The Cybershot DSC-T900 is the latest ultra-sleek touch screen camera from Sony. It shoots 12-megapixel images, records 1280x720 HD video, and has a gorgeous 3.5-inch 920,000-dot screen.

The great strength of this camera lies in its design. It's built for looks, with a sliding cover, thin profile, and non-extending lens. The LCD, which takes up the entire rear of the camera, is particularly attractive, with crystal clear image playback, though the low-resolution menu system looks decidedly under-whelming on such a high-reslution display.

As much as we like the looks of the LCD, its touch-screen capabilities leave something to be desired. Using the screen is the only method for accessing menus and changing settings. Because of this, the icons have to be large and easy to hit, and the camera has limited controls. The touch-screen also isn't as responsive as we would like, and feels laggy and inaccurate.

As we noted above, the photographic controls offeredc are on the slim side. There's no way to manually white balance, no control over aperture or shutter speed, and the high-speed mode doesn't work above ISO 800. However, the T900 does have a good range of ISOs (80 to 3200), and a ton of editing tools.

Performance (read in-depth performance coverage at DigitalCameraInfo.com)

In our lab testing, the performance of the T900 was generally good, but with a couple of noteworthy issues. It performed very well in terms of color accuracy (both for still photography and video) and image stabilization. However, the images tended to have a high amount of noise, the camera had a habit of oversharpening the picture, and the small lens produced a lot of distortion.

Comparisons (read in-depth comparisons at DigitalCameraInfo.com)

We compared the T900 to three other cameras: the Canon PowerShot SD970 IS, the Casio Exilim EX-FC100, and the Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR. Of these, the Sony is far and away the most sleek and stylish, though the Casio was quite good-looking too. The Casio and Fujifilm both have hardware that makes them interesting. The Casio can shoot still photographs at up to 30 shots per second, and slow-motion video at up to 1000 frames per second. The Fujifilm has a sensor that can halve its 12-megapixel resolution in order to reduce image noise or boost dynamic range. The Canon doesn't have any significant gimmicks, but is just a solid little camera.

The Sony T900 was the most accurate for color, the worst for image noise and distortion. It came in behind the Canon and Fuji for resolution, only beating the Casio, though the T900 did have the best image stabilization results of the lot. In video testing, the Sony did quite well for color accuracy and sharpness.