SONY DSC-HX1 : The New Cyber-Shot

2009 is already shaping up to be another bumper year for the superzoom 'bridge' camera. Since the publication of our superzoom test at the start of this year there have been a number of new models released with new features such as bigger zooms, better video and fast burst modes. Sony's entry in this category, the HX1, features a 20x lens (that extends from 28mm at the wide end all the way to 560mm at the telephoto end), HD video recording, a large 3' tilting LCD screen, up to 10 frames per second continuous shooting speeds, and special shooting modes that help you get better pictures easier. All this built around an all-new CMOS sensor.

Until recently, almost all compact (small sensored) cameras were built around CCD sensors. This is because CMOS sensors have more circuitry built into the chip than CCD sensors and, with less room for actually capturing light, noise and noise reduction issues will have a detrimental effect on image quality.

Manufacturers have been working on these problems with CMOS sensors for a number of years in DSLR cameras, where all but the cheapest models feature CMOS sensors. Canon, which has been at the forefront of this CMOS sensor development, released the CMOS-sensored SX1 IS which we reviewed last month. Given Sony's heavy involvement in the sensor design and fabrication industry it is not surprising that it has followed suit with the CMOS based HX1.

While the Canon PowerShot SX1 IS utilizes its CMOS sensor to record 1080p (30fps) HD video, a fast 4fps continuous shooting speed, and offers RAW file recording, the HX1 uses its CMOS technology in some less conventional ways. The first of these is a super fast (as fast as the top end professional sports cameras) 10 fps continuous shooting. This relies not only on the sensor's speedy processing but also on a fast physical shutter, which in turn enables three unique shooting modes: Sweeping panorama (which stitches panoramas together as you shoot), Anti Motion Blur (which takes 6 images, and combines them to try and minimise the amount of blur in an image) and Twilight mode (which uses 6 stacked images to reduce the noise produced in images shot in low light situations).

While the HX1 may not feature RAW file recording, there are many manual settings such as three noise reduction settings, many white balance settings, a full range of manual modes, and many others for the photographer who wants ultimate control. Does this combine to make a compelling package that should command your money? Lets find out in our review.

Sony DSC-HX1 vs DSC-H50- key changes

• New 28 - 560 mm equiv 'G' lens
• Ultra fast 10 fps continuous shooting speed
• HD movie recording at up to 1440x1080 at 30 fps
• Intelligent Auto mode
• Unique sweeping panorama, twilight, and anti-shake modes
• A revised menu system (Home menu is gone)
• HDMI port

Operation and controls

For the HX1 Sony hasn't made huge changes over the H50; the external interface tweaks include moving the zoom rocker, swapping the custom and play button locations, and moving the rear scroll wheel. The biggest change in the interface is the disappearance of the home menu system, which is replaced by a vertically scrolling menu that has large icons and help prompts. The current settings for each function are displayed on the left bar for quick reference.

Like most of the other superzooms on the market, the HX1 is styled like a mini-SLR, and is a shooting priority camera - meaning that it will go into record mode whenever you half press the shutter button ready to take a picture. If you are coming from a less complex compact camera, the HX1 can take some time to master, but with the extensive help prompts Sony has placed throughout the interface, it should take less time than some other cameras.

Unlike Canon with the SX1 IS and SX10 IS, Sony has decided to keep movie recording to its own mode - there's no separate movie button. Zooming is available during movie recording, although it's much slower than normal to keep camera noise to a minimum while filming.

Rear of camera

The rear of the camera is dominated by the 3" tilting LCD which will move 90 degrees either up or down. To the right is the menu button, the multi controller, and the delete image button. At the top of the camera is the EVF, which protrudes nicely from the back of the camera, and (for the most part) prevents you from smudging the rear LCD with your nose. The play button is situated between the EVF and the custom function button (which can control smile shutter, white balance, or metering mode).

To the top right, just below the mode dial is the new scroll wheel. It functions much like the scroll wheel on the H50 when in playback mode and navigating through the menus, and controls aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation in record mode. The new scroll wheel can also be pressed. In menus and playback this confirms settings (the same as pressing the set button), but when shooting images, pressing the wheel down will cycle through the user controllable setting (such as aperture, EV and ISO). Finally apart from the absence of the scroll wheel and the home button, the multi controller is unchanged from the H50, allowing you to change display settings, activate macro mode, turn the built in flash on and off, and activate the self timer.

Top of camera

	A top view of the HX1 reveals just how much the lens barrel protrudes (it's shown here at the widest setting). The top panel is fairly well covered with button and dials, including dedicated buttons for burst and focus modes.

Display and menus

The menu system has been overhauled for the HX1. The home menu from the H50 is gone, replaced by a vertical scrolling selection of panels (think the home menu turned side ways). Overall the menu interface is quite straightforward to use.

Record Menu

The most basic recording screen showing battery level (including number of minutes remaining) and the number of shots remaining on card at the current image settings. Note also the indicator for macro mode set to auto.	You can choose to overlay much more shooting information, including the current shooting mode, the current aspect ratio and image settings, a live histogram, a grid to help framing, exposure compensation settings, shutter and aperture values, the current ISO setting, and the current focus mode.
There are 3 auto focus modes (Multi AF, Center AF, and Flexible Spot AF) and two manual focus (Semi Manual, Manual Focus) modes on the HX1. One of the more interesting modes is Semi manual which allows you to select an approximate focus distance, and the camera will try to lock focus on a subject at that distance.	When the camera has focused on a subject, the focus brackets will turn green to indicate.
Pressing the continuous shooting button brings up this menu. Continuous shooting is available at three speeds, the fastest of which is 10 frames per second. Regardless of which of the continuous shooting speeds you have selected, the HX1 can only shoot 10 images before it must pause to save the shots to card. There is also the bracketing function which can be set in the menu system to a choice of white balance, exposure or color bracketing.	In order for the HX1 to shoot movies, it must be in the movie shooting mode. in this mode the user can select between 1440 x 1080, 1280 x 720 and 640 x 480 resolutions. The highest resolution, whilst technically '1080p', is recorded in 4:3 aspect ratio and anamorphically stretched out to 16:9 to fill an HDTV screen.
The Home menu system from the H50 has been (thankfully) dumped, replaced by a simpler menu system. The current setting for each function is displayed for quick checking. A useful help prompt is displayed about each setting option, but it takes a second to show up.	The settings not shown in the main menu are accessed via the final item in the main menu. While many of the settings in this section are items you may only set once, hiding the format card option in here seems like a rather odd decision.
There is a smile detect shooting mode, which detects faces and waits for a smile before taking a picture. In use this function was very hit and miss, and a subject making any kind of face would trigger the shutter.	After you shoot a burst of images the HX1 IS must pause to store all these images onto the Memory Stick. You can see from this animation that the HX1 is only capable of shooting a maximum of 10 images in a burst.
The ISO stacking functionality in the HX1 shoots a number of images in a burst and processes them together to create a image that has less noise than if a higher ISO setting is used.	The HX1 has two manual focus modes. The first one displays a distance scale and allows you to select the focus distance. The second more interesting mode also displays a distance scale and will try to focus on the closest subject to the selected focus distance.

Playback Menu

This is the most basic playback display showing the image size and aspect ratio, the number of images stored on the current card, the image number, and time taken.	As with image recording, there are a number of image display options to show an increasing level of information about a particular image.
Here is all the information available turned on in image playback. Including a histogram, the shutter speed and aperture used, the ISO setting, and what the exposure compensation value was.	It is possible to zoom into images in playback mode to check fine detail and focus. The maximum zoom for the HX1 is 8x.
The playback menu has been redesigned much like the the shooting menu; a vertically scrolling menu with current settings shown on the menu bar quick checking.	The settings menu is also available in playback mode.
You can sort images in a number of ways including date, folders, and favorites. While this may not seem like a very useful function for use in camera, keep in mind that you can connect the camera up to your TV via HDMI for slide shows (which can be played with music).	Once nice way to view photos is via the date feature, which displays the first photo taken on a particular day in a calendar view. Useful for quickly finding image for display.
There are a number of in camera image editing functions, including Cropping, Sharpening, Soft Focus, Blurring, and happy faces.	Here is an example of one of the retouching functions in action, adding vignetting to an image to isolate a subject.
During playback a burst of image taken in continuous shooting mode is displayed as a stack.	Selecting the stack will allow you to view images in the stack, and also select the representative image for the stack.

Special Recording Modes

The HX1 takes advantage of its fast continuous shooting speed and high speed shutter (which solves the problem of distortion with the electronic shutter normally used for high speed shooting in compacts) for three special shooting modes.

Regardless of the usefulness of these special scene modes, Sony should be commended for trying something other than just upping the resolution and increasing the zoom reach (though of course it did increase the zoom range). These modes have the potential to make your photography easier, help you spend less time in front of the computer, and more time out taking photographs. Anything that encourages the taking of photographs has to be a good thing.

Panorama mode

The first - and the most impressive - of the new features of the HX1 is a sweeping panorama mode, which allows you to shoot a panorama in one sweep by holding down the shutter, and panning the camera from left to right (or whichever direction you select) - during which time the camera shoots continuously. The speed of your panning is tracked as you move and, so long as you don't go too fast, it doesn't matter if you vary your speed during the actual 'sweep'.

The HX1's processor will then stitch the images together (using data from the IS sensors to track your motion) and save the resulting panorama on your Memory Stick When shooting in this mode, the largest image size has a resolution of 7152 x 1080. Flash is not available in this mode, and any movement in your picture during panorama shooting can result in strange artifacts. You can use the camera in vertical (portrait) orientation to get a more resolution into the shot vertically, or in landscape (horizontal) orientation to get very wide panoramas.

This illustration from Sony demonstrates how to use the sweeping panorama mode of the HX1. Pan slowly in the direction you select, and the camera will stitch the panorama for you.	You can shoot the sweeping panorama in any direction you want, and choose from standard (4912) or ultra wide (7152) settings.
When you have selected panorama mode, the camera indicates which direction to sweep in, and also prompts you to press and hold the shutter to shoot the panorama.
The end result is pretty impressive (in fact this mode is one of the most impressive things we've seen on a digital camera for a long time) - as long as you stick to scenic shots and avoid anything really close to the camera or anything moving too fast (basically the same limitations of any stitched panorama). You'll find a few more examples in the gallery at the end of this review.

Limitations

The sweeping panorama mode combines a number of frames to construct the resulting panorama, and generally the results are superb (you have to look hard to see any joins), though there are problems if you try to capture a scene that contains significant movement, such as the street scene shown below. To avoid these problems, it is best to avoid scenes containing fast moving objects. Of course this is true of any stitched panorama (and is most obvious when the moving subject is near the camera).

You'll also get distortions if you tilt the camera too much during the sweep, though in practice it's pretty easy to pan in a relatively smooth manner for the best results.

This car starts at the left most edge of the panorama.	As the photo was taken sweeping from left to right, fragments of the car was captured towards the right edge of the frame.
Here is the full photo. Feel free to download this image for a closer look. Depending on your intended usage of the photo, this problem could actually be used to cool effect.

You have to keep panning until the HX1 tells you to stop; if you don't sweep through a large enough angle to fill the pre-defined frame, gray will be used to fill in the rest of the image (this can also happen if you sweep to fast or move up and down too much, at which point the HX1 gives up).

	Here you can see the edge of the recorded image, with the HX1 filling the rest of the image with gray.

Twilight Mode

According to Sony, Twilight mode should help you to take sharper, less noisy shots in low light situations, by shooting six shots in a continuous burst, and then combining them into a single image. This is achieved using a process known as image stacking (exactly what the HX1 is doing under the hood we can't say for sure).

Image stacking is a process where two or more (6 in this case) images are layered and combined to improve the signal to noise ratio. This works because noise in an image is random and will vary from shot to shot. The process of stacking irons out inconsistencies between the frames, and since (in theory) the biggest difference from frame to frame in the burst will be the noise pattern, the noise will be smoothed away. So then, six images stacked taken at any given ISO, should give you less noise than a single image at that some ISO. That's the theory.

In practice of course it's not quite that simple. To really rid an image of noise using stacking you need more than six images (this is especially true when the source is very noise to begin with) and, crucially, you need the framing of the shots to be identical (we're presuming Sony does some processing to align the images before stacking as this mode is designed to be used without a tripod) for the technique to be fully effective. That all said, as the results below show, it certainly works, especially when used on a tripod and when the Auto ISO doesn't need to go ridiculously high (in Twilight mode it seems to try to stay away from ISO 1600 and higher unless absolutely necessary).

Twilight mode is available either manually selected by turning the mode dial to that location, or via the intelligent auto mode, where the HX1 will select Twilight mode if it detects the need. Being an auto mode, twilight mode is quite straight forward to use - just press the shutter button, and the camera will do the rest. The main thing you need to remember is that it will lock you out of the camera for a number of seconds as it processes the six images into the final image saved to card.

The Twilight mode is situated between the sweeping panorama mode and anti shake mode.	Twilight mode is to all intensive proposes a scene mode; the only exposure control you have is exposure compensation, with the camera taking care of the rest of the settings. In use we found that the highest ISO setting the camera used was 800.
When in twilight mode, just shoot as you normally would. Once the HX1 takes the six shots it processes them in camera. During this process (which takes a few seconds) the camera cannot be used.	Once the processing is finished, the resulting image is saved. Unlike continuous shooting, only one image is saved, with the six images combined into one.

Like the sweeping panorama function, the twilight mode stacks images together and produces a single image. Also like the sweeping panorama function, the twilight function is prone to problems with objects moving though the frame.

The crop has been brightened up for you to more easily see the problem. Part of the man walking down the street has been cut out replaced by the black of the store front.

In the studio we setup a low light scenario with areas of low contrast detail to see how the noise levels of twilight mode would compare to manually selecting aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

Sony HX1 ISO 400 Aperture Priority Mode	ISO 200, 1/5, F3.5
Sony HX1 Twilight Mode (ISO 640)	Twilight Mode, ISO 640, 1/8, F3.5
Sony HX1 ISO 800 Aperture Priority Mode	ISO 800, 1/10, F3.5
Sony HX1 ISO 3200 Aperture Priority Mode	ISO 3200, 1/40, F3.5

In this situation twilight mode as selected ISO 640, which is not a user selectable setting under manual modes. The shutter speed of 1/8 is accurate for ISO 640 and falls in between the 1/10 selected by ISO 800 and 1/5 selected by ISO 400. You can see from the crop that while the fine detail is comparable to the ISO 400 result, it is noticeably less noisy, and the exposures (slight white balance differences aside) are very similar. In low light situations where ISO 400 or above is required, and there is not much movement in the frame, then twilight mode would be a good choose to reduce noise in the image.

Anti Motion Blur Mode

Like the twilight mode, the Anti Motion Blur mode on the HX1 combines 6 images taken in a quick burst to form one picture. The priority in the anti motion blur mode is to reduce the amount of blur (instead of reducing noise like the twilight mode). After the 6 images have been taken, the HX1 does a difference analysis and tries to take the sharp parts of each of the six shots to create a single, sharp result.

The manual points out that the system is far from perfect:

Reducing blur is less effective in the following situations:

• Image with erratic movement
  
• Image with a main subject too close to the camera
  
• Image with little contrast such as sky, sandy beach, or lawn
  
• Image with constant change such as waves or water falls

With all these conditions, placed on it, the Anti Motion Blur mode is not nearly as useful as it may first appear (and the results are pretty inconsistent). It is most useful in situations where there is little movement in a scene (such as someone talking and waving their hands at the same time) or as an aide to further reduce camera shake.

Being an auto mode, Anti Motion Blur mode is quite easy to use. Just press the shutter and the camera will take 6 exposures, and combine them into one image. During the processing time, you cannot use the camera. Anti motion blur is available in intelligent auto mode,where it can be selected by the camera if it feels the need.

The Anti Motion Blur mode is situated between the easy mode and twilight mode.	Like twilight mode, anti-shake mode is an auto mode, with the only exposure adjustment being exposure compensation.
After the six shots have been recorded, the HX1 processes them in camera. During this process you cannot use the camera.	After the camera has finished processing these images, a single image is stored to card, with the individual images used to produce it discarded.

White Balance

The HX1 features a grand total of nine white balance modes: Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent Light 1, Fluorescent Light 2, Fluorescent Light 3, Incandescent, Flash, and Custom (manual). We found that in outdoor use in good light the HX1 did a good job of white balance, but in any artificial light its performance was decidedly average. The dedicated white balance presets do no better - sometimes worse - than the auto white balance modes, so leave the HX1 in auto white balance mode for best results, or carry a gray card and use custom.

Incandescent - Auto WB Red 5.8%, Blue -9.2%, Average	Incandescent - Incandescent preset WB Red 5.7%, Blue -10.2% Average
Fluorescent - Auto WB Red 0.2%, Blue -6.8% Average	Fluorescent - Fluorescent preset WB Red 5.5%, Blue -5.5% Average

Flash Performance

The built-in pop-up flash unit has a specified range of 9.2m at wide angle and 5.1m at telephoto (when the ISO is set to auto). In use the flash worked well in most situations both indoor and outdoor for fill flash.

Skin tone - Good color and exposure.	Color chart - Excellent white balance, excellent exposure.

Macro Focus

The HX1 can focus to 1cm at the wide end and 150cm at the long end in macro mode. If you look at the specifications, this is the same as it can do in non macro mode (you can't turn off the macro mode in the HX1, there are only on and auto settings.

Wide macro - 118 x 88 mm coverage 29 px/mm (741 px/in) Distortion: Fairly high Corner softness: High Equiv. focal length: 28 mm	Telephoto macro - 114 x 85 mm coverage 30 px/mm (770 px/in) Distortion: Low Corner softness: Low Equiv. focal length: 560 mm

Focusing down to 1cm produces great magnification, but corner softness becomes is much more visible than at normal shooting distances, and distortion is quite high. At the telephoto end the distortion and corner softness is better, but with a 150cm minimum focus distance, it is not as useful in everyday situations. The Canon SX1 IS and SX10 IS offer better macro performance and have the same focal length range as the HX1.

Barrel and Pincushion Distortion

Given the very large focal length range, the HX1 exhibits very little distortion. 0.4% at the wide end is going to be hard to notice in the real world unless you are shooting very close up, which also applies to the 1.9% at the telephoto end. While vignetting is very low, corner softness is evident at both the long and wide end.

Barrel distortion - 0.4% at Wide angle Equiv. focal length: 28 mm	Pincushion distortion - 1.9% at Telephoto Equiv. focal length: 560 mm

Dynamic range optimization

The HX1 features Sony's Dynamic Range Optimizer (DRO) processing which brightens the shadow regions of the image to give a more balanced image in high contrast situations. In the HX1 has three DRO settings: Off, standard and plus. To really see the effect of DRO, you need to set it to the plus setting.

DRO off	DRO Plus

The effect of DRO is not huge as can be seen in this example, but any assistance to improve the limited dynamic range of the small sensor in the HX1 is welcome. The big improvement in DRO from previous incarnations is that turning it on does not slow down the shot to shot speed of the camera.

Image stabilization

The optical image stabilization system used on the HX1 IS features two modes: On (IS on all the time), 'Shooting' (IS is activated at half press of the shutter) and of course OFF.

Whilst both options produce the same results, the 'shooting' option will presumably use a little less battery power.

The design of the HX1 aids steady hand-held shooting - especially when using the EVF - producing sharp results at 2 stops under the 1/focal length rule without IS. Turning the IS on gives you another one or two stops (though as usual the effectiveness will vary from user to user). The presence of an effective image stabilization system is essential for a camera with such a long lens, especially one with a less than stellar maximum aperture at the long end of the zoom, which will inevitably result in lower shutter speeds in anything other than perfect light.

The stabilization test

In this simplified version of our SLR IS test, four hand-held shots were taken of a static scene with the stabilization off and on. The shutter speed was decreased and repeated (from 1/125 sec to 1/2 sec). The zoom was set to a position roughly in the middle of the zoom range (200mm equiv.), the test target was 6 m away from the camera. The test was repeated three times and an average taken.

The resulting images were then inspected and given a blur score - 'Sharp' (no visible blurring at 100%), 'Mild Blur' (the kind of camera shake that is tolerable at small print sizes) and 'Heavy Blur' (virtually unusable due to camera shake) and 'Very Heavy Blur' (little discernible detail).

Hand-held, no stabilization (200mm equiv.)

You can see from the chart that the mini-SLR design of the HX1 allowed a majority of recorded images to be sharp at 1/30th (3 stops below what would normally be expected) with IS turned off. With a few safety shots, even 1/15 sec is usable.

Hand-held, IS On (200mm equiv.)

With IS turned on, we could produce a majority of sharp shots at 1/15th sec, and down to 1/4 should be usable if you take a few extra images.

Specific Image quality Issues

The image quality performance of the HX1 is pretty much on par with what you would expect from a small sensor compact camera; the switch to a CMOS sensor hasn't made any dramatic improvements here, and at a pixel level the output looks quite unpleasant, over-processed and over-sharpened. Even at ISO 200 it is possible to notice noise in the image, especially in shadow areas.

The metering does a good job of keeping images well exposed, but the limited dynamic range of the small sensor used in the HX1 means that there are going to be blown highlights in images in bright conditions. The big 20x zoom is a little soft towards the edge of the frame, and towards the edges you'll see more color fringing too. Nearer the center of the frame the HX1 has less problems with color fringing, and when it does it is only one pixel wide so you need to be looking for it to really notice.

Despite the mini-SLR styling and handling, images from the HX1 never look even remotely as good as those from the cheapest DSLRs and, since there is only JPEG file format available, there is not really a huge amount of latitude to improve image quality in post processing.

The Low dynamic range of the small sensor used, means that in bright conditions, there are going to be clipped highlights in your image. A little bit of negative exposure compensation will help here, and being able to display a live histogram also helps you to see when you need exposure compensation. In the edge of the clipped highlight area, you can see a little bit of purple fringing too.

The lens on the HX1 performs relatively well in most conditions considering the wide zoom range, but towards the edges of the frame it is quite soft and more prone to CA than in the center of the image.

ISO Sensitivity / Noise levels

ISO equivalence on a digital camera is the ability to increase the sensitivity of the sensor. This works by turning up the "volume" (gain) on the sensor's signal amplifiers (remember the sensor is an analogue device). By amplifying the signal you also amplify the noise which becomes more visible at higher ISO's. Many modern cameras also employ noise reduction and / or sharpness reduction at higher sensitivities.

To measure noise levels we take a sequence of images of a GretagMacBeth ColorChecker chart (controlled artificial daylight lighting). The exposure is matched to the ISO (ie. ISO 200, 1/200 sec for consistency of exposure between cameras). The image sequence is run through our own proprietary noise measurement tool (version 1.5 in this review). Click here for more information. (Note that noise values indicated on the graphs here can not be compared to those in other reviews.)

Sony DSC-HX1 vs Canon PowerShot SX1 IS vs Panasonic Lumix FZ28

Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 125	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS ISO 100	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ISO 100
Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 200	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS ISO 200	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ISO 200
Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 400	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS ISO 400	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ISO 400
Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 800	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS ISO 800	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ISO 800
Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 1600	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS ISO 1600	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ISO 1600
Sony DSC-HX1 ISO 3200	Canon PowerShot SX1 IS NA	Panasonic Lumix FZ28 NA

The noise reduction on the HX1 starts to kick in at ISO 200, with more sharpening thrown into the mix to keep things from looking totally blurred. The HX1 and the FZ28 perform similarly in terms of noise levels and amount of retained detail, with the HX1 doing marginally better as ISO settings climb. The SX1 IS performs worse than the other two cameras at anything above base ISO (though to be fair these results that look very similar at print sizes, and none is great above ISO 400). The HX1 is at a disadvantage as it is the only camera of the group that cannot record RAW images (to allow you to make a decision on noise reduction and sharpening in post processing). The extra ISO 3200 setting on the HX1 is almost pointless as it is a blurry noisy mess. If the ISO 1600 settings on these cameras are emergency settings, then ISO 3200 is a extra emergency setting, maybe even not enough detail left for a small print.

What you should take away from this is that there is currently no inherent advantage to buying a camera that uses CMOS sensor technology vs CCD technology in terms of noise levels and detail retained at high ISO.

Luminance noise graph

Cameras compared:
Sony DSC HX1, Canon PowerShot SX1 IS, Panasonic Lumix FZ28

Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard deviation of luminosity is on the vertical axis.

This graph shows that the current generation of CMOS sensors are just as noisy as CCD sensors, the difference is down to the type and amount of noise reduction a manufacturer decides to apply in camera.

RGB noise graph

Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard deviation of each of the red, green and blue channels is on the vertical axis.

Low contrast detail

What the crops and graph don't show is the effect of noise reduction on low contrast fine detail such as hair, fur or foliage. An inevitable side effect of noise removal is that this kind of detail is also blurred or smeared, resulting in a loss of 'texture'. In this test the crops below show the effect of the noise reduction on such texture (hair) as you move up the ISO range.

100% Crops
ISO 125	ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1600	ISO 3200

As the noise reduction kicks in at ISO 200, the sharpening is also turned up, meaning that ISO 200 and 400 don't look that different to base ISO (though of course, fine detail is being lost). You can really see the loss of detail between ISO 400 and ISO 800 (to the extent that it almost looks like two different cameras). Once you get to ISO 1600 the output, like virtually all small sensor cameras, is a blurry mess.

In-camera High ISO noise reduction

From the graph below you can see the three noise reduction settings of the HX1 at work at the higher ISO settings. The small sensor of the HX1 produces a great deal of image noise at higher ISO settings, and to some extent the highest noise reduction setting reduces the visible noise at ISO 800 and above. What is not seen here is the amount of detail destroyed by noise reduction at these ISO settings.

In-camera High ISO noise reduction settings (ISO 800 - 3200)

These crops give you a better idea of how much of the detail is destroyed by noise reduction as it works hard to keep noise down at high ISOs in the HX1. The highest NR setting does reduce the visible amount of noise somewhat compared to the NR standard setting, but it is also causing ugly smear patterns. The lowest NR setting shows that there is a little more detail recorded by the sensor at high ISO settings, but at the expense of higher visible noise. Whether lower noise or higher amount of fine detail is better depends on your personal preference and your intended use for a particular image. Though we would like to see the inclusion of RAW image recording so that you can make the decision on noise reduction vs fine detail in post-processing, this is still the exception and not the rule in superzoom cameras.

NR - ISO 800	NR Standard ISO 800	NR + ISO 800
NR - ISO 1600	NR Standard ISO 1600	NR + ISO 1600
NR - ISO 3200	NR Standard ISO 3200	NR + ISO 3200

Movie mode

Unlike the Canon SX1 IS and SX10 IS (which both have a button dedicated to movie recording in any mode), the HX1's movie capture sits in its own mode (accessed via the mode dial). Once there, all you have to do is press the shutter button to start movie recording and press it again to stop. During movie recording, the only exposure setting is AE compensation with aperture and ISO selected by the camera. White balance is user selectable in movie mode.

During movie recording the camera can either autofocus (and chooses what to focus on), or be set to focus at a pre-set distance. Zooming (at a slower than normal speed to keep noise down) is also adjustable during movie recording. As you adjust exposure compensation, the brightness of the rear LCD or EVF (depending on which one you are using) is adjusted to reflect the change. A counter is displayed on screen to show the duration of the current clip. Movies are recorded in MPEG4 (H.264) format at 30 fps and saved as .MP4 files. At the highest quality setting the bit rate is around 12Mbps (in our tests captured movies at the top setting used up around 1.5 MB per second).

The HX1's highest quality video setting outputs 1920x1080 pixel files (1080p, 30fps) - like many digital camcorders they're actually recorded at 1440 x 1080 resolution (with a rectangular pixel aspect ratio that the decoder 'stretches back out' to the 16:9 format), so they don't quite have the resolution of a full HD movie (they're effectively interpolated 1.33x horizontally in playback). Other resolutions available include 720p and VGA.

Video quality is generally quite good, especially at the highest resolution, though it does exhibit the same problems as still images in terms of image noise, and they are quite soft if you look too closely (though since they're designed to be watched on a TV you probably won't be looking that close). Being a CMOS sensor, the HX1 is also prone to image tearing during quick panning.

	There is a dedicated movie mode on the main mode dial, which is where the screen captures here were taken. The main difference is that you can preset a couple of options. As with stills recording you can choose the amount of information overlaid on the live preview image.
	Movie recording with all information overlaid, including the battery indicator, the current movie format selected, the folder name, and how many minutes of movie recording space is left on the Memory Stick. The Optional grid is shown here. EV is adjustable before and during movie recording.
	Three display options are available during movie recording. There is the most basic option that displays only the exposure compensation setting. The other two options show all the information shown in the screen capture above. The second is a 'bright' option that increases the brightness on the LCD.
	There is a cut-down menu in movie mode, with only the options applicable to movie recording. It contains the two exposure modes (automatic or manual), a choice of movie compression sizes, white balance settings, metering modes, color modes, and image stabilization settings.
	The white balance settings in movie recording is the same as in other capture modes. In testing we found that the best white balance setting for the HX1 is to leave it in the auto mode

To see sample videos just click below!
sample 1
sample 2