Sony has produced a lot of unusual camera models for our consideration, and they’ve given us a lot to look at up and down both lengths of the spectrum–they’ve given us fantastic cameras, and horrendous cameras.  And they’ve given us cameras that can only be called a mix of both, which is exactly what we’ll be calling today’s review target, the Sony TX7.

The Sony TX7 is a ten megapixel camera with a 4x optical zoom and a 2x digital augmentation, a three and a half inch LCD touchscreen, Optical SteadyShot image stabilization, face motion detection, twelve different scene modes and a panoply of white balance modes, nine point autofocus, burst shooting mode, auto flash, forty five megs of onboard memory, a USB port, direct printing capability and included editing software.

You can see why I’m so puzzled with this model.  A ten megapixel camera with such short zoom should be a lower end model.  But lower end models don’t include this kind of tech with them.  They sure don’t offer LCD touchscreens.  They don’t offer nine point autofocus and all those other great options, and they absolutely don’t boast that kind of onboard memory.

Now here’s the worst part of the whole mess–the Sony TX7 is going to set you back fully four hundred bucks.  I’m not prepared to call that a good value, given the short zoom and lower resolution.  But there are a lot of other great features here, including stuff you can only find on high end cameras.  So if you’re okay with a lower resolution than you can get, and like all of the extra features you can get, then you’ll definitely want a closer look at the Sony TX7.