Good Travel Companion..!. Review on Sony Cybershot DSC-S600

As many others have given the technical description of this model, I am limiting myself to my experience with Sony DSC-S600.

I chanced upon this on E-bay when I was looking out to buy a digital camera. I was initially looking for Olympus Mu 100 but never had a chance to have a first-hand feel of that.

What attracted me was the price, features and the offer. It was bundled with a 1 GB memorypro duo card for Rs. 9990. I was desperate to own a digital camera and had lost my patience going through all the reviews and models to choose the best one. I relied on Sony's brand and went for it. I purchased this in November 2006.

I had a bad experience on e-bay while purchasing this. There was a Paisapay linked to it and there was a delay of about 10 days before it got delivered. I had planned a vacation in the interim and I went on vacation without the camera. On my return, I found that the camera had still not been delivered and after following up with the seller, it got delivered.

The camera did have a manual, but soon I realized that  the manual was split into two - Quick starter and detailed one. Only the detailed one had been sent to me and this was referring to the quick started at every instance. There was difficulty starting to use all the features of the camera without the quick starter manual. I had no idea how to change the resolution until I learnt that from a photo studio.

The memory card started giving trouble within a month - "File Access Error". I returned the memory card to the seller and got a replacement. Even the replaced card gave me the same trouble. When I returned the memory card for the second time, the replacement never came nor my money. I made innumerous calls and wrote many mails to the seller (Mahavir Computers run by Ashok Jain from Mumbai) but I could read the intentions of the seller from the way he was dealing with me. When I approached E-bay for help, their policy states that any grievance should be filed with them within 60 days and now I realized the reason why the seller sent another faulty memory card for a second time.  After 4 months of struggle, I decided to go to the consumer court and sent a notice to the seller, after which he refunded me with Rs. 900. One of the promotion mails received from Mahavir Computers thereafter turned about to be a chain mail of aggrieved customers. There were at least 100 customers that I could count from the chain of e-mails, who had similar experiences of getting cheated on various electronic goods - ranging from iPOD having lesser memory than promised, fake products in branded name, seller not refunding or replacing the product, to Windows operating system sold by the seller not being genuine..! In the interim period of 60 days after sale, the seller provides very good service to get a good credit rating to keep up his feedback at 97+%. He argues and blames any customer for giving a negative feedback. I stop here about my complaints on the seller as this review is not about that.

I got another memory card in the local market for Rs. 700 and they worked well and are still working good without giving any errors.

In the interim, I could not use my camera to its fullest as the memory was limited to 32 MB. I discovered that pen torch cells (AAA cells) do not work well with this camera. One flash and the charge is drained out of the cells. The seller was supposed to provide me alkaline batteries, which he never sent. I used rechargeable cells of 600 mH, again the charge would go down quickly. After some research, I bought 2100 mH cells and these were really good. The charge would last for at least 300 pictures or 2 to 3 days, and they were rechargeable.

My lessons with the purchase:

1) Never buy a product without feeling it on hand.

2) Never deal online as there are only a few genuine sellers.

The other issue I faced with the camera was that when we are in the video mode, we cannot zoom in or out. We just have to get closer or farther to capture the image. But one possibility to take close-up videos from a distance is to zoom in the lens in stills mode and then move to video mode. The closer zoom will stay while you capture the video. To adjust the zoom, you will have to put the video in standby mode, move again to stills mode adjust the zoom and get back to video more. There will be some break in video but that is the limitation.

But what was amazing was the clarity of the picture, and the clarity of the audio in the video mode. It served its purpose for me as I had a growing kid and I wanted to make an album of him taking pictures at different stages of his life. Sony has kept its promise and has delivered value for money. Nevertheless it is a very good travel companion.