These remarks are in response to some of the comments that I received about my earlier posts evaluating the Sony DSC-H9.

In the online forums, such as the Sony forum at DPReview.com, there are lots of spectacular pictures made with the DSC-H9. But, in retrospect, most of them fall under the category of "nature photography," and most of them are close-ups and macros. There are pictures of bugs, beetles, butterflies, buds, and birds, plus close-ups of cats and dogs. There are also some shots that demonstrate the camera's excellent qualities for sports photography.

But a camera has to be good as an all-around tool. Most of the pictures that I saw used only the center of the frame, with the sides out of focus due to the subject matter. I saw very few pictures that tested the edge-to-edge sharpness of the camera, such as landscape shots. If you are going to test a camera, you have to take these sort of shots as well. Most of the scenes like this that were posted were from people who were having trouble with the camera and were putting up the pictures to demonstrate the problems they found.

I think that the people who feel that this is a spectacular camera (and it is in many ways) should post some photos showing how the camera maintains edge-to-edge sharpness at all focal lengths, and how the camera is as free of color fringing as comparable models from this and other manufacturers. This would be a big help to people who are considering the purchase of a DSC-H9.

Recently, photographers have discussed something called "bokeh," a mystical term used to describe the out-of-focus areas of a picture. I want to add a new term to this vocabulary.

"Coherence."

This term will be used to describe the quality of an image when viewed over the entire picture, from one corner to another. What "coherence" will measure is the impression that the entire image was made with the same lens. Does the quality and appearance of the center of the image match the quality of the sides and corners? Is the color rendering the same? What about details that appear all over the picture, are they the same?

This is one of the problems that I found with the DSC-H9. The images that it produced lacked coherence. The aggressive noise reduction, color fringing, and a strangely out-of-focus appearance to images that should have been corner-to-corner sharp gave the shots a non-uniform appearance in situations that my other cameras handled easily. In many, the sides of the image had a "smeared' appearance.

The DSC-H9 is the first digital camera that I've had that lacked coherence, something that my other cameras handled so well that it seemed trivial. But as I reviewed over a thousand pictures from the DSC-H9, this is what eventually stood out. I had trouble identifying and understanding this at first as I had never seen it before, in over fifty years of buying and using cameras. It was something new.

The less-than-stellar image quality of the DSC-H9 can be traced, for the most part, to trying to jam too many megapixels into too small a sensor. All the related problems come from using image processing software Band-Aids to cover this up. The addition of an even wider zoom range lens certainly didn't help the end result. (An additional factor may have been the requirement to speed up the image processing speed to get a high frame rate in "burst" mode.) As long as manufacturers place new features over image quality, this is the sort of result you're going to get.

In the final evaluation the DSC-H9 will be seen as a fine camera for close-up photography and nature photography in general. Areas where only the center of the picture has to be sharp.

It's possible that I got a bad camera, although the thought of turning a camera purchase into a lottery is a bit unsettling. But I actually tried two different DSC-H9s. Would a third one have been better? There was no chance to find out, as the period where the camera could be returned was drawing to an end and I had to make a decision.

I think that the last straw for me was that you couldn't put filters on the camera, other than the large, expensive ones offered by Sony. I have an extensive filter collection, mostly 58mm, and I have adapted my other digital cameras to this size, including my Minolta A2, which has a wider angle lens than the Sony. I think that this is a huge oversight on Sony's part and while there will eventually be third-party solutions to this problem, the idea of the consumer spending more money to fix a serious design flaw is suboptimal, to say the least. This sort of oversight, as well as some of the other flaws, shows that the design of a camera has to be coherent as well.

There are people, as I, who think that Sony is a wonderful company. But even wonderful companies occasionally turn out a product with problems. No company has a perfect record. I think that all criticism of a camera should be heard, all reviews, good and bad, should be allowed to be published. If there are cameras with problems and no one points them out, what incentive is there for the manufacturer to fix the problems, or to do better next time?

Copyright 1958-2008 Tony Karp