Accessories

Beautiful camera. Won't accept my 1GB card.
I bought this camera for the many features, and the nice lens it has. Unfortunately, it won't take my brand new 1gb card from sony. I also tried my 1gb psp card and it won't work.
The famous c:13:01 error comes up.
there's a 128 mb (old out of production)card that might work, but the cheapest is about $40, and is not even new.
You can't buy a new one either, since they're not made anymore, like I said.

Good camera for it's time
This was my first digital camera, I've had it since 2001 and have taken over 3,000 pictures with it. The image quality is excellent, My biggest complaint is that the auto focus is sometimes erratic. I've had pictures sometimes end up out of focus for no reason, and it's not always obvious looking at the display. Battery life is good. Camera has a good selection of manual features, Auto white balance setting consistantly gives great results, Build quality is excellent, The shutter lag is slow compaired to newer cameras. A very good camera at it's time, Image quality is as good as most newer P&S cameras.

The best first camera
I got this camera as a gift 4 years ago and it's seen a lot of use since then. This was a great first time camera. I took wonderful pictures with its automatic settings and even better ones once I learned how to adjust them to the scene.
Currently I'm upgrading. While I love this camera, there are much better prospects on the market now.
This camera has downsides that come with age:
-Size & weight are too much. It easily gets in my way.
-Turn on time and delay between pictures have both made me miss many spur of the moment shots
-Battery is big and obsolete. My biggest problem right now is I can't find the charger and if this camera only used AAs it wouldn't be such a big deal. When I can charge the batteries, they don't last very long. I always need to carry two fully charged ones if I'm going to be out for a day.

Still, this camera taught me a lot about digital photography with just playing around with it. I don't think I'd have picked anything else that was out there 4 years ago.

Sony DSC-S85

If you're in the market for a digital camera, there has never been a better time to buy. The high tech electronics marketplace is absolutely glutted with digital cameras; nifty features and consumer options are way up, and prices are way down. Currently available digital camera models cover the resolution range from less than one megapixel to almost eight megapixels. An average user really only needs 4mp as this is great quality for enlargements up to 11 X 14. Many newer cameras on the market are overrun with too bells and whistles that make it difficult to find a camera that takes truly great pictures consistently. The DSC-S85 does just that, great pictures consistently and with no problems. I have had my camera for 2 years and never had any issues with blurring or poorly lit photos. The settings are straight forward and the camera is easy to use.
The DSC S85 has a Carl Zeiss Vario Sonnar 3X zoom lens, an accurate auto focus system, an optical view finder, and a 1.8-inch LCD display, all in a compact package that looks and performs like an upscale 35mm point and shoot. The 4.1 megapixel CCD provides superb images (2272x1704 pixels) that actually get pretty close to the resolution of a scanned 35mm negative (3000x2000 pixels) giving digital photographers excellent image quality.

Great camera
This is an excellent automatic camera. My husband bought it for me 2 years ago & I've been very happy with it. My only complaint is that the manual focus is pretty useless because using the display is an unreliable source & the viewfinder doesn't work for focus. I haven't had much of a need to use the manual focus however as almost every image turns out crystal clear!