[Snakebyte]

Anyone have this Digicam?
What turns me on about it is its great lowlight ability via long exposure time and it�s good noise reduction. But of course that�s not all, 5x optical zoom, Hologram AF, good ISO 800, and what not. At ~$633 its at a good price for me.
The Nikon Coolpix 5400 was good until I read of its slow write times and its difficulty focusing in lowlight.

Also, does this camera remember the previous settings or do I have to set it up every time I shut it off?

Iv been wanting to take pictures of the stars and it seems as if this camera may be able to do it. I just wish it had TimeLaps�

I like having a lot of control over my camera but I would also like to just point and shoot sometimes.


Any opinions and/or suggestions are much appreciated.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscf717/
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Kevin Moore
www.darkesthorizons.com

[dsoul]

I've had this cam for about 5months now.

Couldn't be happier!

my only beef with the cam is the storage medium seems limiting and costly for the memory stick pro cards.

yes, it remembers all your settings, ... another great thing I love about the cam, is the long battery life... 4hrs + shooting time, 8hrs + preview time.

the zooming is FAAAST .. I've tried the G3 and many other prosumers, and the zoom on this is tight! ... not to mention, the nightshot/nightframing is an excellent feature. Oh, and if you like taking macro shots, the 717 has a 2cm macro distance measure! Just check out the review on http://www.dpreview.com as well as their sony forums .. they're very informative as well.

first thing I got was a 1-A filter and I never use the lens cap, I just leave the filter on as protection to the sweet carl zeiss lense.

can't go wrong with this cam.
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First rule of 604x is you do not talk about 604x.
http://ddsoul.deviantart.com

[Ragnarok]

What exposure can you get with that cam?
Mine has a limit of 30" and I've found that sometimes it isn't enough for nightshots.
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"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

[Impaler]

I looked through a couple of the most recent issues of Astronomy magazine (I have a subscription) (i'm big on astrophotography), and I discovered that most star field photographs still use either film or straight CCD chips.

Digital cameras have a few distinct disadvantages. First, every ccd and cmos chip has a defect known as "hot pixels". It happens when a few cells on the chip have a surplus charge, leaving a few false pixels in your picture. You can correct these pretty easily with with photoshop, of course, but it becomes a tedious process when you're searching for a few stray pixels in a picture full of pinpoint stars.

Also, lowlight exposures tend to eat batteries pretty fast, since it involves more image calculation. This becomes moot if you have rechargeable batteries, and more than one of them, but it's still something to keep in mind.

This isn't to say that digital cameras don't work for night shots; I took the above picture of the moon with a Nikon coolpix 3500 and a 90mm refractor telescope. I would just be wary.
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QED, sort of.

[strata]

but there's plenty of software out there that checks where your cameras hot pixels are and in some cases even fixes it straight in the camera (though this is camera specific software) so that shouldn't be too much of a bother?
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Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

[Impaler]

I already said that it was easy to fix. ?

I'm just noting it because it's kept some astrophotographers from going to completely digital afocal star stuff.
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QED, sort of.

[Giant Hamster]

http://tha.trishock.com/graphics/remix/moonshot-remix.jpg

I REMIXz0RZ ZACH.

[strata]

impaler: yeah you said that was pretty easy to fix with PHOTOSHOP, which is rather completely not what I said/meant.
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Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?