Sony HX5V

It always happens.

You set off somewhere, on a strict timeline, having carefully calculated the time required to be there at your appointment, a time which allows you do some final checking before you leave and maximise your productivity before leaving.

This method is also known as Setting Off at The Last Minute.

Because you know it is going to be a fast trip, with no opportunity to stop along the way, you pack all your expensive camera equipment and put in the boot of your vehicle. After all, there will be no time to stop. Will there? And you leave.

And it happens.

Potentially the best light you have seen along this road in years. It offers you enough look-at-this moments that you want to stop, to say: sod it; this is too good to miss. Will you rise to the bait? Will you stop and get out your camera and  hope that, by the time you have assembled it, the light will not have  gone, having departed over the horizon, laughing mockingly? Will you be late for your appointment? Do you really care?

Decisions, decisions.

It has happened to me many times, and by the time I have got out my DSLR, put on a lens, inserted a card, formatted it, checked my settings and got out to shoot, the light has….gone. Dammit.

Of course, over the years I have developed a certain cunning. Now I assemble and leave the camera on the seat beside me in the vehicle, or I learn to anticipate what the light may be like, what is possible. Inevitably it isn’t and it isn’t and I don’t.  If you can follow that.

It happened to me last Friday morning, as I drove into Christchurch. The light was stunning, painting stripes of pink along the front edges of the hills around Culverden, and later coating the rather dreary bus shelter by Balmoral Forest in gold light. A Robin Morrison moment, if ever there was one. The light continued to mock me. I saw possibility after possibility, all of which would have kept me busy for hours. Or not.  Because I had set off at the last minute and my camera was packed away in its case in the back of the truck…I wasn’t going to bite…

For a long time I have envied all those tourists who whip out a point and-shoot digital camera from behind their ears and grab the moment or pull out their iPhone, snap, and then make a virtual Polaroid. My envy grows until eventually I decide to join them, borrow one of the APS-sized sensor cameras, and make some photographs. What is more, it seems to me there is a completely different aesthetic when making pictures on the back of a screen compared to the involvement /immersion experience which comes from using a viewfinder, an aesthetic which begs exploration.

Then the envy disappears. When I see the noise, halo-ing, CA (chromatic aberration) and smudging of fine detail, I lose interest and go back to my BBT (Big Boys’ Toy). But I live in hope, because those little compacts seem to me to put the fun back into photography, and I am happy to cede control if the results deliver. Inevitably they don’t. What is more, nobody takes a photographer using one of those seriously, so theoretically they should be the perfect camera for Street Photography.

Until now.

Perhaps there may be hope after all. As I said, I have missed photographs because I did not have a camera immediately to hand, i.e in my pocket. There is an old rule to getting a picture: f8 and be there. It worked for Cartier -Bresson… And, as I said, I have been keeping an eye on the point-and-shoot technology, waiting for one which could deliver.

So, when I saw the feature list for Sony’s new HX5v, I got interested, and asked if I could take one to Africa to test-drive.

On the surface the HX5 looks pretty much like any other compact; black, lens at one end, 3″ screen on the back, etc, etc…almost big enough for the Bridge hand, but not quite…So far, no different… but exploration of the features reveals it is packed with some very good things.

Firstly, it has a 10 Mp Exmor CMOS sensor. Sony have resisted the urge to go beyond 10 Mp, more than enough for a sensor of this size. Above 10MP, signal-noise ratios mean that noise build-up becomes a real problem. Or put another way: the image quality turns to crap. It is nice to see manufacturers beginning to show some common sense and go for features rather than pixel count. Perhaps the Megapixel Wars are over at last…

It uses a Sony G series 10x zoom lens, which gives a 35mm focal length equivalent of 25-250mm.Nice. It uses SD as well as memory stick. Even better.  Using a 4GB SDHC card, left over from my EOS days gives me around 880 shots. Unfortunately the battery is only good for around 330 images, so it is important to carry another (fully charged) one. Not that it takes up much room…just remember  which pocket you put it in!

It shoots 1080i HD video…Interesting…that could be fun…

Build quality is excellent and it feels solid….

All well and good. But the acid question is: how good are the photographs from it?  Given that cameras in this class are still using an APS sensor and use of that is close to its theoretical limits, as far as lens and sensor design go, is this a camera to be taken seriously? Which means…can I make a quality print from it? What have they done for me to take it seriously?

Well, a few things actually…. and these are the following:

1. They have kept the megapixel count down to 10 MP. Fewer pixels mean bigger photosites with more room to breathe and better quality. Actually I think 6MP is more than enough to make an A3 print, potential for exhibition work here.
2. There is the Handheld Twilight mode. With HHT, the camera achieves focus and exposure, and then shoots a burst of 6 shots. Once that is done, it processes them together and delivers a jpeg with less noise and slightly finer detail. It is actually a really effective workaround for the noise issues of these small sensors.    My tests showed real noise build-up at ISO 800 on a single image was double plus ungood. With HHT it improved dramatically. However HHT is not just for lowlight shooting .My source at Sony suggested I use it in the daylight, saying that it made a real difference to those kinds of photographs. So, on a trip to Table Mountain, I began to try it out. It works. It really does. Downloaded to Lightroom and examined at 100%, the images are remarkably clean and sharp. Sony promise I will be able to make a 13″ x 19″ print from these files. That will have to wait until I get home to New Zealand. So far, however, from what I have seen, that should hold true.

Later that day, we found ourselves out at Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, supposedly the southernmost part of Africa (it isn’t), amongst all the tourists milling around the lighthouse. Because there was so much movement, I expected ghosting or the camera to have problems (actually, I was trying to create them…). However the images came out sharp and crisp, with no ghosting, which suggests that the first frame captures the shot and the others somehow fill in the shadows and noisy areas. This makes it possible to capture “decisive moments” and hold the quality. I noted too, that the shutter is very quick, almost as good as my DSLR, and that there is no need to allow for delay.

1. Backlight HDR mode. Very effective. Small sensors do not have the dynamic range of the larger full-frame cameras (laws of physics, you see) so we are always up against it. With the BHDR mode, the camera shoots one shot for the shadows, one for the highlights, and then blends the two. It seems to work really well with people against a dark background. Useful.
2. 

   Panorama, Cape Point Lighthouse

   iSweep Panorama mode. This is FUN!!! You select a scene, identify the left side of the shot, and then pan across it until it tells you to stop or you decide to do so. Then it generates a panorama, by stitching the shots together. So I shot images of Cape Town from the top of Table Mountain, which was all well and good and produced nice images which you can view here. But I wanted to pressure test this mode, so again I waited until Cape Point. Tourists were milling in a really confined place, so I tried this out at a time when there were fewer about.  There was one directly in front of me and, as I panned, a guy in right field wandered into shot against the direction I was panning (the camera insists you go left to right). As a result he has been warped somewhat. Which is really cool. The software has struggled with the complex scene and there is warping on the left and right sides. Which is wonderful. Now I know where the limits of the software are, I can play with them. Creativity and new ways often come from the fringes, from out on the edges.

Those are the functions which really grabbed my attention. But there are other features shoehorned into this camera, some of which you will find on the opposition’s products. You decide which ones are useful…

1. Smile detection. The camera waits until someone smiles, then shoots the photograph. You can choose between a broad smile, normal or slight smile (for those of you with Gothic friends)…
2. Face detection.  The camera looks for a face in the shot, then adjusts the focus point to cover that.
3. Retouch mode. You can apply red-eye reduction and unsharp masking in-camera.
4. Burst mode. You can shoot up to 10 frames/sec in good light
5. Honours detection. The camera detects an image which will help you get your letters and adjusts composition to optimise the image, automatically placing a key centre of interest on a third and beeping when you have done it accurately and it is time to press the shutter. Amazing.
6. Built-in compass…use your camera to find your way out of the jungles of Borneo…
7. GPS.  No it doesn’t help you navigate your way around Johannesburg. What will do is geotag your photographs with latitude and longitude. You then hook into Google Earth and will plot them on your map…now that is useful. I certainly used it as virtual notebook when in the townships  of the Cape Flats earlier this week, to get a sense of where I was and where I had travelled for later reflection and cataloguing…
8. O yes, and apparently it will store and carry music, although I haven’t yet figured that out.

So it would appear to be the answer to all my prayers; a camera which will give high-quality images while allowing me to prowl the streets , looking like Joe Tourist, as I hunts down the elusive Decisive Moment. Nirvana? Perfection?

Not quite.

I do have some gripes.

1. There is no aperture-priority mode. In HHT, the camera decides aperture for me. I don’t have a choice. By and large it seems to get it right.
2. There is no option to shoot RAW, only jpegs and there are only two settings for quality in easy mode: large ( print/10Mp) and small ( 5MP)
3. There is no way of adjusting contrast, sharpening and tone in the menus. I always prefer to set jpeg sharpening to “off”, and do it myself later. But that option is not available here. To my eye the images fresh from the camera are rather oversharpened, exhibiting obvious haloing. CA is evident on photographs shot in bright light, but correction in LR or Perfectly Clear will sort out much of that.

But that is about it. It is easy to be looking for a substitute for a DSLR, some convenient solution which will mean it is possible to carry a small camera and leave the Big Toys at home.

This isn’t it.

There is no way that a sensor this small is ever going to compete with the 24.6 MP full-frame sensor of an A900, in the same way that a Daihatsu Sirion will never be able to foot it with an Audi A6. Granted, they will both get you there, but there are orders of magnitude difference in terms of performance!

Remember there are two different markets in play here. The Sony HX5V is aimed at people who want a result without having to work for it. The A900 is pointed squarely at those who are happy to do so, and have some knowledge. There is also a difference in price…… the former is designed to fit in a pocket, the latter in a camera bag.

So is the HX5V a replacement for a DSLR or, put another way, would I leave my DSLR at home and travel the world with  only one of those? Will I recommend that to any of the people who regularly ask me that same question?

Absolutely not.

But I know what they mean. Carrying 12kg of DSLR kit is a pain…until I need it. Then nothing else will do.

But it is worth remembering that  >94% of camera buyers choose one of these to travel the world, and the majority of them will be quite satisfied with a compact like this, as they have since the days of the Box Brownie. The camera as aide-memoire, as a tool to freeze moments. And with GPS built-in, it has got even more useful, a reminder that we stood somewhere specific to make the photograph.

And for those moments when we just want to look and see, to be unfettered by our huge camera kits, as say, when riding along on the freeway in the early morning light of Cape Town, enjoying the light and the experience of being there; just wanting to entrap it without having to think, then a compact like this, and this one in particular, is able to free you and allow you to play.

And perhaps, just perhaps, give you a new experience of photography and a new way of making photographs. At $NZ 600, it seems a wonderful way to be able to have photography literally at your fingertips.