Sony DSCH400B.CEH Digital Compact Bridge Camera - Black

OK, straight out of the box and into action within the last couple of hours. Firstly, if you have used a similar bridge camera before then you will feel right at home with this one. It was easy to set up, the first time switched on it asked for language settings, date & time, image quality etc, just a few easy menus and then you are good to go. Battery and card compartments are easily located at the bottom the camera. The camera feels right for my hands, very comfortable and not overly heavy. The rest of the menus are easy to navigate and quite clear, it's not long before you find what you want and can change it, like the annoying click sound whenever I pressed anything on it at first!The mode dial has settings so that you can manually control aperture and shutter speed as normal but there is an intelligent camera setting which I used to start with. The intelligent setting was very good in a few different conditions and the manual settings were easy enough to control.There are 2 things that are most impressive about this camera and I guess they are the main reasons for buying it. The first is image quality, with 20 M/pixels on hand it took good, vibrant photos with lots of detail. The second is the staggering zoom lens. I was taking close up's of herons at one point, which are notoriously shy and getting some very pleasing close-ups given that I could barely see them with my own eyes! When zooming to maximum the lens does take a few seconds to catch up and home in as others have noted, but once it is at the correct magnification you can take shot after shot, even moving it a bit between shots and it copes fine.The range of control you have with this is perfectly adequate for me, I'm not a pro and nor am I interested in spending ages grappling with a multitude of variables like you would get on a true DSLR.All of this for less than £190 has to be good value.My only negative so far is the cheap and tacky lens cover, that is not going to be long before it gets lost or damaged I'm sure. But that is a minor point. I don't intend to use this camera for videos so haven't commented on that side of it, this is perfect for me to grow my ability to take stills when I have half an eye for a decent shot and don't want to spend all day achieving greatness!Love it, long may it continue.UPDATED REVIEW AFTER FURTHER USE---------------------------------I've had the camera a bit longer to play around with now and can add the following comments :-I do sometimes miss a manual focus on this camera, occasionally it struggles to focus for itself, particularly if the subject blends in quite well with the background. I find it can constantly go in and out of focus as it searches (unsuccessfully) to find the subject. This is not very often but at those times I would like to be able to grab the lens and manually do it for myself.The panoramic setting is great. You point and click and hold down while you pan the camera left to right. It only lets you take left to right so sometimes you need two or three attempts to find the perfect start position on the left to get everything in on the right. But is does give a seamless panoramic shot. It won't let you alter the focus length though (eg you can't zoom in first then take the panoramic shot), it has it's own setting for the zoom in this mode.The ISO setting doesn't let you select a specific speed, it just offers a generic setting for low light conditions, but still works pretty well. I have tried the night time settings and found these to be good.When you switch on it takes a while to get going, the same sometimes when you quickly move towards full zoom, you are going to miss the odd shot as I have waiting for it to be ready in both these cases. But I'm not often wanting to quickly capture something spontaneous that is just happening now and I think most cameras will suffer some lag at switch on and zoom.All in all I'm still very pleased with the camera for what it does for the money, sometimes I find the settings just a little restrictive but as I said right at the start it isn't a DSLR camera where you be as creative with settings as you want to be if you have the time and inclination. It is a very good point and shoot camera with a thin but useful spread of features, a fine lens and zoom and takes good quality photos.

I got the camera on offer and it is amazing, easy to use, has full manual ability over shutter time, exposure time etc, it does way more than I know how to use, you cannot get different lenses for it but at 63X zoom it doesn’t need one.It is an ideal beginners camera ( which is what I am)N.B the newer version of this camera is considerably more expencive and does not have as big a zoom .... it is about 50-53 X ... mainly the newer camera as best as I can see it wifi/ bluetooth but you can buy a bluetooth sd card so I don’t see the need for un-necessary expenceAnyway it is a lovely camera and takes fantastic picsMy only gripe is it doesnt have a remote control as such to take selfies, The newer one does, that aside its amazing

Absolutely brilliant! Purchased for my girlfriend for her birthday so that she could get in to photography. The zoom quality is amazing on this camera. We went to a zoo to test it out and most of the animals were out of eyesight. Using this camera we were able to take photos as if they were right in front of us. The con to this level of zoom though is that you need to have a steady hand or a tripod as it is very shaky.There are plenty of settings available for those who know more about ISO levels and such (which we don't) but we used some of the other settings such as standard/optimised and brightness levels and got some pretty good results. For a first camera beyond standard digital and not as expensive as a DSLR, this is worth buying.

What a camera! This thing is absolutely amazing. I own professional DLSRs and this was a present for my father in law.The camera is light, you may think that is because it is cheap... trust me praise your lucky stars it is light. I can't stand lugging around my DLSR, it is ridiculously heavy and hurts my back. The grip on this camera is well proportioned and natural to grasp.The quality of the build is apparent when you touch it, use the buttons and of course taking photo's. Image quality is amazing, fantastic for this price range and even above it.If I wanted a camera for going on holiday or going on walks, I would buy this.