We used the lenses at their widest and longest focal lengths and with the apertures wide open. The crops are taken from the upper left corner of the chart and presented here at 100%.

The Sony H9 suffers from quite noticeable coloured fringing in its corners when zoomed-out or in, and sadly this doesn’t improve as you close the aperture. It’s just something you’ll need to live with if you want this 15x optical zoom.

To measure and compare the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9’s macro performance we photographed a custom chart using it and a number of rival super-zoom models with their built-in lenses.

Each camera was positioned at a distance and set to a focal length which delivered the maximum possible reproduction.

The dark lines are 10mm apart and the result is not cropped. Smaller areas are preferred in this test. The image left was taken with the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9 in its Macro mode.

The Sony H9 can focus as close as 1cm from its subject when zoomed-out, which allows for some very impressive macro-photography. Obviously like other cameras which focus down to 1cm, the challenge at such close range is avoiding casting shadows on the subject or even prodding it with the lens. The shot above was taken as close as we could get to our chart without completely obscuring the illumination. We’re confident you could get a fraction closer still to match the result from the Olympus SP-550UZ, although when zoomed-out, you will suffer from noticeable geometric distortion with the H9. Still a good result here for the H9 though.