How to make a great little camera out of the WX70

After thorough market research, this summer I bought a Sony WX70 for my mom. Here are my conclusions about it after a few months. I'm no expert, but I hope this post will help other people with similar needs.

As you may know, this particular model is part of the current range of over-pixelled sensor compacts, so I already heard about the picture quality issues, the “gouache painting” effect, and so on before buying it. Nevertheless, I felt that its intuitive touch screen, its USB charging and its specific “EASY” mode were essential to gain my mom's acceptance. Also, I trusted Sony’s artificial intelligence to ensure taking decent out-of-the-box pictures under any condition without requiring neither photographic knowledge, nor manual settings, nor Photoshop post-processing. This is her first digital camera, so she has no need (yet) for sophisticated effects such as panorama or HDR.

When I finally received the camera, all the flaws discussed in forums regarding this product range were confirmed: the PQ is appalling at pixel level. Even my older generation Sony TX5 had better PQ using fewer pixels. It’s very disappointing at first glance.

So, I played with the settings in order to achieve the best possible parameter configuration for her usage.

The bottom line is, if you want to get the best out of this camera, do as follows:
-     set picture mode to 5 MP (yes, you heard it right)
-     set video mode to 1440x1080p
-     disable digital zoom (but you knew that already)
-     engage the EASY mode
-     never shoot at maximum wide angle

What you get if you follow all the above steps:

*     Pixel-perfect sharp 5 MP out-of-the-box jpeg files with generous compression ratio, apparently free from the “painting” effect, ideal for pixel peepers, nicely printable at reasonable sizes, that appear flawless on 1080p HDTV screens. The pictures even happen to have almost as much resolution as needed for the upcoming “UltraHD” HDTV sets (the new 2160p standard). You really have to think about the 16MP sensor as an over-sampling method: the goal is to average several nearby pixels to determine colors as accurately as possible, effectively delivering better results at 5MP than old 5MP compacts could achieve with bigger sensors. Noise-wise, it seems that the “easy” mode is usually locked at around ISO 100, indispensable to avoid disappointment on such a small sensor. So it's ideal for static family portraits, with no risk of key parameters being changed by mistake (unless you forcefully exit the EASY mode).

*     x17 optical zoom! Well, sort of. What the camera actually does in 5MP mode, is cropping the sensor image adequately after reaching its maximum x5 optical zoom. That was a surprise to me. This transforms the WX70 into a much more versatile camera for general use (although it is always advisable to avoid maximum optical zoom). Unlike classic digital zoom which does cropping+upscaling, what you get here is cropping+downscaling, helping to reduce noise. This is because 5MP is much less than the nominal sensor resolution, so there is quite some room for cropping. Maximum wide-angle must never be used, because the image borders at wide angle are smudged (presumably to hide aberrations). Therefore, always zoom-in a bit (x1.2) before taking any picture to avoid this issue.

*     12Mbits/s 1080p video, free from interlaced artifacts. The European Sony model has the edge here, thanks to its 25fps (vs 30fps in the US firmware) giving it slightly more bandwidth per frame. On a side note, I noticed that if you take pictures while recording video, you get photos truly free of the “painting effect” (presumably because the hardware cannot perform such a complex filtering while encoding H264 video). Consider this the “raw” mode of the WX70 if you will, allowing photos to be cleaned and processed in sophisticated applications without the burden of Sony’s discussable filtering. From the user point of view, however, you may be forced to configure the lowest possible resolution for such shots (as a quick and dirty way of reducing noise), otherwise, users will think that pictures taken during video look really bad.

Finally, for enhanced ease of use, I also put an “eye-fi” SD card in the camera, and configured the card to automagically upload pictures to the bedroom HTPC running MS Mediacenter 7, as soon as both the camera and the HTPC are powered on in the same room.

Overall, my mom is very pleased with this set-up and with the results she can get out of it, all by herself.