Sony Cyber-shot DSC-V1A no-excuses "enthusiast" camera from Sony: 5 megapixels, 4x zoom, fast AF, and features galore<<Optics :(Previous) | (Next): Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests>> Page 6:Exposure & FlashReview First Posted: 04/18/2003, Updated: 7/1/2003 |
Exposure
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In the Scene exposure mode, you have the option of shooting in Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Landscape, Portrait, Snow, or Beach preset modes. (The latter two modes are new additions to Sony's standard Scene presets.) Twilight mode sets up the camera for shooting night scenes, using a slower shutter speed to capture more ambient light, and adjusting the exposure bias to prevent loss of detail in bright lights and highlights. (Big applause for Sony with the V1 though: For a long time, one of my pet peeves with Sony digicams has been that the "normal" exposure modes restricted exposure times to 1/30 second and above. You were forced to switch to one of the "Twilight" modes if your subject demanded a longer exposure time. I'm extremely pleased to report that this is no longer the case, at least in the particular instance of the DSC-V1. "Normal" exposure times now extend well out into multi-second territory, a very welcome improvement.) Landscape mode simply uses a smaller lens aperture to increase the depth of field, keeping the foreground and background in focus. Landscape mode typically uses slower shutter speeds, so a tripod is recommended in all but bright lighting. Portrait mode works in the opposite manner, using a larger aperture to decrease the depth of field. This produces a sharply focused subject in front of a slightly blurred background. Snow mode prevents color from washing out in heavy-white scenes, while Beach mode emphasizes blues for accurate water and sky rendition in seaside and lakeside images.
The V1 employs a Multi-Pattern metering system as its default, dividing the scene into multiple areas and taking separate exposure readings for each section. The readings are then evaluated (not necessarily averaged, the algorithm evaluates contrast as well as brightness) to determine the best overall exposure. Center-Weighted and Spot metering options are also available through the camera's Record menu. The Exposure Compensation adjustment manually increases or decreases the exposure determined by the metering system from -2 to +2 exposure values (EV) in one-third-step increments, and is adjusted by pressing the Exposure Compensation button on the rear panel and turning the Command dial.
In addition to the V1's NightShot and NightFraming low-light features (discussed in detail in the Viewfinder section above), the camera also offers an impressive Noise Reduction system. Activated automatically with shutter speeds of 1/25 second and longer, the V1's Noise Reduction does an outstanding job of reducing the image noise associated with long exposure times. Judging from the camera's operation, it appears the V1 is shooting a "dark" frame with the shutter closed after each exposure when the noise reduction mode is active, and then subtracting the noise in that dark frame from the captured image.
An AE Lock button on the rear panel locks the exposure reading without also locking the focus (as happens when you half-press the Shutter button). AE Lock works well with Spot and Center-Weighted metering, letting you base the exposure on a particular area of the subject without also having to lock the focus on that area. Simply aim the center of the viewfinder at the portion of the subject you want properly exposed and press the AE Lock button. The exposure will be locked until the Shutter button is fully depressed or until the AE Lock button is pressed again.
ISO can be adjusted to 100, 200, 400, or 800 sensitivity equivalents, or set to Auto, letting the camera adjust it to match the shooting conditions. The V1's White Balance adjustment offers seven settings: Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent, Flash, and One-Push (manual). The One-Push reading is set by placing a white card in front of the lens and pressing the up arrow to set the reading. Through the Record menu, the V1 also lets you adjust sharpness, saturation, and contrast, offering low/normal/high options for each. (Kudos to Sony for including these features: Now, I'd like to see them go a step further, and offer both a wider range of adjustment and more/smaller steps for contrast and saturation. I've found fine-grained contrast and saturation adjustments on some other cameras highly useful in "customizing" the camera's basic response to suit my personal preferences.) A versatile Picture Effects menu offers three creative options: Negative Art, Sepia, and Solarize. Negative Art reverses the color and brightness of the image. Sepia translates the image into brown, monochromatic tones. The Solarize option is really more of a level-slicing or posterizing function, dividing the image into areas of fairly "flat" color. (It's not really a "solarization" effect as old-line film types would understand the term.) These effects are "live" in Record mode, so you get a preview of the effect on the LCD monitor before you record the image.
The Self-Timer mode is activated by pressing the Down arrow button on the Four Way Arrow pad. Once in Self-Timer mode, a full press of the Shutter button starts the timer, which counts down 10 seconds before firing the shutter. The camera beeps and flashes a front-panel LED to mark the countdown interval. After recording an image, the Quick Review function provides instant playback of the picture if you don't release the Shutter button. Pressing the left arrow button also activates the Quick Review mode, giving you the option of deleting the most recently recorded image.
Flash
The pop-up flash on the V1 operates in Auto (no icon displayed on LCD screen), Forced, Suppressed, and Slow Sync modes, with a Red-Eye Reduction mode enabled through the Setup menu. Auto mode lets the camera decide when to fire the flash, based on existing lighting conditions. Forced means that the flash always fires, regardless of light, and Suppressed simply means that the flash never fires. The Slow Sync setting combines the flash with a longer exposure, recording more ambient light to balance out light from the flash. Red-Eye Reduction mode tells the camera to fire a small pre-flash before firing the full flash to reduce the effect of red-eye. Once enabled through the Setup menu, the Red-Eye Reduction flash fires in both Auto and Forced modes. Flash intensity can be manually controlled via the Record menu with choices of High, Normal, and Low (except in Full Auto mode). If required, the flash pops up on its own once the Shutter button is halfway pressed in all flash modes except Suppressed. - But you have to snap it shut manually.
The V1 also features a true hot-shoe external flash connection on top of the camera. This greatly increases the options for connecting an external flash. Additionally, an ACC Sony accessory flash input socket is on the camera's left side, but is proprietary to the Sony HVL-F1000 external flash unit. (The new HVL-F32X flash unit is a much better match for the V1's capabilities though.)
All flash exposures -- whether from the built-in flash or a TTL-compatible
external flash -- are metered through the V1's lens, providing true TTL metering.
Sony's new HVL-F32X external flash unit, for example, is one external unit that
takes advantage of the camera's TTL metering system. (Note that the earlier
HVL-F1000 external flash unit does not provide TTL metering.) The addition
of TTL metering (using the camera's pre-flash to precisely establish exposure)
is particularly useful when the subject is significantly brighter or darker
than its background and the lens is set to the telephoto end of its focal length
range. TTL metering determines exposure from just the part of the subject that
appears in the camera's field of view, ignoring foreground or background objects
outside the frame. The F32X also does an excellent job of throttling down for
macro shots, something many external flash units have difficulty doing.
New (optional) External Flash!
Astute
readers will have noted the hot shoe atop the DSC-V1, and particularly its multiple
contacts. This new shoe is set up to work with a brand-new external flash, announced
by Sony at the same time as the V1. The HVL-F32X flash unit is an optional accessory
for the DSC-V1, but should be on the short list of accessories to add for any
photographers seriously interested in flash photography.
The new HVL-F32X flash has a host of new features relative to the earlier HVL-F1000, not the least of which is the support for true TTL (through the lens) flash metering when used with the DSC-V1. This is a huge benefit whenever you're taking telephoto shots of subjects that are significantly brighter or darker than the background. With a typical area-metered flash, the background will dominate the exposure, with the subject coming out either over- or underexposed, depending on whether the background was darker or lighter than it. With true TTL metering, only the part of the scene that's visible to the camera's CCD will affect the ultimate exposure. Also worth mentioning is that the F32X does an excellent job of throttling down for macro shots, something that many external flash units have difficulty doing.
Here's a list of features of the new HVL-F32X flash unit:
- Guide number of 32 meters - This is pretty powerful, translating to a range of 10 meters with an ~f/3.2 lens aperture.)
- Autofocus Assist Illuminator - A set of 6 bright LEDs under the flash head cast a surprising amount of light, greatly extending the range of the camera's low-light autofocusing ability.
- Two-brightness AF Illuminator - The AF illuminator has two brightness settings, letting you conserve battery power (not to mention your subject's eyesight) when working at closer range.
- Modelling light - This is a common feature on high-end professional flash units, but the first time we can recall seeing it on a prosumer-grade external flash. There's a button on the back of the F32X that triggers the flash head to deliver a very fast series of strobe pulses lasting about a half a second. The effect is to turn the F32X into a moderately bright modeling light, letting you preview how your flash setup will light the scene you're shooting.
- Manual flash strength setting - For use in conjunction with external "dumb" slave strobes, or for other situations requiring purely manual control, you can set the F32X to fire a single pop with each shot, and set the strength of its output manually.
- Backlit control readout LCD - A nice touch for a strobe, which by definition will generally be used in dim lighting conditions that would make it hard to read the control display otherwise.
I haven't worked extensively with the HVL-F32X yet, but first impressions (from a very rough prototype) were very good. The TTL capability worked great, and the powerful AF illuminator was great for photographing more distant subjects in total darkness. I don't yet have a projected selling price for the US, but if it's at all reasonable, I expect Sony to sell a lot of these. (For a little more detail on the unit, as well as a few more product photos, see our news article on it from the Spring 2003 PMA show.)
Special Recording Modes
Like many Sony digicams, the V1 offers a number of special recording modes, including TIFF, Voice, E-Mail, Exposure Bracketing, and Burst 3. The TIFF option saves a 2,560 x 1,920-pixel uncompressed TIFF version of each image, in addition to the standard JPEG version, at whatever image size you've selected. Voice mode lets you record a five-second sound clip to accompany a still image, with the audio recording starting immediately after the image capture. The E-Mail option records a still image at the 320 x 240-pixel JPEG size for easy e-mail transmission, again in addition to a full-resolution file, at whatever image size you've selected in the menu system. This lets you capture full-resolution images for storage and printing, while at the same time recording smaller versions that you can just drop into an e-mail to share with others. Exposure Bracketing captures three images with one press of the Shutter button (one at the normal exposure, one underexposed, and one overexposed). The variation between exposures is adjustable through the Setup menu, with options of 0.3, 0.7, and 1.0 EV steps. "Burst 3" mode captures a rapid series of three images, at approximately two frames per second. (The the number of images in the series may be limited by available Memory Stick space, and the actual frame rate may vary somewhat, depending on the resolution and quality settings.)
Movie Mode
The Movie mode is accessed by selecting the film frame icon on the Mode dial on top of the camera. You can record moving images with sound at either 640 x 480 (VGA) or 160 x 112 (Mail) pixels. Sony's new MPEGMovie VX mode lets you record full VGA resolution movies for as long as the Memory Stick has space. (The amount of available recording time varies with the quality setting and resolution.) Recording begins with a single press of the Shutter button, and ends with a second press. A timer appears in the LCD monitor to let you know how long you've been recording and approximately how much recording time is available.
The V1 also provides limited movie editing capabilities right in the camera. While most digicam users don't expect to find full A/B roll video editing in their cameras, I've often wanted to trim off material from the beginning or end of a video I've recorded, or extract an interesting bit of action from the middle of a much longer clip. The V1 let you do just that via the Divide option on the Playback menu. As its name suggests, Divide works by splitting movies into two segments. Do this once to trim away spurious material at the front of the clip you're interested in, and do it a second time to remove unwanted footage at the end. Once you've split the movie into parts like this, you can throw away the segments you don't need.
After enabling the Divide function through the Playback menu, the V1 starts to play the movie. You simply press the OK button on the Four Way Arrow pad to stop the playback where you want to make an edit. From there, you can scroll backward or forward frame-by-frame until you find the point where you'd like to divide the movie. You can then either delete the unwanted portion of the movie or keep it on the Memory Stick. As noted, the Divide function is great for "editing" the part of a movie file you want to save, given that you can make an unlimited number of divides. You just can't put the pieces back together again in the camera. For that, you'll have to use MPEG editing software on a computer.
Clip Motion
Through the Setup menu, you can set the movie recording format to "Clip Motion," which turns the V1 into an animation camera, recording up to 10 frames of still images to be played back in succession as an animated GIF. Frames can be captured at any interval, with successive actuations of the Shutter button. When you've captured as many photos as you need, you just press the center of the Four Way Arrow pad to tell the camera to finish the sequence by assembling the images into a single animate GIF file. Available image sizes are Normal (160 x 120 pixels) and Mobile (120 x 108 pixels). The number of captured frames may vary with image size and available Memory Stick space. (You have a maximum of 10, but could be constrained to fewer if your memory is nearly full.) Files are saved in the GIF format, and are played back with approximately 0.5-second intervals between frames. Unlike Movie mode, the flash is available with Clip Motion.
Multi-Burst
Also accessed through the Movie option under the Setup menu, the V1 features a Multi-Burst mode, which captures a very rapid burst of 16 images arranged in rows and columns in a single file. Once captured, the images may be played back in sequence on the camera. Because image capture is so fast, the effect is of a slow-motion sequence. Three frame interval rates are available through the Record menu, 1/7.5, 1/15, and 1/30.
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