Sony just goosed up the "high zoom" range of its CyberShot line with the DSC-H3, bringing that old DSC-H2 rolled out in February '06 up a notch with more megapixelidge, a 2.5-inch viewscreen up from 2 inches, and a lower price. This one's a little slimmer, too, looking a lot less like a lens with a camera attached. And, it adds face detection and the ability to view your photos on an HDTV.

Looky there, this DSC-H3 has 8.1 megapixels inside instead of its predecessor's measly six, but for some reason Sony backed off that H2's optical zoom of 12x down to 10x for this Carl Zeiss glass. Sony must've done that to make the camera a little less unwieldy, perhaps hoping no one would miss those extra 2x at the long end of the zoom range. Maybe that helped the company knock a hundred bucks off the price while adding two megapixels to the sensor—Sony says the DSC-H3 is going to cost "about $300" when it ships next month, with pre-orders starting Thursday. [Sony]

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