Testing the Sony Party-Shot: the robot that makes you photos
No. Leave to imagine a kind of C3PO with a camera in hand. I said robot, but no android. The Sony Party-Shot is a kind of platform-shaped section of a sphere, which integrates seamlessly with some of the compact cameras CyberShot from Sony , using its features face and smile detection to focus on taking photos to right and left everyone who gets to throw ... and without you having to worry about the camera.
After automatic detection of faces, smiles or eyes closed all that remained to be done is that the camera alone hiciese photos, and is what makes the Sony Party-Shot .
The "personal photographer" as Sony likes to call it, it only works for now, with two compact models: the DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1 . This is because the camera has to be prepared to control the Party-Shot, because their functions are accessed from the menus of the camera.
For several days I could try this particular robot, along with the CyberShot DSC-WX1 of which we spoke recently, and the truth is that the results surprised me.
The Sony Party-Shot must be supplied with batteries to get maximum performance. In doing so we can put anywhere and rotates up to 360 º taking pictures. If we buy a feeder (not included) to forget the batteries, the most that you can rotate it 180 degrees, it will depend on the cable. In that case, a good place to place may be close to the TV, also connecting its video output to scroll through the pictures on the screen that you make.
After placing the camera on the Party-Shot, we can access its menus to adjust the radius of rotation (90 º, 180 º or 360 º) or the firing frequency at three different cadences. No one can speak of an exact number of shots per minute as it depends on what it takes to frame and focus.
The base fits perfectly with the camera, so that people are using face detection, smile and wait. It can detect up to eight faces while looking for the best fit parameters for framing and everyone comes out focused and well lit. Unfortunately it takes a while since it detects a face until triggered, so the picture may not be any trace of a smile ... or sometimes the person, although moving slowly, the camera will face to achieve your goal.
Sony claims you'll get photos with "a beautiful composition." Obviously you can not ask a robot that has a special artistic sensibility, but it is true that the system avoids the frames centered, as it might seem at first, and surprise us with different compositions and varied. Even take several photos of the same scene with different zoom settings and several frames. Besides the rotation, the camera can be tilted up and down, so it's easy to vary the frames. However, sometimes the system is wrong, and can detect as faces things that really are not.
It is certainly a striking accessory, you may find interesting if you get used to hold meetings at home and whenever you're out of the photos, for being behind the camera. And if someone goes wrong in the pictures, can not blame anyone ...
The price of the Sony Party-Shot is 150 euros, maybe a little high, but acceptable for a treat like this. The downside is that you need one of the two cameras mentioned above, that cost 350 and 380 euros.
