Christopher J Osborne

Introduction

If you just want to see some photographs, skip straight to the results section.

When Sony launched the Cyber-shot DSC-S85 in June 2001 they were still near the beginning of their journey towards becoming one of the biggest and most dominant forces in both the consumer and professional market place, so there were no large sensor cameras or interchangeable lens cameras at this stage. But sitting at the top of Sony's DSC-S series of compact digicams with tunnel-type optical viewfinders, the S85 showed they could never-the-less compete on equal terms with established big names of the photographic world for the photographic enthusiast's dollar.

The S85 was the first 4mp consumer level digicam, so at launch its main competitors were 3mp cameras such as the Nikon Coolpix 995 and the Canon PowerShot G1 (Incidentally the Canon G1 and the Sony S85 were both fitted with 7-21mm f2-2.5 lenses that look more-or-less identical to me!) But this was the era of the megapixel race, so Canon, Nikon et al weren't far behind! Canon launched the 4mp PowerShot G2 two months later in August 2001 and Nikon launched the 5mp(!) Coolpix 5000 in September 2001.

The DSC-S85's predecessors included the DSC-S70 (3mp) of February 2000 and the Sony DSC-S75 (also 3mp) of February 2001. So if you had bought the S75 at its launch, what exactly would upgrading to the S85 have got you just 4 months later? Apart from the sensor the cameras themselve were very similar. The S75 could deliver 2048 x 1536 files (3.1mp, not the 3.3mp advertised on the camera) while the S85 could deliver 2272 x 1704 files (in reality around 3.9mp, again less than the 4.1mp advertised on the front of the camera… this sort of thing was common at the time!). If you do a quick bit of mental arithmetic that looks at first glance a jump of 33%, but in fact it's a jump of only 19%. And if you were to make prints at 200 pixels per inch, the S75 would yield a print approximately 26 x 20 cm, while the S85 would yield a print 29 x 22 cm. In other words not much bigger! As you can see the megapixel race was inevitable, but not necessarily all that useful! Certainly each individual rung up the megapixel ladder got you only a very minor gain. So if you had indeed bought an S75 just 4 months prior to the launch of the S85, given that the cameras were very similar apart from the sensor, you should certainly have stuck with it!

But we're not here to talk about the S75, we're here to talk about the S85 and what it's like to buy and use in 2025, so let's do that…

Buying a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 in 2025

This particular S85 was lent to me by a friend specifically for this article, so I don't have any personal experience of buying this camera to offer you! But a quick trawl of eBay suggests that for an example in good condition and complete with all main accessories, budgeting around £50 should be sufficient, though with some persistance and patience finding one for £30 or even less isn't out of the question.

But as always with Sony digicams of this era, remember that they don't use the more familiar SD or Compact Flash memory cards, but rather Sony's proprietary Memory Stick cards, so if your camera doesn't come with a suitable memory card you probably won't have one just laying around, and Memory Stick cards often command something of a premium price. (You should stick to memory cards of 128mb or less for the S85.)

Using a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 in 2025

Sony tried a new charcoal grey colour for the S85 (the previous S75 model was a more conventional silver grey colour), and although the S85 is not as obviously style oriented as the DSC-V1 model that replaced it, there's no doubt ithe S85 is a handsome beast in its new colour. The nicely shaped hand grip also makes it a very comfortable thing to hold, and the signature Sony jog dial makes accessing things like aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation quick and easy. So high marks for ergonomics.

But the thing that really raises the S85's game when it comes to general usability is the LCD screen above the rear monitor. Even when bright sunlight is washing out the monitor and you're semi-guessing about your framing, the LCD screen makes it easy to set things like exposure compensation.

It is a bit of a shame that there's no programme mode though. Most digicams have both a fully automatic 'green' mode that gives access to no or very few manual controls, and a programme mode where shutter speed and aperture are both set automatically but you still have access to a range of other manual controls for things like exposure compensation and ISO and, if you're lucky, programme shift. But at least you do still have access to exposure compensation in Sony's fully automatic 'green' mode, so it's still a useful mode for general photography. (On this example of the S85 the green camera icon for the fully automatic mode has rubbed off, but it's still there in the form of a blank space on the mode dial!).

The lens on the S8 has a very standard zoom range of 34 - 102mm (i.e. a 3x zoom ratio), but it never-the-less deserves a special mention for the fast f2-2.5 maximum aperture. This is good for low light photography, especially given the limited ISO range of 100-400 that is typical of cameras from this era. And you don't want to go faster than 100 ISO if you can help it! Fortunately when set to Auto ISO the S85 will do it's best to keep to 100 ISO.

So while the Cyber-shot DSC-S85 might not have had the shear style of its DSC-V1 successor, it was perhaps the superior camera when it came to ergonomics and usability. One of the other advantages of the S85 over the later V1 is that the larger body allows room for a much larger NP-FM50 battery that lasts much longer! You can also see here the slot for that Sony proprietary Memory Stick memory card.

One fairly obvious way in which this camera will give you a real taste of vintage digital photography is in its operating speed: start-up time is around 5-6 seconds, shut-down time is around 4 seconds, focus acquisition time is around 1.5-2 seconds, and it takes around 3-4 seconds to write JPEG files to the memory card. So you have to just slow down, take your time and breath while you wait .

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 results

But of course the real question is, what were the results like? The answer is, for the most part, very nice indeed. This was certainly a camera capable of generating genuinely pleasing photographs. You will of course get all the usual effects of using a small vintage sensor, like blown highlights and chromatic aberrations, and the lens exhibits quite a lot of barrel distortion at the wide end. It's a bit of a shame that the S85 doesn't feature a RAW mode, but even so, these are all things that are fairly easy to deal with in post-production. I can certainly confirm that I was able to make lovely A4 and 150 x 100mm prints from my S85 files.

But as always, see for yourself…! (These images were lightly processed to taste in Adobe Lightroom.)

ISO 100 - 7mm - f/2.5 - 1/500
This is a straight out of camera shot that makes the barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom range plain to see.

ISO 100 - 7mm - f/2.8 - 1/500
The same shot processed to taste in Lightroom, including correcting the barrel distortion. The corners are still a bit soft!

ISO 100 - 7mm - f/2.8 - 1/400

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/3.5 - 1/500
At reasonably close-up focussing distances you can get rather attractive bokeh.

ISO 100 - 13.9mm - f/2.3 - 1/1000

ISO 100 - 12.2mm - f/3.2 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 9.3mm - f/2.8 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/2.8 - 1/200

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/6.3 - 1/50

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/3.2 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 8.1mm - f/2.8 - 1/400

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/3.2 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/2.8 - 1/125
In this shot, close to the closest possible focus distance and zoomed to the most telephoto focal length of the zoom range, and with the aperture set to almost its maximum opening, the bokeh is almost DSLR like!

ISO 100 - 21mm - f2.8 - 1/100

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/4.5 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/2.8 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 10.6mm - f/2.8 - 1/250
In this straight-out-of-camera shot of leaves against the sky, chromatic aberrations at the high-contrast transition between leaf and sky is plain to see…

ISO 100 - 10.6mm - f/2.8 - 1/250
…but I'd say it's less than I've seen on many other digicams from this era, and it was fairly easy to deal with in Adobe Lightroom.

ISO 100 - 18.2mm - f/2.8 - 1/160

ISO 100 - 18.2mm - f/2.5 - 1/50

ISO 100 - 9.3mm - f/7.1 - 1/500

ISO 100 - 15.8mm - f/8 - 1/640

ISO 100 - 9.3mm - f/8 - 1/800

ISO 100 - 18.2mm - f/8 - 1/1000

ISO 100 - 21mm - f/8 - 1/1000

ISO 100 - 13.9mm - f/8 - 1/1000

Links

• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 specifications
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 Operating instructions (PDF)
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 contemporary review on DPReview
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 contemporary review on Imaging Resource
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S85 contemporary review on Shutterbug