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Sony DSC-H5 Review.Sony Cybershot DSC-H5 manual
In early , Sony launched the first in its new H-series of digital cameras, marking their return into a market segment from which they'd been conspicuously absent -- the long zoom digital camera. Battery life is rated at shots. The Sony H5 uses contrast detection autofocusing, with 3 focusing points and an AF assist lamp to help out in difficult lighting conditions. Image exposures are determined with multi-pattern metering by default, and both center-weighted or spot metering modes are also on offer.
As well as the internal memory, a Memory Stick Duo slot compatible with PRO Duo cards as well lets you expand capacity to meet your needs. Read on for the whole story. It seems like just yesterday or the day before that the only long zoom digicam -- the Olympus C Ultra Zoom -- was discontinued because "consumers prefer the little cameras.
But that 2-megapixel long zoom had some devoted fans ready to buy a long zoom with a larger sensor. Just wait, they were told, just wait. Not only are we seeing 10x and 12x zooms from a number of manufacturers, but several are offering more than one model.
I myself have recently reviewed offerings from Fujifilm, Kodak regular size and a subcompact 10x zoom and Canon a real gem -- and there are others I haven't seen from Panasonic and, of course, Olympus. The good news about several of these new long zooms but unfortunately not all is that they include image stabilization. While shooting hand-held at mm or more requires stabilization, the benefits of image stabilization don't stop there.
Sony has a long track record with image stabilization in its camcorders, but we are starting to see its Super SteadyShot image stabilization system employed in its still cameras. And a menu option determines whether it's active during framing, or just when the Shutter button is pressed. The H5 can shoot as high as ISO 1,, obviating the need for flash and its inherent red-eye.
Sony endowed the H5 with the mini-SLR form factor so many long zooms use. It feels well-balanced in the hand and not at all too heavy to carry. Wrist Hold. Carrying the H5 in the shooting position wore out my finger tips there's not much room around the grip , so I came up with a more comfortable approach. It's as nice a grip as any other long zoom, certainly, but it illustrates a problem I had over and over again with the H5: It seems designed from drawings, not sculpted from clay unlike the Canon S3 IS, which was nicely sculpted.
The Sony DSC-H5 is an attractive design, certainly, and not impossible to learn, but it just didn't work for me. The grip wasn't the only issue. The thumb pad on the rear of the body is just below, but exactly as deep as the zoom toggle above it. Guess what? Right, I kept resting my thumb on the zoom toggle. It was just a little "too" convenient. My thumb is above the grip but the zoom toggle is just above that and the navigator just below, all on the same plane.
Plus there are some important buttons right alongside. It's easy to hit the wrong thing. Oddly enough, the one set of controls I wanted to find by touch on the Sony DSC-H5, the four-way navigation controller, was hard to find by touch because it was as smooth as the rest of the back panel. I had to look for it. Two controls I did like were the Shutter button, angled toward the front, and where it should be on the grip, and the Command dial just below it.
Sony has used Command dials on its digicams going back to I liked them then and I like them now. Twirl to your setting and press to activate it. Diopter Adjustment. It's underneath the EVF's eyepiece. But that means the eyepiece protrudes, snagging on camera bags and coat pockets. Or just jabbing you in the chest hence my preference for a wrist strap. On the lens end, Sony includes a lens hood and a hood adapter. The adapter screws into the body and protects the extended lens from the lens cap attached to it.
The hood locks onto the end of the adapter in either its working position or its reversed storage position. I tend to shoot into the sun quite a bit. With the adapter in place, however, the pop-up flash is useless, creating a lovely shadow of the hood assembly in every wide angle shot. It's one or the other, flash or natural light; although if Sony had designed the pop-up flash so it rose just a little higher, the whole problem would have been avoided.
Note that if you remove the Sony DSC-H5's lens hood and leave the adapter in place, no shadow is cast by the flash, though the combination looks rather unfinished. I was so glad to have it that I kept it on all the time, but the flash wasn't tall enough to peek over it. And it's a nice enough EVF that I almost always used it rather than the glorious 3. I persuaded myself that it gave me a little more battery life. This is much larger than the 2. I counted approximately , pixels on the H5 compared to the H2's 84, But then, that's another reason I preferred the EVF.
I didn't want anyone else to see what I was shooting. Battery Compartment. Just two AAs are all it takes. But these were mAh NiMHs. Card Compartment. Same compartment, but you don't have to lose power just to switch cards. A little half-door lets you access the card without bothering the batteries. Zoom was not as smooth as butter on a summer afternoon, but it was controllable. I was able to compose my images without tapping the Zoom toggle back and forth.
And the Zoom level is pressure sensitive, so I could quickly get to one end or the other by pressing harder. Shot-to-shot speed was good in Burst mode. Multiburst records a series of shots without the shutter sound, more like a video capture.
I was constantly surprised to see how well the H5 had done when I reviewed the images on a computer. They looked more washed out and overbright which they tend to be anyway on the camera than they did on the computer. But camera LCDs are not bit color displays, so don't be too surprised.
I've been impressed recently by how well some long zooms do with digital zoom, a feature I had gotten into the habit of avoiding. So I've retrained myself with relish and the odd hot dog to turn it on when a new camera arrives because the results are much better than they used to be. Sony pioneered intelligent digital zoom with its Smart Zoom, which just avoids resampling the zoom crop to the full file size. The Sony DSC-H5 provides the latest generation of that wonder as well as the sort of digital zoom you usually get: resizing.
Both were usable, which is saying something. The H5's range with digital zoom is fairly modest compared to its competitors, but still gets into spotting scope range. Digital Zoom. And here I am zooming all the way in at 72mm a few steps left of the above shot -- but I was standing in a strong wind that blew the evergreen branches in and out of the image and even made me unsteady as I tried to center the Palace of Fine Arts.
Still, it's a sharp image with SteadyShot. I suspect that they fall more in the Quibbles Department than Defects Division, things I'd eventually have gotten used to, but they were impediments. It's on the controller I found difficult to find. So, peering through the eyepiece at the EVF, I would realize I needed some exposure compensation and have to take my eye away from the scene to find the controller, activate EV, snuggle up to the EVF again and slide the command dial around to set it.
I was constantly fiddling with the Command dial to lower the shutter speed to get a reasonably sharp f-stop setting. Why couldn't it just remember the last setting? Also right up there in the nuisance category was the lack of an auto rotate function. That meant a lot of extra work for me.
I shoot a lot of portrait-oriented images. Finally, the autofocus illuminator was not only visible in the EVF when I half-pressed the Shutter button, but it caused otherwise shy bystanders to stare at me as if I were doing laser eye surgery without a license. You can turn it off, but then it's not a feature any more.
It also lets you set the Flash Sync to either rear or front curtain. That's an unusual option in a digicam but a welcomed one. Front is a bit more responsive, firing the flash when the shutter opens. But Rear, which fires the DSC-H5's flash right before the shutter closes, is essential when shooting moving objects so the blur captured with ambient light doesn't precede them.
On our longest outing, shooting 80 pictures, I got the low battery warning, but the camera kept shooting. Sony includes a charger with the H5, an unusual but appreciated touch. And a good thing, too, because as I used the H5, I enjoyed it. Especially when I got home and had a look at what it had done.
The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H5 is an attractive camera but it stuck me as designed on a computer, rather than sculpted in clay. It is handsome, but awkward to use. Its awkwardness would, I suspect, take only a few days to overcome, but it marred my otherwise happy experience with this camera whose images were a delight to review on the computer.
The high sensitivity of ISO 1, brings with it plenty of noise, but also delivers shots you wouldn't otherwise get.
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