Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX9V 16.2 MP Review

I have been waiting for the Fuji 550EXR for a while and got disappointed by its video.

After getting HX9V I am satisfied. In short, it gives the best video quality you will get from anything. At 1920/1080/60 fps, it easily rivals sophisticated HD camcorders and may even exceed a lot of high-end DSLRs (depending how you see it, no auto-focus on a DSLR video simply puts me off, not to mention the poor aliasing rife in DSLR videos).

Image quality wise, it is acceptable, just the sort you would expect from point-and-shooters (never expect the 16m pixels to be the same as the 16m on the t2i). Nothing to be excited about nor dread about. But the sweep panorama blows away all the negatives. Just imagine being able to do 180 degree panorama by just panning you cam, and generating a 10,000x4,000 image (that's 40 megapixels) with ease. That's something even a DSLR will struggle with a fish eye lens (yes I have a 8mm fish eye on a canon t2i by the way). On HX9V, at least you don't have to defish afterward, and don't have to put up with the weight (DSLR plus a fish eye lens could easily weigh more than 5 times this thing.

And finally, being able to go from 24mm to 384 mm in under 3 seconds. Actually you could even achieve 480mm if you opt for 10M image size and activate smart zoom, which essentially does the cropping for you, which gives you basically 20x optical zoom). I don't have anything more to ask for, since 24mm is wide enough and 480mm long enough for 95% of my need. The rest 5% is covered by panorama.

For your info, I also use a canon t2i and have to carried three lens in such a setup in order to cover the same zoom range of the HX9V. That will be: 18-55mm, 55-250mm, and an 8mm fish eye.

Just think about the difference of weight and likelihood of keeping the set up at all times! At least I know I will be using HX9V a lot more than the t2i setup.

Yes there will be times I will be only using t2i, but those are getting fewer.