Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX9V review

The HX9V is one of the pricier pocket-sized ultra-zoom cameras, but it’s also the most feature-packed. There’s AVCHD video recording at up to 1080/50p, GPS tagging, manual exposure and focus control and a 3in, 921,000-dot screen that’s as sharp as the eye can see. Battery life is also outstanding for a compact camera at 410 shots.

The navigation pad doubles as a dial to enable quick adjustments, but manual exposure settings were inexplicably slow to update we turned the dial. The spot focus point was much quicker to adjust, and a Custom button can be assigned to exposure compensation, ISO speed or white balance.

There’s a notable lack of aperture- and shutter-priority modes – it appears that the camera uses a neutral-density filter to simulate smaller apertures, as only two settings are available for any given focal length. That’s not necessarily a problem but it does preclude experimenting with depth-of-field effects.

Sony does scene presets better than anyone: iSweep Panorama and 3D Shooting capture panoramic images in 2D and 3D respectively simply by slowly rotating the camera. Anti Motion Blur captures, aligns and overlays six frames to reduce noise in low light.

Performance was excellent, with incredibly fast autofocus and just 1.3 seconds between shots. Continuous mode is limited to 10 frames and runs at either 10fps or 2fps. It’s a little odd that this choice of speeds is made is a completely different menu to where continuous mode is selected.

Details are sharp into the corners of frames, but the slightly blocky appearance suggests that digital processing is working hard, even at ISO 100 – click to enlarge

The lens was sharp across its 16x zoom range and right into the corners of frames. However, while bolder shapes such as buildings looked bitingly sharp, more complex textures such as grass looked a little unnatural on close inspection, with evidence of noise reduction and digital sharpening being hard at work. Skin tones looked like they’d been airbrushed, and in low light they exhibited a lot of noise. This is one of the better 16-megapixel compact cameras for noise levels but it can’t match the smooth, clean details of certain lower-resolution cameras such as the Canon SX230 HS.

Low-light photography is impressively smooth but subtle details are glossed over by noise reduction

The HX9V comes very close to greatness, and with a lower-resolution sensor it might have earned itself an award. However, at this price only the very best image quality will do.