Three of a Kind (well, now down to one)

New features of the Sony DSC H50

Every generation of new digital cameras must have new features. This is a law as immutable as gravity…a certainty only equaled by the inevitable upward creep of pixel count.

Last year’s feature of moment was face detection. The camera looked for, and recognized up to 8 faces in each shot, locked on to them, and computed the best focus point and aperture to keep them all in focus. Pretty slick. (If your camera didn’t have it, you were, like, ancient history.) The H9 had it. I never tried it.

You can almost picture imagine the Sony engineers and marketing people sitting around the break room sipping their fruit flavored soy shakes and asking themselves: “But what are we going to do this year to top face detection? Where is the new frontier?”

Smile Shutter

Imagine a camera that not only recognizes faces…it recognizes smiles, and will wait until face in the image smiles before releasing the shutter and setting off the flash. You would press the shutter down to activate smile shutter mode and then take your finger completely off the release. Like auto pilot for cameras. The camera will then track the face, and only take the shot when it detects a smile. it would then remain in smile shutter mode until you took it out, capturing as many smiles as happen (or at least the ones that happen when the flash is recycled if you are shooting indoors).

Okay, so you would need a way to fine tune the system, since there are big smiles and small smiles, and you might either want to catch them all, or only the really bigs ones. You would want to be able to adjust the smile sensitivity from, say, Mona Lisa to Vegas show girl.

Yeah right.

Well, yeah, right! Sony has done just that. And it works. It is the strangest, most wonderful example of largely superfluous, and totally amazing, technology I think I have ever seen. I mean, what photographer worth his or her investment in memory cards (or sticks in Sony-speak) is going to miss a smile?

Evidently Sony thinks there are a lot of us.

And it is totally amazing. Your kids will get a huge kick out of it the first time you try it. (Okay, we all know a few teenagers who will make the camera wait a very, very, very long time in smile mode…just to be themselves…but a few exceptions just prove the rule (or so they tell me).)

I happen to live in the perfect household to test smile shutter. I live with, at the moment, three of the finest young actors in Southern Maine. No. Really. (Kelia Ingraham appearing as Chip in Beauty and the Beast at the Arundel Playhouse beginning June…etc. etc.) I mean these kids can smile on demand…but more to the point, they can not smile on demand. A few moments with the two who are home this evening and I am a total convert. Smile Shutter is way cool. Smile Shutter works. I might even use it (once in a while).

And, if you want to look totally, totally cool to your technosavy friends and family (including, we all suspect, secretly, the unsmiling teen in the hoody) just demonstrate Smile Shutter. Let them do it. It is sooooo cool.

A post script: when demonstrating this feature to my wife yesterday and describing face recognition, she, practical being that she is, asked “But if you have more than one face in the image does it just fire off when the first one smiles? Everybody else might be scowling.” Good question. Good point. Models please!

And the answer, amazing as it may seem, is that, no, it does not just fire off when the first person smiles…it waits until all the faces are smiling! How cool is that?!

We also noticed that, because it catches the smile actually happening, as opposed to being held for the camera, the eyes come out way better…wide open…smiling just as much as the lips. I am actually going to use this feature. It goes beyond technology for technology’s sake to make a difficult task (individual or group spontaneous portraiture) much easier. That’s technology done right. Thank you Sony.

Selectable Noise Reduction

As I alluded to in the last section, one of the major complaints about the H9 was that the noise reduction, presumably, was too aggressive, and was wiping out fine detail in some images…smudging detail…even in images taken at low ISOs.

Sony’s response has had to wait for the H50 (bad on you Sony!) and has taken the form of Selective Noise Reduction. You have menu choices for Low NR, Standard NR, and High NR.

Other tests with the H50 vs the H9 have already shown that the Standard NR in the Sony H50 does a better job both of reducing noise and preserving detail…a very good trick indeed…since anyone who has ever tried software noise reduction, whether it is the standard Adobe flavor or an more exotic plug-in, knows that the more noise you remove, the more detail you lose. Fact.

In the Standard NR setting, Sony has done, to my eye, a exceptional job of balancing effective noise reduction with high detail. Supposedly they are using a new technology to accomplish this feat…but however they are doing it, it seems to work.

It works so well, in fact, that they may have eliminated the need for Selective Noise Reduction.

My tests show that there are indeed visible differences between the NR settings (at least when viewed at 200%), and that they are exactly what you would expect. Low NR preserves the most detail, but images taken with that setting would really require NR in post processing to make an acceptable enlargement, even at 100 ISO.

Standard, as above, is a very fine balance.

High produces almost noiseless images, but with a slight (but visible at 200% enlargement) loss of detail. Interestingly enough the High setting has less effect on higher ISOs than it does at lower…or, it may have the same effect, but the base line of noise is so much higher that the effect is not so noticeable. I may use High NR in certain tricky situations where I want the smoothest texture to the image, and I will certainly be shooting some images in both Standard and High just to have the option of picking the one that works best.

Here are full size files of two images on Standard NR, the first at ISO 100, and the second at ISO 400, and then 200% crops from the same images taken with Low (left), Standard (middle), and High NR (right).

Dynamic-Range Optimization Standard and Plus

Sony’s Dynamic-Range enhancement technology has evolved through several generations now. It works fairly well, “recovering detail lost in shadow areas” better than your average P&S. The Plus setting on the H50 (and the A200 for that matter) claims to “recover detail in shadow areas without losing highlights.” Casual tests so far show that it does indeed preserve more highlight detail, especially in sweeping landscapes with dramatic skies with majestic clouds (post card scenics!, but the legitimate staple of the landscape photographer).

The effect is not quite HDR (high dynamic range, generally produced through multiple exposures of the same scene at different exposure values, merged in software to produce optimum detail in both shadows and highlights, or through several processings of the same file merged to achieve a similar effect), but it is effective in expanding the dynamic range of the sensor just enough to be visible and useful.

Then too, I find that the jpeg images from even the standard D-R setting on the Sonys work better for multiple processing HDRs than conventional jpegs…it seems that there is more detail data there, especially in shadows, even when it has to be brought out in software after the fact.

D-R Plus just takes it one step further, to the point where most images will not need any D-R stretching in software to produce dramatic effects.

That is standard D-R first, and then the same scene with D-R Plus. And finally, the second file tweaked in LightZone for maximum drama.

Intelligent Scene Recognition

I had to download the pdf manual from the CD and read up on this one before I could get it to work. Fact is, there are some specific settings you have to make besides choosing SR or SR Plus in the menu…and the SR menu only appears when you have the camera in Auto mode (the little green camera on the function dial).

Once you get everything set right, however, it does work, automatically choosing appropriate exposure for back-light and twilight scenes…and, more importantly, post-processing the images to bring out detail that you would have otherwise lost. This is most useful when taking photos of people against a bright background…something that always takes some fiddling with EV compensation or manual controls otherwise. The image below was taken with face recognition on, and SR set. It correctly identified the scene as backlight, set the exposure, and post-processed before writing the image to the Memory Stick. Not bad at all. (No flash by the way.)

Conclusions

The H50 is clearly an improvement on the H9…most of the issues the H9 had with non-fuctioning features (Action Mode), and image quality overall have been, not only fixed, but often taken to a whole new level of quality and functionality. The H9 has an overall image quality that compares favorably with the A200 DSLR, and which, in some cases, at least with the kit lens that comes with the A200, actually exceeds the quality of the DSLR.

Macro shots with the H50, in particular, can be brilliant…stunning in their detail and clarity. Even scenics taken at good distances preserve a respectable amount of fine detail, with no sign of the smearing that sometimes diminished the quality of H9 images.

Noise, while not yet at the level of the DSLR with its much large sensor, is well controlled at the standard setting, the the High NR setting can save images taken at higher ISOs.

Still missing, and missed, are selective jpeg compression (though the H50 seems to maintain a good balance between small file size and quality), and raw capture.

Still there, and we wish it were not, is a noticeable amount of Purple Fringing in the corners of wide angle images. The PF is much reduced from the H9, and not much worse than the A200, but still, it seems like an intelligent software agent could detect and remove it before the image is written to the Memory Stick.

Still there and we are glad it is…

Most importantly, though, the H50 maintains all the use features and functions that made the H9 so much fun to use. Articulated LCD, composition gird, long range zoom, super-macro, compact size, light weight…the perfect (to my mind) go anywhere, do anything, camera.

And, it is somehow a more attractive camera too…the H9 always looked a bit geeky with it’s high EVF hump and chunky body style, and felt a bit plastic, a feeling only emphasized by the sloppy function dial.

The H50 looks and feels, and we can only think, is more refined. Small changes. But significant.

I said at the beginning that I am predisposed to like the H50 since I already invested in one…however nothing in my testing has made me regret my purchase. Quite the contrary. i am delighted with the H50: feel, function, image quality and features. This is the camera for me. No doubt about it.

I hope this review helps you to decide if it is the camera for you.