Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900

This camera looks great at first glance. But in owning and using the camera for a few months now, I have gone from excitement to regret. Here are the things I really hate about this camera: 1. You can't… just use a cable to transfer photos. You have to have the dock with you. What a hassle! Your other option is to buy a memory stick card reader to plug directly into your machine. Or maybe there's some custom cable they will sell you. But why should you have to buy extra garbage just to get photos from your camera into your computer? The camera should come with a cable that plugs directly from the camera into a USB port. 2. You have to take the battery out of the camera to charge it. Or buy an AC adapter to plug into the dock. Again, Sony makes you choose between a bad user experience or spending more money for accessories to achieve a decent user experience. 3. This also means that when you travel, you have to pack the battery charger and dock in addition to the USB cable (that plugs into the dock). It boggles my mind that they wouldn't just stick a micro-USB port on this camera so all you'd need is a micro-USB cable to charge the camera and transfer the photos simultaneously. And yes, micro-USB can handle it. My BlackBerry has a 3.2MP camera and a battery that has more than twice the capacity of the Sony camera. And the required circuitry can't be too large, considering my BlackBerry is smaller than this camera. The only excuse I can think of is that Sony wants to force you to spend more money on accessories. And they are counting that the "average user" doesn't realize that there is a much simpler and convenient solution like micro-USB. The other possible excuse is just stupid corporate decision-making trumping good user experience. Either way, I feel completely burned as a customer. I wanted to return this study in poor user experience, but I had misplaced the battery charger and I didn't find it until it was too late to return it. Yet another reason to hate all these extra parts you have to keep track of... Worse still, we downloaded our first batch of photos only to find that they were very poor quality. A lot of blur and grain because it wasn't a brightly lit scene. The only time I have gotten decent photos out of this thing is when there is a lot of ambient light. Garbage.

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