Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX9V

14th December 2011

Written by Gordon Laing

Quality

Sony Cyber-shot HX9V vs Canon PowerShot SX230 HS vs Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 Resolution

To compare real-life performance when zoomed-out, we shot this scene with the Sony Cyber-shot HX9V, Canon PowerShot SX230 HS and Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 within a few moments of each other using their best quality JPEG settings.

The lenses on each camera were set to approximately the same field of view and all three cameras were set to Program auto exposure mode.

The ISO sensitivity was manually set to the lowest available setting 100 ISO – on each camera.

	Sony Cyber-shot HX9V results
1	Sony Cyber-shot HX9V Resolution
2	Sony Cyber-shot HX9V Noise
3	Sony Cyber-shot HX9V Sample images

The image above was taken with the Sony Cyber-shot HX9V with its lens zoomed to 5mm (28mm equivalent), just inside its maximum wide angle setting of 4.28mm (24mm equivalent) setting, to provide a comparable field of view with the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS. The camera metered 1/320 at f8 and 100 ISO. The original image file was 5.31MB. The crops are taken from the areas marked with red rectangles and presented here at 100%.

Overall the Cyber-shot HX9V image looks very good. It’s well exposed, nice and contrasty with a histogram that shows a tiny bit of clipping at the highlight end, the colours are nicely saturated and the auto white balance has done an excellent job.

What about the detailed view? The first crop holds no surprises, as you might have expected, the Cyber-shot HX9V’s 16.2 Megapixel sensor doesn’t capture the same degree of detail as we’ve seen from lower resolution Cyber-shots. The detail in the grass and rocks looks a little fuzzy and there’s a faint light halo around the chapel and wall which extends along the horizon.

Moving down to the second crop, the detail here is holding up well despite the slight graininess. The lighthouse is a well-defined white column and you can see the detail in the island on which it stands. In the foreground of this crop the edge detail in the windows is, though not pristine, reasonably crisp.

The crop from the edge of the frame looks a little clumpy, but there’s no fringing and back in the centre on the last crop there’s dood detail everywhere and the lettering on the banners is perfectly legible. This is an excellent result for the Cyber-shot HX9V. The level of detail in these crops proves that it is possible to produce a 16 Megapixel sensor that’s capable of the same kind of detail resolution as 14 and even 12 Megapixel sensors, quite an achievement.

Compared with the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS I was quite surprised to see less of a quality difference than I would have expected between 12.1 and 16.2 Megapixel models. Because of the Cyber-shot HX9V’s higher resolution the crops actually show larger image detail despite the matching focal length at which these images were shot (the Sony was zoomed in slightly to match the PowerShot SX230 HS’s 5mm maximum wide angle). In the first crop the Cyber-shot HX9V doesn’t pick out the detail as clearly as the PowerShot SX230 HS, but compare the second row and there really isn’t a great deal in it. The Cyber-shot doesn’t suffer from chromatic aberration to anything like the same degree as the PowersShot SX230 HS and again in the fourth crop it’s a very close call.

Compared with the Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 the Sony Cyber-shot HX9V comes out clearly in front. From the first crop the TZ20 / ZS10 is looking a great deal grainier overall and in subsequent crops the Lumix TZ20 suffers from a quite unpleasant and visually intrusive clumping of pixels which, along with the noise, reduces the amount of fine detail you can see and gives the image a very processed look. By the final crop things are looking a little more balanced but, overall, the crops from the 14.1 Megapixel Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 can’t match those from either the 12.1 Megapixel Canon PowerShot SX230 HS or the 16.2 Megapixel Sony Cyber-shot HX9V.

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

Sony Cyber-shot HX9V	Canon PowerShot SX230 HS	Panasonic Lumix TZ20

f8, 100 ISO	f4 100 ISO	f4, 100 ISO


f8, 100 ISO	f4 100 ISO	f4, 100 ISO


f8, 100 ISO	f4 100 ISO	f4, 100 ISO


f8, 100 ISO	f4 100 ISO	f4, 100 ISO

Sony Cyber-shot HX9V results : Real-life resolution / High ISO Noise

Sony Cyber-shot HX9V vs Canon PowerShot SX230 HS vs Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 Noise

	Sony Cyber-shot HX9V results
1	Cyber-shot HX9V Resolution
2	Cyber-shot HX9V Noise
3	Cyber-shot HX9V Sample images

To compare noise levels under real-life conditions we shot this scene with the Sony Cyber-shot HX9V, Canon PowerShot SX230 HS, and Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10 within a few moments of each other using their best quality JPEG settings at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.

All three cameras were set to Program auto exposure mode and the lenses were set to approximately the same field of view, around 5mm to match the PowerShot SX230 HS. The ISO sensitivity was set manually.

The above shot was taken with the the Sony Cyber-shot HX9V in Program auto mode. The lens was zoomed in slightly to 4.8mm (27mm equivalent), the sensitivity was set to 100 ISO and the exposure was 1/5th of a second at f3.5. The crops are taken from the area marked with the red square and presented below at 100%.

The 100 ISO crop from the Cyber-shot HX9V is, by any measure, a clean result with very slight evidence of noise or noise processing. but the step up to 200 ISO results in a significant drop in quality. Take a look at the detail in the stone column on the left of the crop and the vertical lines between the wood panelling on the front of the church organ. Detail that’s clearly visible in the 100 ISO crop is obscured in the 200 ISO one. Having said that, while there’s clearly a lot of noise processing going on behind the scenes, the result isn’t dreadful and I doubt you’d notice at less than 100 percent view. In fact I checked and you can’t tell the difference at 25 percent, but you can, just, at 50 percent.

At 400 ISO the noise is too much for the processing to deal with and there’s now a lot of graininess around, but this is still within the bounds of acceptable image quality, you can see the noise, but it’s not so intrusive as to make you think twice about taking shots at this setting. At 800 ISO and beyond though, the game is up and the noise clearly has the upper hand. Overall though, this is a good result for the Cyber-shot HX9V and the best performance yet we’ve seen from a 16 Megapixel compact sensor.

Compared to the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS, there’s not much in it at the start, though the SX230 HS 100 ISO crop looks to have the better of it in terms of fine detail. At 200 ISO, though, the Cyber-shot HX9V crop takes a sharp quality dip with agressive noise procesing resulting in significant detail loss. At each step up the ISO scale the quality gap between the PowerShot SX230 HS and Cyber-shot HX9V gets progressively bigger. While the Cyber-shot HX9V can produce great results at its base 100 ISO setting, once you raise it the cracks begin to show up pretty quickly. We’ve included the Cyber-shot HX9V’s anti motion blur composite scene mode in preference to Hand-held Twilight mode which, though qualitatively better, underexposed the scene.

Compared with the Panasonic Lumix TZ20 / ZS10, as in our real-world resolution test, the Cyber-shot HX9V has a clear advantage. This is most apparent in the 100 ISO crop with the HX9V crop showing more detail and less noise than the one from the Lumix TZ20 / ZS10. Despite the drop in quality as the Cyber-shot HX9V moves to 200 ISO, it’s still a superior result to the 200 ISO crop from the Lumix TZ20 / ZS10. And the HX9V maintains that edge all the way up the sensitivity range. Though it lacks a full resolution 3200 ISO setting the Lumix TZ20 / ZS10’s High Sens scene mode produces 3M images at 3200 ISO and the Handheld Night Shot mode has produced a good result at 400 ISO.

Now head over to our Sony Cyber-shot HX9V sample images to see some more real-life shots in a variety of conditions.

Sony Cyber-shot HX9V	Canon PowerShot SX230 HS	Panasonic Lumix TZ20

100 ISO	100 ISO	100 ISO


200 ISO	200 ISO	200 ISO


400 ISO	400 ISO	400 ISO


800 ISO	800 ISO	800 ISO


1600 ISO	1600 ISO	1600 ISO


3200 ISO	3200 ISO	Hi Sens 2000 ISO


Anti Motion Blur 3200 ISO	Handheld Night Scene 800 ISO	Handheld Night Shot 400 ISO