Sony Cyber-Shot G1

Posted by T3 Online on Tue 30 Oct 2007

Sony's Wi-Fi-toting digicam is also an MP3 player.

Cameras these days are like pop singers. Not content with striding around doing their day job, they want to be applauded for their "versatility", branching into MP3 playing, satnavving, fashion-design and experimental theatre. The G1, for instance, wants to be a serious multimedia device, with Wi-Fi, 2GB of memory holding 600 shots, and an MP3 player. It gets off to a flier, being exceptionally well built, with a gigantic, pin-sharp LCD that's far superior to the cack nailed to the back of most digicams.

With a 3.5mm jack for using your own cans, it's a workmanlike music player, but too chunky to use full-time, and with a speaker that redefines the word "wimpy". The Wi-Fi's a bit wobbly too. You can send pictures to DNLA devices via a hotspot, but can't upload them directly to sites such as Flickr. You can also transfer pictures to up to three other G1 users, but let's face it: you will never meet any. It's pretty slow to start, and whoever hid the navigation joystick just out of sight on the side deserves a sound thrashing, but those niggles aside, this is a competent point-and-shoot camera, producing decent pictures - up to 14 x 11 inches - and MPEG-4 movies, with all the usual scene modes, anti-shake, macro focus and ISO settings of questionable usefulness.

That leaves as the main USP the fact that if you ignore the MP3 player and just use the 2GB memory for photos, you've got room for a whopping 600 shots. The problem is that even with that in mind, the fiddly side controls, slow start and average features won't justify the £450 price to most of us.