Sony Cyber-shot HX5V

UPDATE 07/07/2011: In line with our new, tighter test criteria, the HX5V is now a three-star camera rather than a four-star camera. This is due to its sub-standard TN screen.

UPDATE 19/10/2010: the overall score of the Sony HX5V has been brought down to four stars. In line with our newly tightened test criteria, the TN screen with 230,000 dots cost the HX5V its fifth star.

The market for point-and-shoot cameras with big, powerful zooms is really taking off, and everybody wants a piece of the action.  Sony is a case in point: after taking a long time to refine its ultra-compact T series, it's moved over to produce its own 10x zoom with this HX5V.

A 25-250 mm zoom is almost commonplace today, but Sony has a few other tricks up its sleeve, including a back-illuminated CMOS sensor, a GPS receiver and the ability to film in Full HD.

Handling

The first thing that surprised us was ... how unsurprising this camera is.  The HX5V looks just like all of the other compact cameras with big zooms and is almost exactly the same physical size as the Panasonic TZ7, or the Canon SX200 for that matter.  It does have a small bulge on the right hand side to support your middle finger and improve the grip, but other than that, there's not much to say about the handling.  This camera certainly doesn't go off the beaten track ... 

Noteworthy features include the presence of burst mode and automatic panoramas on the mode dial, giving direct access to two special features that help the current generation of CMOS sensors stand out.   There is a manual mode, but it's somewhat hampered by the fact that the diaphragm only has two positions, offering either f/3.5 or f/8 in wide-angle or f/5.5 or f/13 in telephoto mode.


When you switch this camera on, the quality of the screen is unfortunately immediately obvious.  Although it is 3'' across, it only has 230 000 pixels--half as many as are available on Panasonic's closest equivalent--and, worse still, it uses TN technology.  That makes it impossible to line up a shot correctly without facing the screen directly.  When will manufacturers learn that this sort of hardware is unacceptable, especially on a high-end camera like this or where the display is fixed?

One good thing about the big zoom is that it moves at two different speeds, meaning you can both take time to frame the perfect shot and move quickly from wide-angle to telephoto.

Also worth pointing out are two intelligent modes, iSCN and iSCN+.  The former chooses the best settings for your photo based on the information that the camera can collect about the scene, but the latter goes one further by taking an extra photo every time you press the shutter release in situations where that could be helpful, such as when light levels are low.

Finally, when we opened up the flap at the bottom, we were relieved to see that the memory card slot welcomes SD cards.  Like Olympus, Sony has finally seen sense and adopted the same standard as everybody else.  All that's left now is to convince the few diehard fans of microSD cards to move over too and we'll be able to forget about memory card compatibility problems once and for all!

There is one small issue though: despite having an unusually large battery for a camera of this size, the GPS chip is very power hungry and drains it very quickly, meaning you can't get much more than a hundred photos out of it if you geotag them all.

Responsiveness

The HX5V takes a little over two seconds to switch on, which is about normal for this segment, where the large zoom lenses need at least a second to open out.  The autofocus is very fast in wide-angle mode when light levels are good, but its performance is average in telephoto and the HX5V can sometimes struggle when light levels drop.  That's all relative though, as autofocus still has an average of 1.5 s in these conditions.

In burst mode, you can take ten photos in one second, but the camera then freezes up for 13 seconds while it saves them all.  Fortunately, you don't have to wait long if you've just taken a single photo, and unless you need to deconstruct a very fast movement, then you probably won't need to use the burst mode very often.

Image Quality

The HX5V does well at low sensitivities.  In wide-angle mode, the lens is accurate in the centre of the frame, but a little less so around the outside.  Things are more even when you zoom in, but just a little less detailed in the centre.  At the shortest focal lengths, there's a trace of purple fringing, but it's nothing dramatic, and will only really be problematic on branches that are only one or two pixels wide for instance.


As you increase sensitivity, there's a little blurriness at 400 ISO.  This increases noticeably at 800 ISO, without being too much of a problem, and even at 1600 ISO, you'll be able to produce some 8 x 12'' photo prints.  That's all thanks to Sony's excellent post processing.  The grain that does appear is notably neutral: coloured noise, which is the worst kind, is kept in check and large dark zones aren't invaded by lots of colour.

It's not all good news though.  The exposure has a tendency to act in a very neutral way, so as a result, the brightest areas are over exposed: if you take a street scene, for instance, a little stretch of sky could easily end up as a block of white.


The algorithm that stitches together automatic panoramas also seems to have been improved.  When we took it outside, it managed to avoid cutting moving objects in two or producing duplicates, but it couldn't work any miracles in the most impossible cases.

Video

The HX5V faces the tough challenge of taking on the Panasonic TZ7 and its successors, so a decent video mode is going to be essential.  Sound is captured in stereo and video recorded as AVCHD files.  Two different modes are available: a 'fake' 1080 mode that measures 1440 pixels across, and a real Full HD 1920 x 1080 mode.  In both cases, recording is interlaced at 50 Hz, although the sensor only produces a signal at 25 frames per second; we don't really see what the advantage is over using a progressive scan ...

Videos that we shot really had a lot of detail, but the mic seemed a little subject to echoes, but was good quality overall, and a lot better than the majority of today's digital cameras.  The zoom, which is quite loud with still photos, moves more slowly and quietly while shooting video and autofocus keeps working well, even if Panasonic has a small advantage in this field, although the TZ10's lower resolution obviously makes its job easier.