A helping hand in tricky shooting conditions

There are some common situations where it’s hard to get well-exposed pictures with your digital camera.

Bright sunlight behind your subject, known as ‘backlighting’, can fool your camera’s metering system. This leads to dark, underexposed subjects in the foreground. It’s particularly frustrating with portraits where faces closer to the camera are darkened.

Your camera can also struggle in twilight. If the subject is far away, built-in flash won’t have enough power to illuminate the scene brightly.

In addition, slow shutter speeds can lead to blurred results if you’re shooting at twilight without flash.

Twilight portraits can be problematic, too. If you’re using flash, exposure settings will prioritise on the face of a person in the foreground, at the expense of background detail that’s lost darkness.

Using a tripod in twilight can also produce disappointing results. At very low light levels the camera will select its highest sensitivity setting, but this leads to higher levels of picture noise and an unnaturally ‘grainy’ look.

Automatically great results every time

Intelligent Scene Recognition takes the guesswork out of adjusting your digital camera’s settings for beautiful results in a range of common shooting situations.

It’s completely automatic, recognising five commonly-encountered scenes and adjusting settings to ensure well-exposed results.

It also works in macro mode, so you can enjoy great-looking results with close-up subjects.

Extra options for more great-looking pictures

For everyday shooting, Intelligent Scene Recognition Auto Mode takes a single image, optimising exposure and other camera settings to suit the scene.

If you want greater creative flexibility, Advanced Mode takes two images of the same backlit or twilight scene in quick succession with different camera settings. This makes it easy to pick the image you prefer.

Intelligent Scene Recognition features on these Cyber-shot™ models: W150; W170; W300; T300 and H50.

Cyber-shot™ W170 with Intelligent Scene Recognition

Cyber-shot™ T300 with Intelligent Scene Recognition