Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V - Performance

The HX50V has two continuous shooting options, either a burst of up to 10 shots at approximately 10 frames per second, or a burst of 10 shots at 2 frames per second.
Sony rates the battery at 400 shots, or 200 minutes of recording time.

Image quality

Sony delivers good, but not class-winning image quality with the HX50V. Colour rendition is mostly accurate when using default settings, while the lens is reasonably sharp and captures a good amount of detail, particularly at its sharpest point in the centre of the frame.
It's a shame that the sensor inside the HX50V is so small. With a plethora of large sensor compacts on the market, including models from Sony's own range, packing 20 megapixels onto a 1/2.3-inch sensor doesn't make much sense.


When looking at images at full resolution, there's plenty of evidence of over-processing at work, making photos look slightly crunchy. This issue is exacerbated as the ISO level climbs. The happy medium is around ISO 200, where the noise profile is acceptable for maintaining detail if you wanted to make crops or enlargements. The HX50V has an ISO range of 80-12,800, though at ISO 6400 and 12,800, the camera takes approximately five shots in quick succession then stitches them together to help reduce noise. At these high sensitivities, expect plenty of noise, making images only usable for absolute emergency situations.
However, if you are just looking for a camera to share low-resolution shots on the web or small prints, the HX50V is an excellent compromise. The reach of the 30x zoom will be incredibly useful for many photographers, particularly those who want a long zoom in a small, overall package.

Further within the menu systems, Sony offers a range of colour modes for photographers, including vivid, real, sepia, black-and-white and standard. Boosts to contrast, saturation, sharpness and noise reduction are available too. Filters are provided under the Picture Effect sub-menu, and include options such as painting, rich black-and-white and miniature mode.

A selection of picture effects from the HX50V.
(Credit: CBSi)

 Video quality is excellent on the HX50V. In fact, we'd go so far to say that it has the best video recording quality of any superzoom camera currently on the market. When shooting in AVCHD 50p, movement is smooth and fluid, while colours appear vivid. Even when zooming in, the image stabiliser kicks in, effectively smoothing out a lot of the handshake when not using a tripod. There are two levels of image stabilisation available for video, either standard or active, the latter being designed to compensate for more shaky situations. The video below was taken with active mode enabled.

source: cnet