Major changes / improvements over the F707 include: F717 retained all distinctive features from F707, such as: The F717 was succeeded by DSC-F828 in August 2003.

Some very early production units may experience inaccurate focus with Laser Hologram on.

Sony admitted the problem as a minor design flaw, and offered free examination and repair service.

It was later confirmed that many Sony CCDs made from late 2002 to early 2004 suffer from a large-scale manufacturing defect.

Interestingly, the aforementioned first-run units seem to be immune to this failure, as they used CCDs built from old production techniques.