There’s lots of fine detail when viewed at 100% and few optical artefacts to worry about, but noise is already quite visible in shadow areas.

Edges which should be crisp and sharp are also fuzzy at times, and remember this is at the lowest ISO under bright conditions.

The vertically-tilting monitor was facing directly upwards, allowing us to frame comfortably with the HX1 almost on the ground.

Once again, the crops are detailed, and a lack of darker mid-tones in this composition has avoided too much visible noise.

The increase to 200 ISO has seen noise levels spread to more than just the dark mid-tones, and again edges which should be sharp look a little fuzzy. But there’s still a good amount of detail in the image.

Unlike many compacts, the HX1 can focus quickly, which along with fast shooting, makes action shots quite possible. Out of ten frames grabbed here, eight were in sharp focus, which is a good success rate. There’s a little fringing and visible noise, but we’ll forgive the HX1 here for its fast shooting mode. See below for another example at 10fps.

Like most compacts, the depth-of-field has remained quite large, but by standing back and zooming-in more, you can increase the blurred background effect a little.

The HX1’s automatic face detection kicked-in and locked-onto our subject with ease. By sticking with 200 ISO, there’s some noise, but the subject is fairly forgiving.

We’re near to the closest focusing distance of 1cm here, but even with the lens also at wide angle, the distortion isn’t too bad and the field relatively flat – there’s some good details to be enjoyed here.

Face detection once again started automatically and locked-on quickly.

Viewed at 100%, there’s a noticeable increase in visible noise, but at least we’re not seeing the usual Sony noise reduction which smears-out fine detail.

The increase in sensitivity has resulted in another jump in visible noise, but again we prefer Sony’s relatively hands-off approach to noise reduction here, compared to previous models which smeared-out any fine detail at this point.

So again, like most compacts, 1600 ISO should be avoided unless for emergency use or small emailed images.

The HX1 also offers a 3200 ISO mode, but it ain’t pretty. You can see an example of it in our High ISO Noise results.

All ten frames are shown below, and we’ve picked one for closer examination. The combination of quick focusing and super-quick continuous shooting allowed the HX1 to grab this action sequence with ease, and impressively, most of the frames were sharp even at 100%.