Sony DSC-HX1 Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Near accurate color with oversaturation in strong reds and blues, and slight hue shifts.

Saturation. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 oversaturates strong reds and blues quite a bit, but this is fairly common among consumer digital cameras. Yellows are actually undersaturated a fair amount. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, with the color balanced properly for the light source, the DSC-HX1's Caucasian skin tones had a moderate pink cast, while darker skin tones were pushed quite a bit toward orange. However, performance here is still pleasing. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 showed several color shifts relative to the correct mathematical translation of colors in its subjects, pushing cyan toward blue, magenta toward red, and yellow toward green. Performance here is a little less than average, but overall color is generally good. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Best color with Manual white balance, just a slight nudge in positive exposure compensation required.

Color balance indoors under incandescent lighting was quite warm in both the Auto and Incandescent white balance modes, while the Manual setting produced near accurate results. White values measure out to be just slightly on the cool side, but overall color still looks best here. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 required a +0.7 EV exposure compensation boost to get a bright exposure, which is just a little higher than average. Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

Outdoors, daylight
Bright color and generally good exposure outdoors, though contrast is a little high.

Outdoors, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 handled harsh lighting pretty well, producing somewhat high contrast, though with pretty good midtones. Shadow detail is smudgy and indistinct, however, due mostly to noise and noise suppression efforts. The camera's adjustable contrast setting did help even out the exposure some, without resorting to brightening the overall exposure. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 also has an adjustable Dynamic Range Optimizer setting, which automatically adjusts the range depending on the severity of conditions. It also produced fairly good results here.

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Resolution
High resolution, 1,700 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,700 lines per picture height in both directions. While lines are distinguishable here, they aren't overly clear. Extinction began around 2,050 lines. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Fine detail is slightly soft from noise suppression, though high contrast areas show noticeable edge enhancement.

Sharpness. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 captures some fine detail, though detail definition suffers from both noise and noise suppression. In high contrast areas, the camera produces bright enhancement artifacts, such as along the trim in the crop above left. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows strong noise suppression, with the darker areas of hair showing only limited detail. Individual strands become lost even in the moderate shadows. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

ISO & Noise Performance
Noticeable noise at the lower sensitivity settings, though noise suppression becomes fairly strong at the moderate settings.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 shows some moderate noise at its lowest ISO setting of 125, though detail is still fairly strong. Starting at ISO 200, noise suppression efforts begin to interfere, blurring fine detail. By ISO 800, the entire image looks like a pastel drawing, with very little definition at all. At ISO 1,600 and 3,200, noise grain becomes more pronounced though noise suppression remains strong. The other side effect here is slightly cooler color casts at the highest ISOs (1,600 and 3,200), due to more prevalent blue noise pixels. See the Print Quality section below, to find out what the recommended maximum size print is at each ISO setting.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with pretty good overall detail, though limited shadow detail. Bright contrast, but still good results overall. Good low-light capabilities under average circumstances.

Sunlight. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 performed fairly well under the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above, though contrast verges on being too high. Shadow detail is limited, mostly due to noise suppression, and some noise pixels are visible even in the midtones. At the default exposure, the face is just a hint dim, but overall exposure is much better than the too-bright whites of the +0.3 EV adjustment. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 features an adjustable contrast setting, as well as Dynamic Range adjustment. Both options do a pretty good job of reigning in contrast without brightening the exposure too much. Be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; and it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.

Active D-Lighting. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 offers three levels of Dynamic Range adjustment, which includes an Off setting. Sony's Dynamic Range does a good job moderating the extreme range in contrast without increasing the exposure too much. The Plus setting does push exposure slightly, but results aren't so bright to render the image unusable, retaining a good amount of detail in the shirt.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Low Light. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 produced bright images under the equivalent of standard city street lighting at night, which equates to about one foot-candle. Color balance was cool from the Auto white balance in many shots, but results were still usable. The camera was able to focus down to the 1/4 foot-candle level without any AF assist, and in near darkness with AF illuminator enabled.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) For such applications, you may have better luck with a digital SLR camera, but even there, you'll likely need to set the focus manually. For information and reviews on digital SLRs, refer to our SLR review index page.

Coverage and Range
Very good flash power, with slightly uneven coverage. Auto flash performs well in our portrait shot.

Coverage and Exposure. Flash coverage was slightly uneven at wide angle, though quite dim at telephoto. In the Indoor test, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1's Auto flash mode produced a fairly bright exposure without any positive compensation, though it did raise ISO to 200. There's a slight orange tint from the background incandescent lighting, which actually helps to preserve the mood of the scene.

ISO 100 Range. The lowest sensitivitysupported by the Sony HX1 is ISO125. At wide angle and ISO 125, flash intensity remained bright to 16 feet. At telephoto, flash power maintained the same intensity to about 9 feet, decreasing in brightness at 10 feet and beyond.

Manufacturer Specified Flash Test. In the shots above, the Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 performs about as Sony says it will, though wide-angle results are really inconclusive, since the 30.1-foot distance takes the camera too far out of the lab. Results are good at telephoto, however, the camera raised ISO to 500 to achieve this. Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100 (or the lowest ISO, whichever is higher), to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims.

Print Quality
Good print quality at 11x14 inches. ISO 400 images are soft but usable at 11x14, ISO 800 shots are better at 8x10.

The Sony HX1 was able to produce good 11x14-inch prints at ISO 125. 13x19-inch prints were too soft in areas of fine detail at this, the Sony HX1's lowest ISO.

ISO 200 shots are also acceptable at 11x14 inches, and ISO 400 shots are usable at this size, though there is more noise in the shadows, and less detail overall. This gets less noticeable as the image size is reduced to 8x10.

ISO 800 shots start to show some weakness, with oversaturated colors and deep, dark shadows, but the detail at 8x10 is still decent. ISO 1,600 shots are usable at 5x7, but shadows are dark and saturation a little too pumped for our taste, eliminating detail in colors. ISO 3,200 makes a usable 4x6-inch image in terms of major detail, but the dark shadows and pumped colors continue.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro9000 Mark II studio printer, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II review for details on that model.)