Overall Image Quality

Very good, I was more impressed than I thought I would be.. My only two niggles were firstly that colours often looked pale and under saturated, you'll probably find yourself boosting the saturation by 10 or 15% to make colours look more life like and secondly images are a little soft, this can be fixed using a careful unsharpen mask but not everyone has access to or understands these kinds of tools, I'm not sure where the softness problem is, lens or processing algorithms but whichever it's minor enough not to detract. Other than that the 3000Z is up there in the top five 3 megapixel digital cameras.

Purple Fringing (Chromatic Aberrations)

Looks like Epson have a pretty good lens, very little visible aberrations (though not quite as good as the F505V & S70).

As with the last two Sony reviews we had to search pretty hard to find an example of fringing in an "every day shot", Epson have a good lens system (we kind of hinted at its origins in the introduction to this review, now didn't we...)
Our now standard chromatic aberration test shot, you can see some definite aberrations here although made worse by blooming.

Barrel and Pincushion Distortion

As we'd expect the 3000Z did produce some barrel distortion at full wide angle though seemed to have very little pincushion distortion at full tele.

Distortion calculated as the amount of distortion to the horizontal line (from left or right to its center) as a percentage of image height.

Barrel Distortion, 1.0 % @ Wide Angle	Pincushion Distortion, almost nonexistent at full tele.

White Balance

Sadly lacking... Epson really could have done with throwing a few preset white balance settings, instead we have Auto, Fix and Custom. Which seems great because they have a custom mode, unfortunately using it is a pain, you have to first switch to SETUP then Shot Setup then New W/B then "Yes I really do", then shoot the white subject, then switch back ... Don't get me wrong it works well enough but it takes too long to change.. If there were ever an example for one-push custom white balance this is it!

Outdoors, Auto White Balance	Outdoors, Manual White Balance
Incandescent, Auto White Balance	Incandescent, Manual White Balance
Fluorescent, Auto White Balance	Fluorescent, Manual White Balance

As I said, manual white balance works well enough.. if only it was easier to access.