As shown in Figure 9, the back of this Cyber-shot has a large 3” LCD screen which is bright and clear. The brightness is user adjustable, which is a nice feature. You can up the brightness when using in bright light and lower it to save on battery power at other times.

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Figure 9: The back of the Cyber-shot W290.

Most of the camera’s controls are found on the back of the camera. As shown in Figure 10. From the top, there is a zoom control, the mode dial, a playback button, a 4-way controller and buttons for the on-screen menu and image deletion. Sony uses the same navigation system that is found on many of their cameras. You move up and down with the 4-way control to choose which menu item to change, then left and right to choose the setting.

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Figure 10: The main controls.

The controls are well-placed and very useful.  In a departure from some older models, Sony has merged the Home and the Menu functions into one, which is marked Menu. This makes the camera easier to use. In fact, we found that the controls were clearly marked and quite useful. The fact that the mode dial on the top was marked differently and looked different, helped make the camera easier to use. The mode dial is actually quite nice. The first setting is marked SCN. This allows you to choose from 11 scene modes including High Sensitivity, Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Soft Snap, Landscape, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, Hi-speed Shutter, Gourmet and Underwater (for use with a waterproof enclosure). The second setting is clearly marked EASY. This mode give larger, easy-to-understand icons on the screen and displays instructions when needed. This mode switches to all automatic settings  so you can quickly snap a photo. In this mode the use has control over only the image size and the flash mode.

The next mode is marked by a green camera and the letter “I”. This is the Intelligent Auto (iAuto) Mode. It automatically adjusts to the scene conditions and lighting. Yet, it allows the user to controls setting such as white balance and metering, if they so desire. We expected this to be a gimmick, but were actually quite impressed. In the iAuto mode advanced features like Intelligent Scene Recognition, Face Detection, and Optical SteadyShot are employed automatically without any user intervention. The scene that the camera chooses is shown on the LCD when you frame the picture. Auto modes that we used in the past proved to be inaccurate, but we found the iAuto in the W290 to be quite intelligent. In almost every case, the camera chose the scene mode that we would have chosen. We often take close-up pictures like the ones in this article using the Macro mode. Then when we grab the camera to take another photo, we forget that the Macro mode is on. With this camera, you can leave it in the iAuto mode and it will figure out if you are taking a close-up, a landscape, or a group of people. This automatic optimization is quite impressive and will be very useful for the average photographer who just wants a good picture with playing with the settings.

The “P” mode lets you control the photo settings yourself. From here you can manage the image size, ISO, focus, metering red eye reduction, and other settings.

The last setting is the Movie Mode. The W290 can record videos in high definition video at up to 720p resolution. This is pretty impressive for a compact camera. The videos are quite crisp and clear and even the audio is good. The camera captures the video in MPEG-4 format, which is easy to edit. Although you won’t buy this camera for doing videos, after you try the video mode, you are sure to use it. The only downside is that the camera has analog component video cables, so if you show the video on your television directly from the camera, the video will not be as crisp as if you transfer it digitally. If you have a large enough memory card, the camera can handle videos up to 29 minutes in length.

Under the Mode Dial is a 4-way button that gives you quick access the display settings, flash modes, self-timer, and macro mode. The display settings let you change the brightness and display a histogram.

The Menu Button also lets you control things like movie shooting mode, image size, exposure, ISO, white balance, focus, metering, smile detection sensitivity, anti-blink, red eye reduction, and continuous shooting, as well as changing the camera settings.

As with other cameras of this size and type, there is no view finder on the W290 and no way to directly control setting like the shutter speed or aperture.