The W70 the successor to the W50 and has been a effective successor at that. It is compact and has a good feel to handle. The camera comes with a 7 megapixel CCD sensor in contrast to the 6 megapixel W50. In simple terms the camera is best for those novices who want to just point and shoot and don’t want to tweak much with the manual settings.
The 7 Megapixel snaps are worth printing out and the color quality and sharpness is just right even at high ISO settings. This is very useful in low light conditions.
The camera user interface is very simple which we have come to expect from all Sony cameras. The speed of usage is really good and also the time between snaps is really less for taking shots in quick succession.
One thing that bothered me regarding the camera is the internal battery which may turn out to become a disadvantage when people expect some hard core usage. Though I should say the camera has good battery backup and it can last up to some 350+ shots in one full charge, its better to get an extra battery pack if you don’t wanna miss the action.
The camera’s AUTO mode is very useful if people don’t want to keep tweaking the settings. It makes sure the shots come out good in most of the extreme cases too. The camera has 7 preset shooting modes for those who want to customise their snap settings. The LCD screen is 2.5 inches and is good enough for most situations. Even in bright lightt the LCD is viewable without much discomfort.
Sony has made sure that a large array of external accessories are made available for the camera like slave flash, tripod, underwater casing, pouch, etc
So as a conclusion if you are looking for a camera that will take snaps in a jiffy and also with a small learning curve then the W70 is a really good entry level camera that will fit your bill.