If I had to pick a favorite camera out of my collection, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-V1 would probably be it. It's a tiny, pocket-sized camera with extensive manual control, a great lens with a wide zoom range, and beautiful image quality all wrapped up in an aluminum Sony Style Silver chassis. What's not to love? Seriously, the amount of control here is truly impressive for such a small, unassuming camera - in addition to full PASM modes, it also has manual focus, ISO, white balance, sharpness, contrast, saturation, flash power adjustment, 5 autofocus points to choose from, and spot/center/multi metering modes. There's also a hot shoe for an external flash, “Hologram AF” laser-assisted autofocus, and even a “NightShot” mode for actual infrared photography!! How cool is that!!!!!

I originally bought this camera because after using my Olympus D-510 again, I realized just how nice having a pocketable camera is - having a camera with me at all times means that I'm always able to capture any cool stuff I see when I'm out and about without having to lug a camera bag with me everywhere. However, the Olympus is just a point-and-shoot camera and lacks many of the manual controls necessary to capture complex scenes, so I went off to DPReview's camera feature search to research pocket cameras that suit my needs and it looked like Sony's DSC-V1 was the best choice for me. I then ordered a used one on eBay for a whole $50, and once it arrived, I fell in love immediately. The only thing that could make this camera better is if it had an EVF instead an optical tunnel viewfinder (those things are awful, what's even the point?), but the live-view LCD is so bright and crisp that it's not really a big deal.

The V1's image quality feels like the peak of Sony's pre-Minolta still camera development. It has the same beautiful colors, punchy contrast, natural softness, and unique foliage rendering that I've seen from my Mavicas, just refined even further. For best results, I leave most settings at default but always set the white balance manually (usually to sunlight) as the V1's auto white balance is surprisingly unreliable, and also set sharpness to -1 for a naturally soft image (instead of Sony's default ugly artificial sharpening). To me, the lens appears to be decently sharp across its entire zoom and aperture range, but there is a bit of barrel distortion when fully zoomed out. As for noise, it's minimal at 100-400 ISO (getting slightly more noticeable at each ISO increment), but becomes very apparent once you jump to 800 ISO. It's not unpleasant though - it's pretty soft chroma noise without much distracting luma noise, and I personally love the way it looks.

In addition to looking good, the DSC-V1 also feels good in the hand and controls extremely well. The jog dial positioned right under your thumb is used to adjust shutter speed, aperture, exposure comp, AF point, and manual focus distance, and most other options (like ISO and white balance) are just a button press away in the XMB-style menu. The V1 is unfortunately very slow to power on and prepare to shoot, but once it's ready, all operations are basically instant. The slow power-on time does mean that it's easy to miss fast action when using this camera though.

The V1 takes InfoLithium FC series rechargeable batteries and these aftermarket batteries from Kastar work great. Because these batteries are so tiny, the V1's battery life is pretty bad - expect less than an hour of live-view use per charge. I recommend buying at least two batteries so you can keep a spare in your pocket when you're out shooting with this camera.