I bought my DSC W-300 yesterday, made a few adjustments to my self-designed universal adapter, and shot with it today. I've had DSC W-200 for about a year. I got the upgrade almost solely for the enhanced 230k pixel LCD. The 115k pixel LCD of W-200 drove me nuts, even with Xtend-A-view 2x loupe/shade. The W-300 LCD is at least as good as my expectation. I can digiscope with it with no external magnification and focus my scope spot-on. Very pleased about that. I'll just have to see if it can be done in bright sun with no shade on it.. any thoughts? Here is a frame of my 1st day results, both unsharpened and then sharpened once in Elements. Saved at resolution 8 of 12 for size, and 640 x 480. Settings were: focal lgth: 19.8 which is 2.6 times; distance to Northern Flicker: 15 yds (approx); f.2.8; 1/6 sec (I know, very slow) at ISO-80 (another advantage over DSC W-200's min ISO-100); 0 e.v.; mode: "p"; drive: multi-shot; resolution: 13.6MP.
Of course scopes are important and a variable. Mine is Kowa TSN-824 fluorite with 32x e.p.
Cons to this camera: They inexplicably moved the tripod screw mount to the far left as far as they could go as you look at the LCD display.. dumb. It is unbalanced when the shutter at far top right is pressed. My adaptation was to add another support under the bottom right that I did not have before. 2nd con: Sony moved the battery and card door from right side to bottom right. Now you can't see what you're doing under there when it's mounted, and card or batty could drop to ground or worse be blocked by your mount. Mine happens to leave it clear.
Circuit City online price is $320 U.S. and you can get their store to match that as I did. This is NOT a bad price for such a power-packed compact.
p.s. My "excuse" to buy the upgrade was self-reward for placing 3rd in "WildBird" Digiscoping category Annual Contest.. latest issue pg. 49. -Steve
