Just 14mm wide at its thinnest point, Sony’s credit card-shaped DSC-T77 is certainly slim as cameras go, and its 4x optical zoom is impressive.

While that means it slips into a top pocket, there’s very little on this shiny camera (which weighs only 140g) to get a firm grip on, so camera shake would be a problem were it not for surprisingly effective image stabilisation.

Maintaining the sleek look, at no point does the lens stand out from the body, hidden as it is when not in use by a sliding lens cover. Open it and the camera powers up in two seconds.

This user-friendly, 10-megapixel model’s other talking point is the 3in touch-sensitive widescreen dominating the back, although its smallish icons require nimble fingers. When left on the default non-widescreen auto capture mode, both sides of the screen display black bands, cropping the view to more closely resemble what users will get when the regular JPEG images are downloaded.

What physical controls there are – a power button, shutter button and a tiny zoom control – are found on the camera’s top plate. The zoom was smooth and steady, and with a half press of the shutter release the camera was commendably quick to focus, although the three-second wait while the full resolution shots were stored in its memory felt sluggish.

Sony is pitching this camera at family portrait-takers, and its selectable modes include so-called Smile Shutter in which the camera takes a shot when it detects a happy, smiling subject – along with face detection (which biases the exposure and focus towards faces) and anti-blink technology. Sony’s implementation of this takes two sequential portraits, junking whichever one in which it looks like your subject has his or her eyes closed.

Overall the T77’s images were better than expected – warm, colourful and reasonably detailed – even if the position of the lens means stray fingertips can occasionally creep into shot, and lens flare was problematic on brighter days.

While 220 shots from a fully charged lithium ion battery isn’t the best we've seen, if you value size as much as quality and don’t mind constantly wiping the screen free of greasy marks, Sony’s T77 is worth an exploratory prod.