It was like a bad marriage. I really tried to make it work but, in the end, I couldn't. The divorce from my Sony DSC-H9 was made final yesterday. There was a settlement (more about this later) and we parted amicably.
The biggest problem I found with this camera was the image quality and, if a camera doesn't produce high-quality images, it doesn't pay to discuss its other features, no matter how good or bad.
The DSC-H9 I returned yesterday was not my first. I had already exchanged it. The first one had even worse image quality, pointing to a quality control problem at Sony that may have been brought on by rushing this camera to market.
The overall image quality problems that will be found to some extent in all DSC-H9s point to a more disturbing trend -- the final frontier in the Megapixel Wars. What Sony has done is to try and cram 8 megapixels into a 5 megapixel sensor.
Sharpness After almost 1500 pictures taken with my second DSC-H9, I was amazed at how few had real corner-to-corner sharpness that I had come to expect from a camera like this. I tried all combinations of focal length, shutter speed, color, contrast, and sharpness settings, but pictures that should have been crisp fell apart, especially away from the center of the image. Some will say that the loss of sharpness at the sides of the picture is a result of the DSC-H9s wide angle lens, but it isn't really that much wider than previous models. My Minolta A2 has an even wider lens, but does not exhibit these problems.
Color fringing I got both purple and green color fringing in high and medium contrast areas of the picture. In my first DSC-H9, this was bad enough to make the camera unusable. In my second one, the color fringing was improved, but still bad enough to require correction in a lot of shots where it shouldn't have shown up at all. Shooting the same scenes with my other digital cameras yielded images free of color fringing.
Overly aggressive noise reduction One of the problems with squeezing more megapixels from tiny sensors is that you get more noise. Sony has been overly aggressive in their handling of this, yielding areas of the picture with what has been described as a "watercolor" effect that looks almost like a painting. Unfortunately, there is no setting in the camera's menu to control the degree of noise reduction.
White balance The DSC-H9 has the traditional white balance settings that most other digital camera have. But I found a problem when using the "Auto White Balance" setting. In most cases, it made the right choice, but every once in a while there was an anomaly when shooting several pictures, one right after the other, while using the Auto setting. The first one would come out fine, but the second would have a deep yellow cast.
Handling of colors I love the way that Sony cameras render colors. It's what attracted me to the DSC-F707, my first Sony camera. You can point the DSC-H9 into a dreary indoor space, using just the available light, and it looks like it's been flooded with daylight. But there's a downside to this, especially when shooting scenes that have bright, heavily saturated colors. In these cases, the colors can "blow out" the image as surely as pointing a bright light into the camera. There is a setting to control the handling of colors, but even the most moderate setting didn't work in these extreme cases.
Noise My wife wanted to use one of my DSC-H9 images on her blog, but it was a little too dark. When I put it into an editing program and lightened it up a little bit, it showed an incredible amount of noise, colored specks, in the darker shadowy areas. I would have expected this at the higher ISO ratings, but this was at 200. So I went over other pictures shot at this rating and found that a high percentage exhibited this type of noise. ISO 200 is not that high a rating -- the DSC-H9 goes up to 3200, a figure that looks great on the press release, but is of little practical value. I consider ISO 200 as a good all-around setting for everyday shooting, and I use that on my other digital cameras.
Quality setting This is the first digital camera that I've owned that didn't have some sort of setting for the compression that is used in storing the images on its internal memory card. A higher quality setting produces larger files which gives fewer images on a card, while a lower quality setting produces smaller image files, resulting in more pictures for the same size card.
This would have been okay if Sony had opted for "high quality" as the only setting, but they didn't, settling for something less. This is especially puzzling as the price of storage cards is dropping quickly. Some have claimed that there is no visible difference in the images stored at different settings, but customers like to have this choice left to them. One possible reason for Sony's choice of smaller image files is that it lets the camera take pictures at a faster rate in "burst" mode.
Image stabilizer The DSC-H9 is the fourth camera I've owned that included optical image stabilization, so I'm familiar with what to expect. The Sony's stabilization was not as effective as the systems in my Panasonic DMC-FZ5 and my old Olympus C-2100UZ. To me. it ranked about the same as my Minolta A2, which actually shifted the image sensor rather than a lens element.
There's one other thing I want to mention. While not an image quality problem, it is related. Bright scenes can make the DSC-H9's finder wash out with an overall purple cast that makes it hard to view the scene properly. There is actually a warning about this that comes on a separate sheet of paper, included with the camera. Related to this, there's no way to adjust the brightness of the viewfinders to help calibrate them to match what you actually get from the camera.
If I were still doing camera reviews for Modern Photography, as I did many years ago, I would rate the Sony DSC-H9 as a promising camera, with many innovative features, but with only average overall image quality and some really bad design flaws. (One problem is that you can't put ordinary filters on this camera.) I don't think that the DSC-H9 is going to get glowing reviews. I'll bet that most reviewers hedge their wording to something like "Recommended, but..."
Perhaps Sony will hear the complaints of the people who have bought this camera and are less than satisfied. Perhaps they will offer some sort of fix or upgrade to fix the image quality and other problems. I sure hope so. It would be a shame to let this camera tarnish Sony's reputation.
About the settlement mentioned earlier. I bought the camera from a Sonystyle store. They have a "restocking" charge for returns of digital cameras, no matter what the reason. So it cost me about $72 to return the DSC-H9.
In the end, this was an inexpensive lesson. Actually several. For one thing, I will not let camera lust get the better of me again. I will wait at least a few months after the introduction of a new model, until the reviews and the online forums have had their say, before I consider another purchase.
I will also be more careful of where I shop. I'm not sure if the restocking charge that Sonystyle and other stores charge is legal, or just unwise. I'm sure that once the public understands the consequences of purchasing from these establishments their buying habits will change, and there may be an adverse affect on the bottom line.
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