Our first sample image was taken on a very bright day with the W200 zoomed-out to wide angle and set to 100 ISO. As such this represents perfect conditions. The crops are certainly very detailed, and unlike Panasonic’s compacts, there’s little to no visible noise – although to be fair you’d hope not at 100 ISO. The high contrast deck of the boat does however reveal one of the W200’s optical weaknesses: coloured fringing. You’ll see it in several of our images.

Portrait: 3.21MB, Portrait mode, 1/800, f5.5, ISO 125, 7.6-22.8mm at 22.8mm (equivalent to 105mm)

						For this shot we switched the W200 into Portrait mode and zoomed-into its maximum focal length. The W200 has sensibly opened the aperture to its widest setting, but there’s still not much of a blurring effect on the background. The subject is nice and sharp though, again with plenty of detail and no artefacts to mention.

Building: 3.36MB, Program, 1/500, f5.6, ISO 100, 7.6-22.8mm at 7.6mm (equivalent to 35mm)

We’d certainly expect it to given the bright light and 100 ISO setting, but these days it’s not a forgone conclusion you’ll get a great result with a compact even at 100 ISO.

So a good result here for the Sony, which proves – at 100 ISO anyway – there’s no compromise squeezing 12 Megapixels into a compact.

The first crop taken from the upper right area though reveals some coloured fringing.

We expected the worst, given the W200’s high resolution, but the result isn’t actually that bad.

Sure there’s some image processing artefacts, but still plenty of detail present, and this would look acceptable at most print sizes.

Our second high-sensitivity indoor shot was taken at 800 ISO. The W200 metered this shot a little too dark, so we’ve applied +1EV compensation here.

As you’d expect, the increase in sensitivity has resulted in noticeably higher noise levels, but again while they’re now quite visible, there’s still a good degree of detail – and no drop in saturation that we’ve seen on other compacts.

You probably wouldn’t want to examine it too closely, but we’d say the W200 at 800 ISO is quite usable.

The colour balance is still ok though, so you could make a fair looking small print with this image. Remember that the high resolution also means the noise artefacts will appear smaller than other compacts when printed the same size.

So overall, a surprisingly good set of results for the W200, considering its high resolution.