Smart, happy cameras

“We’re aiming to make cameras smarter,” said Phil Lubell, director of marketing for digital cameras at Sony Electronics.

The T300 includes a host of technologically sounding features. No longer does a camera have a LCD screen, we apparently need a 'Clear Photo LCD Plus' version. Similarly for image stabilisation we need 'Super SteadyShot' technology. And then how can we even start to take a few snaps unless there's a powerful Bionz™ processing engine.

However it's one of the 'more intelligent features' which really caught my eye. The "smile shutter". Not only does the camera detect faces but it detects smiling faces and will wait until there are sufficient smiles to warrant taking a photo. How useful is that at Uncle Bob's funeral? But this 'helpful' functionality doesn't stop there as the user can select 'child priority' or 'adult priority'. So presumably one can delay taking the photo until the majority of the adults are smiling broadly, even though the children have been grinning ear to ear since the mention of ice-cream. My old Pentax SLR had the option of aperture or speed priority which I could cope with but having to decide on the relative importance of child or adult smiles is not so clear cut. What if there are no children in the frame and it's been left on child priority by mistake? Do we have to wait for a beaming child to walk into the shot? I wonder how it copes with an unhappy circus clown.

Another innovation is the 'never mind how much time you spend adjusting the camera settings, I'll take a better picture than you' feature. Yes, if "it", presumeably Bionz, decides that you haven't made a good enough job, it quickly snaps another and then (I'm guessing) superimposes a sticker over your attempt saying "poor exposure" or "camera shake", as occasionally happens when getting poor prints back from Boots. That would put off all but the most determined amateurs - the rest would definitely stick to 'auto' mode to avoid embarrassment.

The T300 can be connected to a High Definition TV and will even add background music to the slideshow. (It doesn't say whether it automatically skips the inferior d-i-y photos though). A range of accessories, can be purchased online at sonystyle.com. I just wonder if this includes a squeaky toy or perhaps Ken Dodd's tickling stick ... without which the slideshow might be fairly short.