Sony is no doubt a technological behemoth, an innovative market leader in everything electrical, and fun. For Sony, digital photography is no exception, the DSC-S70 being the 3.3 megapixel entrant in the highly successful Cyber-shot range. This month however, Sony found itself up against some very stiff competition from the likes of Olympus and Nikon - the digital camera space being one field that Sony is yet to dominate.

Unlike previous Cyber-shot cameras, the DSC-S70 follows a more conventional look and feel, though is by no mean unattractive with its dark trimmings and chrome and silver finish. Not the easiest camera to handle, the Sony offers only a minimal grip on the right side - the weighty unit requiring a fairly firm thumb and forefinger grasp to hold the camera steady. Nevertheless, the layout for the menu and control interfaces suits this grip well with the thumb placed right on the POV hat style menu navigator and the forefinger poised to take a snap over the shoot button.

As with most of the cameras in the Labs this month, the DSC-S70 features an optical viewfinder, an LCD screen and a separate status display - something that was not as common in previous digital camera Labs. The menu interface is simple and intuitive to operate, with a menu bar appearing at the bottom of the two inch LCD screen, browsing being a simple matter of manipulating the POV hat. The DSC-S70 offers a reasonable level of image customisation, with a maximum optical resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 scaling down to 640 x 480. Images can be recorded either as a TIFF, JPEG or even GIF, allowing up to 118 low resolution shots on an 8MB Sony MemoryStick. Apart from stills, the Sony can record short MPEG1 movies, though only 15 seconds worth.

Image quality at maximum settings displayed excellent contrast and strong detail, though the colours appeared lighter than the actual test subject. Despite this, the Sony comes third overall in the quality stakes for what is an impressive camera.