We reviewed our Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 back in December of 2006. It lived a short but wonderful life, dying in the crystal clear waters of the Bahamas after falling out of Jeremiah's pocket in December of 2007. After a lot of thought and research (it's always a lot of research for us), we decided to upgrade to a digital SLR. But after a couple of months of having our Digital SLR, we were missing the simplicity and pocket-ability of a point and shoot. Luckily for us, we were offered the chance to revisit the Cybershot with the Sony Cybershot DSC-W120.

Here are the main things we love about this upgraded version of the DSC-W50:

• The Carl Zeiss lens. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good lens, which can make a huge difference in picture quality. Few digital point-and-shoot cameras (well, few point-and-shoot cameras, period) have lenses this good.


• 4x optical zoom. Optical zoom is the zooming in and out that the lens itself is technically capable of. This is in contrast to digital zoom, which is something the camera's brain tries to do, essentially blowing up information in the picture, and not nearly as well. Look for a camera with a high "x" of optical zoom.


• 7.2 megapixels. We are never going to print mural-sized photographs of our daughter or of the products we review, but 7.2 megapixels means we have plenty of digital information to allow us to crop photos up close as needed in iPhoto (or whatever image-editing software you use).


• A short lag time. This is crucial for parents of fast-moving kids.

The new Cybershot has a 2.5" TFT LCD screen on the back so you don't have to squint to see your pictures, even in bright sunlight. It also fits easily in your purse so you always have a camera handy for impromptu memory-making at the park. It has some other crazy features that work as advertised, including a face recognition option that can set the flash, focus, exposure, and white balance to bring faces out of shadows and reduce the reflective glare that a flash can cause.

The coolest new feature offered over the older DSC-W50 (other than the fact that it comes in pink) is what Sony calls "Smile Shutter Technology." If you set the camera in this mode, you don't need to engage the shutter to try to capture a picture of someone smiling. The camera does the work for you, and when we played with this feature, it worked as expected; a nice broad smile is far better at triggering the camera to take a photo than a sensitive or Mona Lisa-esque twitch.

This technology does beg a few questions about the purpose of taking pictures, and the kinds of memories we're trying to make. I'm a firm believer in the idea that some of the most telling, memorable, and yes, happy moments we can capture sometimes have nothing to do with a smile, which can be a trained response to the presence of a camera that actually masks the nuance of what is actually going on.

But if you recognize that this is just another tool in your arsenal of "automated" picture-making opportunities - akin to autofocus, automatic exposure settings, and other aids - Smile Shutter offers benefits for everyone, if you can find the right circumstance. We're looking forward to letting this camera do some of our work for us this holiday season - while the camera responds quickly enough for you to easily capture a smile yourself, the new setting means that instead of watching the action through the camera lens, you can set up this camera on a tripod, aimed at your festivities, and it'll capture the smiles for you - leaving you to enjoy the firsthand experience. Amazingly, the camera can even distinguish between adults and children and you can give the kids' smiles trigger priority.

At the moment, you can pick up a Cybershot DSC-W120 for about $150 on Amazon.com. For one of the highest-rated digital point-and-shoot cameras online (at the moment, it has an average user rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars), we think that's a bargain.