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Performance
Its battery life, its robust burst-mode capabilities, and its minimal shutter lag under high-contrast lighting highlight the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-F88's generally better-than-average performance figures. In our performance tests, shutter-lag figures were a mixed bag, clocking in at 0.6 seconds under favorable, high-contrast lighting but amounting to an abysmal 1.8 seconds in low-contrast situations, despite a red-hued autoassist light that's bright enough to read by. Shot-to-shot times were average, coming in at 3.5 seconds without flash and 4.5 seconds in red-eye-reducing flash mode. Wake-up time was speedy, however, at 3 seconds from swivel to shot. We captured 852 shots on a single charge of the lithium-ion rechargeable battery, with half those exposures taken with flash and lots of zooming and picture review mixed in to eat up juice at a typical rate.

In burst mode, the camera cranked out 9 shots in about 7.6 seconds at full resolution. If you're analyzing motion rather than shooting sports snaps, the camera can capture 100 shots in a row in two minutes at 640 x 480 resolution.

The speaker's bottom-of-the-camera location means sound is muffled if the camera is resting on a flat surface during playback, but the quality wasn't all that good even when the speaker was unobstructed.

Sony claims that the built-in flash is good only out to about 2.74m (with ISO speed set to Auto), and we found that to be the case at both wide-angle and telephoto settings.

Image Quality
The Sony Cyber Shot DSC-F88's metering system and automatic white-balance controls generally produced accurate colors and even exposures, although some of our incandescent shots were a little on the warm side, and there was a slight tendency toward a bluish cast in the daylight pictures.

The F88 blows out highlights, but surprisingly, there's no fringing in the expected locations.

In general, the F88 muddies up a lot of detail such as the fur on this tortoiseshell cat's face.

As with most digital cameras in this class, it was difficult to retain detail in the highlights, but the images were fairly sharp and clear. A bit of noise was visible even at ISO 100 under average conditions, but when we switched to long exposures, Sony's noise-reduction feature kicked in to produce very good results, even at ISO 400. At the highest sensitivity setting, noise was definitely there but a bit less prominent than we've seen in many competing 5-megapixel models.

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