Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H50

Print | Close this window

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49298270,00.htm

Reviewed 24 July 2008

Reviewed by Rich Trenholm

Depending on your point of view, superzooms are either the dSLR-like cameras you can carry around easily or overpowered compacts that don't fit in your pocket. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H50 is a 9.1-megapixel superzoom, sporting a 15x optical zoom Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens. We carried it around to see if it's worth £230.

Design
The H50 is a sturdy beast, complete with no-nonsense metal lugs for the strap. It has a nicely contoured, SLR-style grip for the right hand. There's plenty of room between grip and lens for your fingers to securely hold the camera with one hand.

One of the most important design factors in a camera built around its zooming capability is the zoom control. We approached the small-looking zoom rocker pad with trepidation and were blown away. It's easily the most sensitive zoom control we've used for ages.

A spinning selector wheel surrounds the standard click pad. The wheel has raised ridges to make it grippy enough to spin easily, but it's narrow. We prefer the Nikon Coolpix scroll wheel that combines scroll wheel and click pad.

The screen is a large 76mm (3-inch), 230,000 pixel LCD. This takes its cue from the Sony Alpha dSLRs with a fold-out arm attached to the bottom of the electrical viewfinder. The screen will tilt to a right angle from the camera, facing either up and down for low-level or overhead shooting.

Like most superzooms, the H50 extends its lens when turned on. We've seen some cameras such as the Fujifilm FinePix S8100fd pop the lens cap off when so doing, an endearing if possibly damaging quirk. But it's still better than the H50 lens, which strains and chugs against the cap that resolutely fails to come off. We're pretty certain that's not healthy for the lens and would rather run the risk of losing the cap when we've forgotten to remove it.

Sony is still annoyingly keen on proprietary formats, so you get a Sony-specific data transfer connection. Instead of USB, you get a special cable with AV out and USB connection, so don't lose it. The camera also records to Sony's Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro Duo format, which may be useful if you have a Sony Ericsson phone.

The H50 comes complete with a lens adaptor ring and lens hood. Other accessories include a remote control that controls shooting as well as playback.

Features
The H50 has an impressive amount of tweakable options. Hitting the menu button gives instant access to white balance, bracketing level, flash intensity, dynamic range, noise reduction, colour settings -- the list goes on. Even in fully automatic mode, you can adjust face detection, red-eye reduction and scene recognition.

The 15x zoom lens has a 31-465mm focal length, equivalent to a 35mm camera. A 1/2.3-inch CCD and Bionz processor handle the thinking, while features include face detection with high-speed subject tracking, an adjustable smile shutter, and dual anti-blur with Sony's Super SteadyShot image stabilisation. The H50 shoots raw files and high-definition still images, but video is only VGA and sound is only mono.

This crop, taken at the maximum ISO 3,200, shows the noise reduction system settings, from left to right: off, standard and plus

Photo slideshows can be played back on your television with music via a one-touch slideshow button. Yet again, a proprietary HDMI cable is required. In playback mode, the camera can filter images by whether there are faces or even just children's faces in the picture.

Another interesting feature we associate more with camcorders than cameras is infrared nightshot mode.

Performance
Images are pleasingly crisp in images captured by the H50. Although images get gritty from ISO 400 upwards, up to ISO 1,600 noise is kept under control without sacrificing too much detail. Colour suffers more than detail, as images taken at higher ISO speeds become seriously washed out.

Dynamic range may be a buzzword in the digital camera market, but we struggle to see much difference in the dynamic range settings available. Blown highlights seem unaffected by the enhanced dynamic range setting, which seems in some pictures to have simply lightened the whole image.

This crop, take at ISO 80, shows the dynamic range options: off, standard and plus. Not much is salvaged in the sky's blown highlights, while the DR enhancer seems to lighten the whole image

The H50 does reasonably well in low light. The adjustable flash makes a big difference in preventing bleached-out subjects, helped by a tendency towards warmer skin tones in most light. The nightshot feature is fun, but quality is actually worse than steadying the camera on a wall or furniture and firing the shot in normal mode.

Burst mode fires a creditable 0.9 frames per second, with 100 images captured in 90 seconds. The screen doesn't go blank during this sequence, which we like. That 100 shots knocked a whole quarter bar off the battery indicator, so don't do it too often.

Conclusion
Proprietary formats and connections are never a good start, but even with this handicap, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H50 won us over. There's a wealth of features in the sturdy body, all of which can be tweaked. Images look great and even the gimmicky additions like nightshot kept us entertained.

The fold-out screen puts this one up on other superzooms -- but the equally excellent Fujifilm FinePix S8100fd has an SD slot alongside its obsolete proprietary slot. If you like the screen enough to buy into a rarefied and expensive memory format, the H50 won't disappoint.

Edited by Shannon Doubleday