Photo gallery: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H50Design
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. It is a sturdy beast, complete with no-nonsense metal lugs for the strap. The H50 has a nicely contoured, dSLR-style grip, with plenty of room between the 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 in ages.
The spinning selector wheel would be better if the click pad was incorporated in it.
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 3-inch, 230k-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 or 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 strained and chugged against the cap that resolutely failed 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 instead of USB you get a Sony-specific data transfer cable with A/V-out and USB connection. Don't lose it, if not you'll have to pay a premium to get a replacement.
The H50 comes complete with a lens adapter 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 gave us instant access to white balance, bracketing level, flash intensity, dynamic range, noise reduction, colour settings — the list goes on. Even in fully automatic mode, we could adjust face detection, red-eye reduction and scene recognition.
This crop, (enlarge) taken at the maximum ISO 3,200, shows the noise reduction system settings, from left to right: Off, Standard, and Plus.
The 15x optical zoom lens has a 31-465mm focal length (35mm equivalent). 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. Besides JPEG, the H50 can also capture in RAW file format and high-definition still images, but video is only VGA and sound is in mono.
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.
The camera records to Sony's Memory Stick PRO or PRO Duo format, which may be useful if you already own a Sony point-and-shoot.
Performance And Image Quality
Burst mode fires a creditable 0.9 frame 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.
This crop, (enlarge) taken at ISO 80, shows the dynamic range options: Off, Standard, and Plus.
Images captured by the H50 were pleasingly crisp. Although images got gritty from ISO 400 upward, noise is kept under control without sacrificing too much detail up to ISO 1,600. Colour suffered more than detail, as images taken at higher ISO speeds appeared seriously washed-out.
Dynamic range may be a buzzword in the digital camera market, but we struggled to see much difference in the dynamic range settings available. Blown highlights seemed unaffected by the enhanced dynamic range setting, which appeared to have simply lightened the whole image in some shots.
The H50 did reasonably well in low light. The adjustable flash made a big difference in preventing bleached-out subjects, helped by a tendency toward warmer skin tones in most lighting conditions. The NightShot feature is fun, but quality was actually worse than steadying the camera on a wall or furniture and firing the shot in normal mode.
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 looked great and even the gimmicky additions like NightShot kept us entertained.
The fold-out screen puts this one up over other superzooms — but the equally excellent Fujifilm FinePix S8100fd has an SD slot alongside its obsolete proprietary xD-Picture Card slot. If you like the screen enough to buy into a rarefied and expensive memory format, the AU$599 H50 won't disappoint.
