This super-compact camera has a 30x zoom, Wi-Fi, and GPS
If you want to buy a camera with a lot of zoom, you don’t have a great deal of choice. Most decent super-zoom cameras are big, with bodies that mimic digital SLRs in design and size. Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V (or just ‘HX50’) is out to challenge that — it’s the smallest camera ever to sport a 30x zoom, and it’s got plenty else besides.
Sony Cyber-Shot HX50V: Specifications, performance, and picture quality
In
our time with it, we found that the HX50 was a quick, but not blazingly
fast, camera. It’s able to start up or turn off in around two seconds,
although a lot of this is spent waiting for the lens to extend or
retract. It’s quick to confirm focus and can capture a photo with around
0.3 seconds of shutter lag, which is par for the course for most
compact cameras. It can capture a burst of 10 full-resolution photos in a
second, but otherwise shot-to-shot time is around two seconds.
The
Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V has a 20.4-megapixel Exmor-R CMOS sensor
accompanying its lens. This is both a good and a bad thing — plenty of
megapixels means larger prints, and theoretically more detail, but given
that the HX50’s imaging sensor is smaller than the finger-nail on your
pinky finger, that’s just too many pixels in such a compact area.
The
up-shot of this is if you’re in good light, like outdoors on a sunny
day, you’re going to get more detail than on a lower-megapixel sensor.
The down-side is that in anything other than ideal conditions, images
quickly start to show image noise, both graininess and colour speckling,
and blurring (from noise reduction fighting those aforementoned image
noise effects).
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| This image was captured in the camera's Intelligent Auto+ mode, snapping three frames and stitching them together for better contrast overall. |
Video handles the noise better than photos, with
the HX50 being one of the best non-enthusiast compact cameras we’ve
tried in terms of its video performance. The option to capture footage
in 1080p Full HD, at 50 frames per second, is excellent — the resulting
video files are smooth and reasonably detailed.
The camera’s sensor extends from a native base of ISO 80 up to a maximum of ISO 3200, which is a versatile enough range. Photos do
start to show significant image noise above ISO 400 though, so if
you’re shooting at the longer end of the camera’s super-zoom range, or
if you’re in dim light, you’ll start to see quickly-increasing amount of
noise as light levels drop.
The lens on the
HX50, though, is excellent. In equivalent terms to a full-frame digital
SLR, which you’ll usually find matched to a ‘standard’ 24-70mm zoom
lens, the HX50 has a lens that’s capable of covering the 24-720mm focal
lengths. This is a huge distance, and it means the HX50 is
incredibly versatile. The camera’s lens isn’t particularly fast (in
terms of brightness) at its maximum or minimum zoom, though, with a
maximum aperture of f/3.5-6.3. Optical image stabilisation works very
well to control hand-shake even at maximum zoom.
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| This is the HX50 at minimum zoom. |
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| This is the HX50 at maximum zoom. |
The HX50 is generally quick to focus, and didn’t hunt or stutter while
we were using it. It’s not a great camera for close-up ‘macro’
photography, though, with a minimum focus distance of around 50mm at the
widest focal length.
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| You can see that the ruler only starts to come into focus beyond the 50mm mark. |
The Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V’s battery is rated for 400
shots, or 200 minutes of movie recording time. This is more than enough
for a week’s holiday, although a huge advantage comes from the fact
that the DSC-HX50V can recharge its battery over any high-current USB
connection — so if you’ve got a laptop with a Fast Charge USB port, or
if you’re carrying a smartphone and its charger on your holiday, you can
use either of these to charge the HX50 through its micro-USB port and
not have to worry about an additional box to carry.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V: Conclusion
The
HX50 is, as super-zoom cameras go, pretty good. It’s got heaps of
features built-in, has the ability to take external accessories through
its hot-shoe, and the lens itself is great.
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