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The image above was taken with the Cyber-shot TX10 with its lens at 4.43mm (25mm equivalent). The camera metered 1/640 at f4.5 and 125 ISO. The original image measured 4.07MB. The crops are taken from the areas marked with red rectangles and presented here at 100%.

The overall result from the Cyber-shot TX10 is pretty good. The exposure is good and there is excellent shadow detail with no blown highlights. The colours look a little under-saturated, though that’s something of a personal opinion, and the image lacks contrast, a fact born out by the histogram.

What about the detailed picture? The first crop isn’t high on detail, there isn’t much of it in the grassy hilside of the foreground, nor the wall and roof of the chapel building, but the second crop is more encouraging. The distant lighthouse is fairly well defined given the slightly hazy conditions and the edge detail in the houses in the foreground is good, but there’s a clumpiness obscuring a lot of the fine detail which is most clearly evident in the lighthouse island, the upper row of rooftops where they meet the sea and the rooftops at the bottom edge of the frame.

The third crop, from the edge of the frame, shows up the clumpiness even more clearly and also looks slightly soft, though in the final crop the straight white lines of the window frames are well resolved, but the writing on the banners is less clear. So a bit of a mixed bag, here with the Cyber-shot TX10’s 4x zoom lens doing a good job at the wide angle setting but the BIONZ processor struggling a little to retain fine image detail from the 16.2 Megapixel sensor.

There’s no doubt that the 12.1 Megapixel sensor of the IXUS 310 HS / ELPH 500 HS produces superior results to the Cyber-shot TX10’s 16.2 Megapixel sensor. The Cyber-shot TX10 crops are generally clumpier with less of the fine detail picked out. The difference is most pronounced in the first and third crops, with the window crop looking clumpy by comparison with the IXUS 310 HS / ELPH 500 HS, though lacking the colour fringing problem. Overall, the Cyber-shot results are impressive for a 16 Megapixel model, but no match for the Canon.

Crops from the 12 Megapixel Panasonic Lumix FX77 / FX78 look soft by comparison with those of both the Cyber-shot TX10 and the IXUS 310 HS / ELPH 500 HS. The FX77 / FX78 crops are even less contrasty than those of the Cyber-shot TX10, but that may be at least partly due to the fact that the FX77 / FX78 overexposed the shot. So, not a great deal to differentiate quality-wise between the Cyber-shot TX10 and Lumix FX77 / FX78, with both losing some fine image detail in the first instance to clumpiness and the second softness.

Now let’s see how they compare at higher sensitivities in our High ISO Noise results.

All three cameras were set to Program auto exposure mode (called Normal Picture mode on the Lumix FX77), and the lenses were set to approximately the same field of view, in this case the widest focal length setting which is roughly equivalent on all three. The ISO sensitivity was set manually.