Introduction

Ease of Use

In a world where the compact camera is under threat of extinction by the smartphone, its one saving grace is optical zoom. Few phones would have their sleek lines interrupted by a podgy camera lens, however adding a bulky lens to a compact camera won’t exactly make it pocket-friendly either. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350’s claim of being the smallest camera to sport a 20x zoom range is a nice coup for the marketing men, but in reality the size reduction is barely noticeable over the current crop of travelzoom compacts, so this alone shouldn’t sway you into parting with your cash.

Even so, the DSC-WX350’s easily pocketable proportions and light weight of 164g ready-to-shoot do make it an unobtrusive companion. This lightness means the camera doesn’t feel particularly solid or tactile, but it’s also far from flimsy. However, the weight saving has taken its toll on ergonomics, as you don’t get any finger or thumb grips to help hold the camera securely when shooting one-handed. The embossed Sony logo helps a little, but it’s more of a token gesture.

Although ergonomic extras may be lacking, Sony has equipped the DSC-WX350 with a proper mode dial. Sure, this alone is unlikely to get your juices flowing, but it’s a feature that’s fast vanishing from this type of camera, yet there’s still no substitute for the convenience of a dedicated dial. It lets you rotate between six shooting modes. Intelligent Auto is the default and automatically detects scenes to apply optimal shooting settings, or you can go the whole hog and slide into Superior Auto mode, whereby the DSC-WX350 also captures multi-exposure images to enhance dynamic range in high–contrast situations.

Front	Rear

If you’d prefer to ditch all this artificial intelligence in favour of some good old manual control, there’s also a Program Auto mode that enables you to change settings like white balance and ISO sensitivity, however there’s no scope to adjust aperture or shutter speed yourself. A dedicated video mode provides video-specific scene selection to help you get better results, and an additional scene mode is available for stills shooting. Lastly, should you be faced with a stunning panorama, flick to the iSweep Panorama mode, pan the camera right, left, up or down and it’ll automatically stitch together a panorama covering three pre-selectable widths, including a 360-degree option. It’s certainly a useful feature, if only you could stop panning at will.

Alongside the mode dial it’s business as usual, with the power button, shutter release and zoom ring. The latter has two speed setting, so twist a little to make subtle focal length tweaks, or give it the full yank to zoom at speed. Moving to the back panel and you find a 3.0” monitor with a 460k-dot resolution. Size-wise that’s fairly typical, but nowadays many similar cameras boast a higher resolution. Sony’s choice of screen technology also trails some of the competition with its limited vertical viewing angles, making it tricky to accurately judge contrast. The monitor’s colour reproduction is hardly the last word in accuracy either.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350’s compact dimensions and large screen means any remaining space for buttons on the rear panel is at a premium. Consequently there aren’t many, and those that do make the cut are on the fiddly side. Dedicated video record, playback and menu buttons are present, as well as a delete control which also doubles as a useful quick tips guide menu that’ll help you out when judging composition and lighting. These controls flank a small – but thankfully raised – 4-way control dial. This gives you rapid access to set the flash and burst shooting capability, as well as several of the effects filters. The dial can also be rotated, making it easier to scroll through menus at speed.

Top	Side

This menu system is shared by many Cyber-shot cameras and whilst it’s not the slickest design in the class, it’s still easy on the eye. Five main tabs contain options for shooting, display, Wi-Fi, playback and general settings. However within these tabs there’s little order or logic to how the sub options are arranged, so it takes some time to recall where your most-used settings are located.

The most interesting option in the menu display is likely to be that Wi-Fi tab. If you’ve got a smartphone or tablet, it’ll let you transfer images from the camera so you can share them, or even shoot the camera remotely using your mobile device. All you need to do is download Sony’s PlayMemories Mobile app and connect to the camera’s Wi-Fi access point. Once connected it’s a pretty slick system with minimal lag, however things do take a few seconds after connection to reach full transfer speed.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 itself is also somewhat sluggish to power up, requiring the best part of two seconds, mainly due to the time taken for the lens to extend. Still, it’s only a fraction of a second slower than most compacts, and the DSC-WX350 makes up for lost time by focussing fast, not only in good light but also when the going gets dim. Throughout our testing the autofocus system was also completely dependable and never focussed on an unexpected area, which isn’t always the case in this camera sector. Both the exposure metering and white balance system also do an admirable job, never falling foul of tricky mixed lighting conditions and providing correctly exposed images, even without any multi-exposure trickery.

Front	Battery Compartment

Dependability is rarely fun though, but the DSC-WX350 has that base covered too thanks to thirteen effects filters, many of which also contain several sub options. There’s a decent range of effects to choose from, including high-contrast monochrome styles, watercolour painting and soft focus filters. The majority of these can be activated via a quick-access menu displayed by pushing the bottom of the rear control dial, and this also gives you control over the brightness, colour and vividness of your images. However a few of the filters can only be found by trawling through the main menu. Check out the Image Quality page of this review for visual samples of all the effects on offer.

Full HD 1920x1080p video capture is also present along with stereo sound recording and wind noise reduction. You can also use the full 20x optical zoom during recording. If you’d prefer to shoot stills at speed, then the DSC-WX350 will do so at a nippy 10fps, albeit only for a 10-shot burst, so you’ll need to time your shoot fairly accurately.

Lastly, all this tech wouldn’t much good with some decent juice to power it, and to that end the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350’s X type Stamina battery delivers a very impressive 470-shot lifespan on a single charge. It’s tricky to replicate the same testing to prove this, but after a day shooting the camera alongside its smaller DSC-WX220 sibling, the latter was ready for a recharge when the DSC-WX350’s battery display had only dropped one bar.

Image Quality

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 sports Sony’s 18.2MP Exmor R CMOS sensor, paired with the new BIONZ X image processor. The combination gives a standard sensitivity range of ISO80 to ISO3200, although in Multi Frame NR mode this is expanded as high as ISO12800.

Keep the sensitivity at ISO800 or below and image quality is very good, with well-controlled grain and little evidence of colour speckling. Quality doesn’t nosedive at ISO1600 either, though by this point detail is starting to suffer. Only at ISO3200 do colours start to become noticeably blotchy and noise unsightly. Switch to Multi Frame NR mode and the camera captures a burst of exposures in an attempt to minimise noise, but even this trickery can’t make images captured at ISO6400 or ISO12800 look attractive.

Back below ISO800 those 18.2 megapixels also do a good job of capturing detail and generate rich colour saturation. A small smattering of grain is visible at all sensitivities if your pixel peep, but that’s inevitable for a 1/2.3” sensor and is the price you pay for having a small camera with a big zoom range. What’s impressive is that fine detail like distant foliage in landscape shots isn’t subject to the painterly smearing effect often produced by cameras with this sensor size thanks to their overzealous noise reduction processing.

Optically there’s also little to criticise as the Sony G lens does a stellar job of minimising chromatic aberration (purple fringing in high-contrast areas) and, despite the large focal length range, produces no distortion. Corner sharpness is a close match for detail in the centre of frame too.

If we’ve got one complaint it’s the slightly underwhelming dynamic range, but that’s easily fixed by switching to Superior Auto mode, whereby the camera will capture high-contrast scenes in multiple exposures to preserve additional highlight and shadow data.

Noise

The DSC-WX350 has nine sensitivity settings available at full resolution. The seven settings between ISO80 and ISO3200 are available in single-shot mode, or you can activate the Multi Frame NR feature to capture images comprised of multiple consecutive exposures at up to ISO12800.

ISO 80 (100% Crop)	ISO 100 (100% Crop)
ISO 200 (100% Crop)	ISO 400 (100% Crop)
ISO 800 (100% Crop)	ISO 1600 (100% Crop)
ISO 3200 (100% Crop)	ISO 6400 (100% Crop)
ISO 12800 (100% Crop)

Focal Range

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350’s 20x zoom lens achieves a focal length range of 25-500mm when converted into a 35mm camera format. Here you can see just how big a zoom range that gives you, covering almost any shooting scenario. The lens is also capable of a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at wide-angle, which is unremarkable but fairly typical for a superzoom optic. It means the lens can’t open particularly wide to let light through to the sensor, hence the camera must compensate with longer shutter speeds and higher sensor sensitivities. Luckily Sony’s Optical SteadyShot image stabilisation system does a great job of ironing out any camera shake, though we can’t show you the difference this makes as there’s no way to disable the feature.

25mm	500mm

File Quality

Two JPEG compression quality options are available to accompany all image sizes: Fine and Standard. Strangely there’s barely any difference in file size regardless of which setting you choose, indicating a possible firmware bug. Testing the similar Cyber-shot DSC-WX220 also flagged up the same issue, indicating this anomaly is not just confined to our test sample.

Fine	Standard

Sharpening

We found that if the pictures have any noise in at all, you're going to increase the appearance of it by adding any sharpening in post production.

Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)

Chromatic Aberrations

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 handled chromatic aberrations well during the review, with purple and blue fringing present around the edges of objects in high-contrast situations, as shown in the examples below.

Chromatic Aberrations 1 (100% Crop)	Chromatic Aberrations 2 (100% Crop)

Macro

It’s slightly disappointing that the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 can only macro focus down to 5cm, rather than the 1cm macro modes available on some rival models. There’s no way to manually activate macro focussing either, but that’s no big deal as in all three automatic modes the camera reliably detects a close-up subject and focuses correctly without you intervening.

Macro	Macro (100% Crop)

Flash

Four flash settings are available: Autoflash, Fill-flash, Slow Sync & Advanced. A separate menu option controls whether or not red-eye reduction is active, although even with this deactivated our testing showed no evidence of red-eye. The flash itself is reasonably powerful, but there is some vignetting visible at wide angle from a distance of 1.5m.

Suppressed Flash - Wide Angle (25mm)	Forced Flash - Wide Angle (25mm)
Suppressed Flash - Telephoto (500mm)	Forced Flash - Telephoto (500mm)

And here are some portrait shots.

Forced Flash	Forced Flash (100% Crop)
Red-eye Reduction	Red-eye Reduction (100% Crop)

Night Scene

Although there’s no manual shutter speed control on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350, it does feature a Night Scene mode that’ll hold the shutter open and keep the sensor sensitivity low to maximise light input without producing significant image noise. The 4-second exposure time does make a tripod essential though.

Night	Night (100% Crop)

Picture Effects

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 contains thirteen Picture Effects, some with additional sub options: Toy camera (normal, cool, warm, green, magenta), Pop color, Posterization (colour, mono), Retro photo, Soft high-key, Partial color (green, blue, yellow, red), High-contrast mono, Soft focus (low, mid, high), HDR painting (low, mid, high), Rich-tone mono, Miniature (top, middle horizontal, bottom, left, middle vertical, right), Watercolor, Illustration (low, mid, high).

Toy Camera	Pop Color
Posterization Mono	Retro
Soft High Key	Partial Color Green
High Contrast Monochrome	Soft Focus
HDR Painting	Rich Tone Mono
Miniature	Watercolor
Illustration

iSweep Panorama

Sony’s dedicated iSweep Panorama mode gives you three width options: Standard (roughly 120-degrees), Wide (180-degrees) and a full 360-degree pan. There’s no ability to simply stop panning at will though. Whichever width you choose, the result is a seamless panorama with a consistent exposure, albeit considerably downsized to 1080 vertical pixels with a distinct loss of detail. To be fair to Sony, most competing compact cameras with sweep panorama modes have similar limitations. If you’re after something more spectacular, you’d be better off manually snapping adjacent overlapping images and stitching them on a computer with additional software.

Sample Images

This is a selection of sample images from the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 camera, which were all taken using the 18 megapixel Fine JPEG setting. The thumbnails below link to the full-sized versions, which have not been altered in any way.

Sample Movie & Video

Product Images

Front of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Front of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350 / Lens Extended

Side of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Side of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Rear of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Rear of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350 / Image Displayed

Rear of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350 / Main Menu

Top of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Bottom of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Side of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Side of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Front of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Front of the Sony CyberShot DSC-WX350

Memory Card Slot / Battery Compartment

Conclusion

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 stands out as a very capable travelzoom camera. Its Exmor R sensor doesn’t fall foul of some of the image quality pitfalls prevalent in cameras using the same size of sensor and produces very pleasing photos with good detail, punchy colours and well-controlled noise.

The camera's optics don’t let the side down either, and neither do its exposure metering or autofocus systems. Consequently whichever shooting mode you’re in, you can be confident the camera will capture a scene accurately.

There’s no doubt that the DSC-WX350 performs where it really counts, but it’s slightly less impressive when it comes to extra features. The Picture Effects filters are nice when you want to indulge your creative side, however the iSweep Panorama mode is somewhat disappointing if you’re expecting detail on a par with stanard shots.

Ergonomically the DSC-WX350 is hardly top notch either, but the most annoying external issue is the screen, which simply isn’t up to the performance of the rest of the camera, or indeed many competing models. It’s something we wish Sony had updated from the outgoing DSC-WX300, but sadly its iffy viewing angles and unreliable contrast are here to stay.

The screen isn’t the only part to be carried over from this older camera though. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find much which has actually been changed or updated for the new model. Both cameras are visually identical and contain almost the same components. The DSC-WX350 does gain the latest BIONZ X processor, though that’s had no effect on burst shooting speed. It’s most obvious impact has been to decrease the battery life by 30 shots per charge, but the resulting 470-shot capacity is still superb. Whether or not the fresh processing power has boosted image quality is harder to quantify, especially as the DSC-WX300 was pretty handy in this department. But since the new camera certainly delivers the goods here too, the BIONZ X upgrade is definitely no bad thing.

Consequently if you already have the DSC-WX300 there’s little reason to upgrade, and likewise if you can find this outgoing model selling for a steal, there’d be no harm in snapping one up instead of the new camera whilst you still can. However, the going rate for the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 still makes it great value given its impressive performance, image quality and versatility.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	4
Ease-of-use	4
Image quality	4.5
Value for money	4.5

Main Rivals

Listed below are some of the rivals of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350.

Review Roundup

Reviews of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX350 from around the web.

Specifications

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