Sony’s “Photo Album” Camera

Remember when the iPod came out and you realized you could carry all your songs in your pocket? Sony aims to do the same thing for pictures with its new T700 digital camera. Along with a memory card slot, the T700 has four gigabytes of onboard memory—enough to store about 1,000 of its 10-megapixel photos.

That should be good for at least a few weeks of memories. But option number two lets you lug around years worth of photos. Sony added a new synch feature to its Picture Motion Browser software that downloads the full-res photos from your camera and sends back low-res versions of those new pics and any others on your computer. With the synch feature, any pics you add to your PC—even photos from other cameras—are transferred to the T700 the next time you dock it.

The downsized photos are VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), which should be all you need for viewing on the camera’s 3.5-inch LCD screen. At that size, the onboard memory can hold up to about 40,000 pics. Too many to scroll though? You can display them chronologically, organize them by folders or search by the date taken or the person in them (using Sony’s face-recogntion tech). Sony offered a similar camera a few years back that included face-recogntion, but it had a lot less internal memory and lacked the PC synching feature. This new model goes on sale in late September for $400.