The Amazing SONY HX1

I am playing with cameras since I was a teenager. My first real camera after the Kodak Instamatic with the ultra modern flash cubes was the RICOH TLS 401. Why a RICOH?

She was the only cheap SLR camera who had 2 viewfinders. One as usual and one on top. You see now where my fable for cameras with more viewfinder / display felxibility comes from.
With the RICOH I went through all the fun the people today have who buy a DSLR. First the camera, then you add some more lenses for flexibility, you need a flash (hello Olympus E-P1), there is need for a tripod and definitely some filters, lens hood, remote (was a rubber squeeze ball with a hose to remotely trigger the shutter. I had my first girlfriend and - well you can guess) . Put this all in a nice bag - nah the tripod is too big you need to carry it extra, and you have yourself a semi professional setup. Somebody just forgot to tell you about the fun and convenience to schlepp it around with you permanently - you don´t want to miss that shot, don´t you?

This is where today a sturdy, always carry with you around (even in your shirt pocket if you want), camera comes in handy. Like my RICOH R6 but this is another story.


Before I end my trip down memory lane and bore you to tears let me quick show you one of my early works.
A cheap bastard I already was as a teenager and a fan of the big picture also. So instead of making pictures, I was making slides and discovered the easy way of foto manipulation by just putting 2 slides together in one frame to create something rather unique.
Please remember that was many years before the IBM PC was born and the normal picture manipulation was done in a darkroom or via (air) brush.

After my experience with the camera equipment and the unwillingness to always carry it around,  I was happy when the superzooms came into play. The usual 3x zoom was a bit limited and so was the creativity what you could do with it.

In this post, what will be updated on a regular base, I will show you some things I discover with the HX1 that I find amazing.

Let´s start with this evening and a nearly missed sunset. Thanks to the Twilight Mode shooting something like that in a near perfect quality is now possible.

I was wondering if the panorama mode would work under these low light conditions.

Here is the cropped, resized and re compressed result. It was shot with ISO 800 and 1/30 sec.
We are talking of a camera movement in a 180 degree circle with all the shake, rattle and roll you get when you do this in a spur of the moment where in time you got the tripod ready the colors were gone. Did it come out perfect?


No, there were some stitching errors. Is that bad? No, I just cut out what I wanted and if it was important to me I could have easily fixed the the crocked phone line.
To have a camera who delivers these low light shots is simply amazing.

Isn´t the ISO 800 noise really bad in a moved around blurred picture?
Not for me when I consider under what circumstances this shot was taken, no Sir, not bad at all.
For your critical eye here a lossless crop of the original, unchanged in any way.

Update 2009.8.20
It is extremely hard to catch a permanent fast moving flying bug (sorry have no idea how it is named) in macro mode. So, the bug moves, the camera moves the distance to the bug moves - you get the idea. So you need a camera who is very quick in focus and shooting. And lots of pictures to get at least a few clear ones. 100% lossless crop.


The 20x zoom combined with the forced flash to get the detail what is lurking in the bushes.



Perfect flash exposure. 


... to be continued