Sony HX90V Image Quality

no compass, the direction recorded is GPS-track data, not the direction the camera was pointing to.

If you want a good light (sunny day) portable super zoom with a decent EVF, nothing can touch the HX90V.

Nothing. Pictures are fantastic. A long zoom requires an EVF. Period.

In a sunny day it competes with my Nikon and the 300mm lenses.

Having said all that, it makes no sense to criticize the little HX90V.

It is very small, very portable. In good light the pictures punch way above the specs.

Does it compete with large sensors in noise? No.

I personally have the following complaints:

yes it feels cheap. But is that a result of a design decision or is it just cheap? The design decision is to have made a super portable, super small super zoom camera with a decent EVF.

I do not like how the EVF requires you to press the eyeball to the EVF to detect the eye. I put my finger under the EVF covering the sensor and it keeps the EVF on. Or put the EVF on On permanently with Menu commands.

I would have liked the flash to bounce.

I would have preferred 2 more ounces of metal and more rigidity to the body. But believe me as a second camera in your pockets you will appreciate the lightness. It is not a first camera. It is a monstruous X30 super zoom for real, in any pocket.

Indoors, at low zoom, it does great at f 3.5 with ISO around 1000. But when zoomed at f 6.4, it is not a high IQ camera. Hopefully you will have your number 1 camera. The large sensor m4/3 with a f 1.7 lens or a DSLR or a Nikon A or a Ricoh GR.

The interesting thing is that with a X30 zoom you will shoot things your human eye cannot see or discern at a distance. When you zoom X30 you will find things in your pictures that you did not know were there. I prefer X10 or X12 zooms. The Olympus Stylus 1 gives you bright X10 zoom, fast AF, F2.8 but at twice the weight and 2.5 the size. The Stylus 1 does do indoors. But not perfectly. There is no perfection in low light. Not even with large DSLRs and large heavy lenses. In low light you will be OK for real with a flash.

How useful and good have you found the HDR,DRO,and multistacking to increase the capabilities of this cam?

the way HDR works you get 2 identical images with different exposures, you only have to assemble them but they match perfectly

DRO not much done with that yet

Multistack, it increases le luminosity of low light picktures alot. and it reduces noise in daylight pictures but notthing should move as it may as well add some blur...

I need more time to play with these functions and I have to read what the manual telles about them

Thanks for your great posts. However, could you post your HDR and non HDR shots (the ones with the sky that I replied to) at full resolution ? That will help me to decide if I will pre-order the cam !

The cam does not assemble the HDR that was wishful thinking by myself and an error, what the camera does is taking multiple shot one after the other with -/+1-6EV which are easy to assamble because the contens is identical. There it also has an auto mode and I thought in auto it does assemble a HDR by itself, thats wrong, in HDRauto the camera decides by itself how many EV difference might be usefull. However the images I uploaded are full resolution, click on the image and than 1:1 to see all the details or give me youe email and I mail the originals to you

and judging by the results I could have printed A2+ no problem whatsoever. If you saw the print I had made from the HX50 at A3 size you would not be worrying about the HX90 image quality, you would be asking which DSLR I used to take the shot. It was taken at ISO 80 with virtually no PP whatsoever, a little bit of additional sharpening, that was it. The quality is quite frankly stunning coming from this noisy point and shoot, no visible noise in the print at all, nada, zilch, zip. Forget pixel peeping at 100% with these cameras, it's a complete waste of time, you are not seeing what these cameras are really capable of. I seriously urge anyone to print from their HX series cameras at a large size and then tell me that these cameras cannot produce great image quality, step away from the monitor and print - with any camera, then you'll know what it can really do.

laserx said:

the way HDR works you get 2 identical images with different exposures, you only have to assemble them but they match perfectly

DRO not much done with that yet

Multistack, it increases le luminosity of low light picktures alot. and it reduces noise in daylight pictures but notthing should move as it may as well add some blur...

I need more time to play with these functions and I have to read what the manual telles about them

Click to expand...

I had these features on the HX400V and missed them when I sold that camera...which is one reason I am buying an HX90V. You DO NOT have to combine the two images for HDR. The camera records the "normal" (middle) exposure and the combined HDR result to card...that is why you have two images. Combining the two in software is not necessary. HDR can be set to different levels...1 ev between frames to 6 ev between frames, as well as "auto"...this makes it the most flexible in-camera HDR of just about any camera out there.

DRO works very well by applying selective processing to different areas of the image to restore highlights and shadows...again there are 6 levels plus auto.

Multiple Exposure Noise Reduction I want to play with more. It should work well.

Thanks again. Email is [email protected]
I would need the originals
Also, my understanding of the cams hdr is that you can set the ev exposure bracket or let the cam select the bracket with auto hdr. However in both cases the cam superimposed the images and you are left with a single jpg like the one you posted. Correct ?

I have to investigate this further, as the manual does not tell much about what the camera realy does. when I enable HDR I hear it click 3 times but I see that 2 new photos are stored to the card. I believe it is once the normal exposure and once the HDR... to be confirmed

and when I have some usefull pictures, I will post/email them. I cannot send you old pictures because I havent found a way to tell what is an assembled HDR and what a normal shot, I cannot see the difference in the exif

laserx said:

I have to investigate this further, as the manual does not tell much about what the camera realy does. when I enable HDR I hear it click 3 times but I see that 2 new photos are stored to the card. I believe it is once the normal exposure and once the HDR... to be confirmed

and when I have some usefull pictures, I will post/email them. I cannot send you old pictures because I havent found a way to tell what is an assembled HDR and what a normal shot, I cannot see the difference in the exif

Click to expand...

The first image recorded is the normal exposure. The second image recorded is the HDR. On the computer you should see slight differences between them...mostly in shadow areas. Registry may be slightly off between the two, as though the camera moved a fraction of an inch...but both will be sharp. Sony does an excellent job of aligning the three images but, since they are working with three images, the aligned image may not exactly match the normal image.

I am getting much more noise in open areas of the image than I expect from a Sony HDR. I am still deciding whether I can live with the noise.

here we have 3 pairs of pictures were we see what HDR does automatically when enabled.

the first picture is always normal exposure and the second is the HDR version








HDR6EV








HDR4EV








HDR4EV

Terrific ! This resolves a lot of the issues. First, the HDR is clearly effective in increasing DR. Second, no sharpness is lost. Third, noise is clearly less.

Another poster found increased noise shooting the HDR in the Creative Landscape Mode. Are your shots in Standard Mode or Creative Landscape ?

Finally, the results stand up to heavy duty PP. Below is one of your HDR shots run through Noiseware Default (mild de-noising) and Contrast Master. The latter is a pesudo-tone mapper that gives a surrealistic look. It will generally produce ugly artifacts if there is much noise or other degradation in the original image. There is none of that in your shot so processed, even at 100% ! I will soon be ordering this cam

Stuart said:

Terrific ! This resolves a lot of the issues. First, the HDR is clearly effective in increasing DR. Second, no sharpness is lost. Third, noise is clearly less.

Click to expand...

it needs some time to get used to the function and to know when to enable and when to disable it and how many EV to use... The disadvantage of the HDR function is that the processing costs time. This made me miss some shots this morning so that I quickly disabled it. There should be an option to save the source images to the SD-card but to postpone the processing to later, so that you can take all the shots you need and let the processor do its job when the action is finished. And only use HDR when nothing moves in your picture the shots are taken very quickly one behind the other but you will get blured moving objects.

A similar function is used to stack multiple images for nightshots, I did some surprisingly good looking picture freehand however alot of detail is lost compared to a longtime exposure on the tripod

Stuart said:

Another poster found increased noise shooting the HDR in the Creative Landscape Mode. Are your shots in Standard Mode or Creative Landscape ?

Click to expand...

All of my shots were done in P. To my knowledge, in SCN Landscape, it does DRO Auto, this is what I see grayed if I press fn in landscape mode. All the SCN programms are very limited to the setting that are available, mostly, you only can switch between single shot&serie, switch flash on/off, change zoom AF/MF, thats all, I do not know how I could get it to do HDR in this mode. The advantage of DRO is that procrssing is much quicker. I will have to check for the effect on the noise. But I noticed already that DROauto can be usefull on singel exposure nightshots of moving objects (like dancing poeple)

Stuart said:

Finally, the results stand up to heavy duty PP. Below is one of your HDR shots run through Noiseware Default (mild de-noising) and Contrast Master. The latter is a pesudo-tone mapper that gives a surrealistic look. It will generally produce ugly artifacts if there is much noise or other degradation in the original image. There is none of that in your shot so processed, even at 100% ! I will soon be ordering this cam

Click to expand...

Your processed picture looks greate (as long as I dont zoom in) but mostly I try to do a good documentation of the reality without optimizing "the truth" and most times I simply don´t have the time to do much post processing

I still have a mental problem ;-) to accept the noise which I see much less with my Fuji F900. Also the sunset program works much more like I like it on the F900. I´ll start a new thread with sunset images

Stuart said:

Click to expand...

Your pic is better than you think. I have made nice 16x20 prints from my h20v . At pixel view these looked inferior to my pp of your shot.IMO pixel view is more an indicator of how much pp you can do than of IQ up to 11x14 or 16x20 prints..A 3 or A2.
Also do you find auto HDR results good? I doubt the menu system makes setting the hdr manually for each shot a pleasant experience.

hmm, good or not good... it is not always good or better than the normal shot there are many times where the HDR is less good or blured because objects moved. I will leave it normally off and I turn it on for shots of still subjects and when I have time to make a better foto. But most of my pictures are in action, during sport, like ballooning for example and the HDR processing time is a major issue. if you have a unique situation that you want to shoot and the fist shot is not perfect, I mostly wont get the chance to take a second similar shot as processing requires too much time and turning GDR on an off or change the HDR settings trough the menu also takes too much time. But I might consider configuring one of the MR positions with a HDRon setup, while I leave it of in P mode

laserx said:

hmm, good or not good... it is not always good or better than the normal shot there are many times where the HDR is less good or blured because objects moved. I will leave it normally off and I turn it on for shots of still subjects and when I have time to make a better foto. But most of my pictures are in action, during sport, like ballooning for example and the HDR processing time is a major issue. if you have a unique situation that you want to shoot and the fist shot is not perfect, I mostly wont get the chance to take a second similar shot as processing requires too much time and turning GDR on an off or change the HDR settings trough the menu also takes too much time. But I might consider configuring one of the MR positions with a HDRon setup, while I leave it of in P mode

Click to expand...

Ah...I carry two cameras. The Sony only gets used for HDR landscpes, macro, and chance shots when I happen to have the camera in my hand and no time to switch. And, as it happens, party shots indoors where Anti-motion Blur is a life-savor. The Nikon P900 gets used for everything else. So my expectations of the Sony are not your normal set. I bought it specifically to fill the gaps in the Nikon

In my case, like in ballon competition, space is an issue, weight is (some kind of) an issue. I have my main task as a copilote to navigate and handle the computer. The camera has to be small, noiseless and it should do good pictures without haveing to brainstorm first. Yes, most times it is on i or i+ but I test all the features and also use it in everyday life