Sony beefs up its digital snapper

Product: Sony Mavica-CD 500 Price: HK$5,490 Pros: Convenient media, at a lower cost than Memory Stick Cons: Chunky

Sony has improved on its popular CD Mavica digital camera. The latest model, the MVC-CD 500, has a five-megapixel capacity and comes with a 3x optical zoom.

The camera, which has a built-in CD-RW drive, records on to an 8cm CD so you can play it on a VCD player or your PC's CD-Rom.

It can capture high-resolution still images of up to 2,592x1,944 megapixels and video clips with audio in Mpeg Movie VX mode at an acceptable quality of 640x480. The video clips can be played back on the full screen of TVs.

When connected to a PC, the MVC-CD500 becomes an external CD-RW Drive. A 156-megabyte CD-R/-RW disc can record up to 1,284 still images at the lowest resolution of 640x480, or 89 minutes of continuous video clips. At 514 grams, the MVC-CD500 is a little chunkier and heavier than most of Sony's digital cameras that use the Memory Stick media.