So Far, Sony.

I know they have been discontinued. But I also know that they sell them on ebay still - so they are not exactly obsolete. If you shop for one, you can still find some new in the box. At this point, I don't know how good Sony is for the warranties or what we consumers could rightly expect.

Five days a week, I used this very camera to take about 150 photos per day. This thing is almost as familiar to me as my own eyes.

We sell clothing online and I find that some of the downfalls of this camera are things that don't bother me so much because of my routine. I find its writing to the disk to be very slow (did you know you can use just regular floppy disks?!), but this works out alright while I write down my numbers and the date of the pictures on the tags. If I took this camera to some action-packed event where I wanted to take a series of pictures in rapid succession, I know it would let me down. Or, in fact, if I was trying to capture precious moments of my three-year old in action!

When I first started the job, I was used to my little Nikon Cool Pix. This Sony seemed much heavier and kind of clunky. It has a raised area in the front, the lowered half a great niche for the hand to naturally rest. It has no viewfinder, either. I kept smacking myself in the nose with it until I got used to looking through the monitor. At first, it genuinely drove me INSANE.

Each disk holds 24 photos, so you can make a smooth transition from film to digital in feeling like you are on level playing ground. We have it set to an option to save it as a larger image with higher quality AND to save it as an "email shot," (fewer pixels, quicker to upload and download but lesser quality for printing). This is nice, actually, because sometimes we want high quality prints from our photos and sometimes we just want to quickly send them in an email so someone will see a quick, updated picture when they have a question about our products.

Take the floppy out and you can easily transfer it to a computer; forget that dreadful chord to plug in and then waiting for the computer to read your overpriced memory card that you have to use over and over again.

Compared with my Nikon, it seems like the user has easier access to change the settings. You simply press a button and a menu bar appears in the bottom of the monitor. You can navigate with the arrow pad to change the exposure, etc. With my Nikon, you do the same thing but it seems a little clumsier and the options have many subfolders and you have to scan through more than one page to find the ISO, etc.

It has a versatile lens, a sliding of a button in the front of the camera (great proximity to the shutter button so it feels natural to use the same finger without thinking or hesitating) takes it from wide angle to zoom.

In my field, we have to do close ups of fabric and this model is perfect for the job. Unfortunately, it is imperative that our photographs be 100% perfectly color correct. Once in a while, the camera seems to take in a yellow tint and it jaundices the pictures. It is a very subtle shift in color and may be seen in the monitor -- if I am on my toes and even notice it, then I turn the camera off for a minute and turn it back on. This seems to correct it. But the shift in color is quite subtle. I have no idea why it does this, not even a theory. This yellowness is hard to edit out, too, by the way. I often have to redo the yellow ones. For family photos or the usual things that people buy cameras for, it might go entirely unnoticed.

The battery life seems rather fair - I think it is 140 minutes. I have the camera on all day and sometimes it automatically shuts off while I switch the mannequins around. But with it being on and used all day, I find I can get about 200 pictures out of it.

Its body seems pretty durable. I have dropped this camera a couple of times and it holds up well. One time, the door where the memory stick is kept popped open just a crack. It would neither open nor shut and it took some lip biting and wrestling to get it back in place.

We have used this camera every weekday for about three years now. It has truly proven itself in terms of performance, durability, and functionality. It is a comfortable extension of me, as any camera should be to its photographer.

After all this usage, it is finally going to its final resting place (and fret not! We're not going to sell it on ebay! ) It has a great long life and we got countless multitudes of photographs out of it.