[Steggy]

Video samples inside video review

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It seems that Sony is a pretty hard company to miss recently with coverage on the Playstation Vita, their official Playstation 3 headset, the unfortunate PSN outage, etc. Back in January, Sony announced a batch of Cyber-shot cameras, including the TX100V. The TX100V brings a few firsts for Sony; it is the first digital camera to have 1080p 60p HD video, and it is the first Cyber-shot to have an OLED screen, which also happens to be a touch screen. I’ve been testing the TX100V for the past 2 months, and these are my thoughts..


Design:

The TX100V is priced at 380 dollars, and is one of the slimmest cameras you can get. It follows a design which I haven’t been a fan of in the past, but I’m coming around to it. Instead of the conventional extruding lens function, the TX100V uses a sliding door to reveal the lens for shooting. This has its advantages and disadvantages. This design makes the camera more pocket-friendly; you don’t have the dangers of your lens jamming from either accidentally turning on the camera in the pocket or God forbid a drop. In the past, the build quality of sliding doors on cameras has been pretty poor, and has been prone to user created damage: dirt causing gritty movement of the door, bends in the door, or worse. To my surprise, the quality of the TX100V’s door is substantially better than the past cameras of the same design. I wasn’t about to rub it in sand or dirt to test extreme durability or anything, but the door had a good thickness compared to others, and feels like it can stand the test of time.

The other design aspect I’ve been weary of in the past is the TX100’s touch screen interface. The TX100V is the first Cyber-shot to include an OLED screen, clocking in at 3.5” and 1,229K resolution. Again, in the past, I haven’t been fond of touch screen interfaces. Using cameras like the Nikon S4000, I’ve found touch screen cameras to have rather clunky UI’s, and I could get to the same menu much faster with buttons over touch screen. The TX100V has been an improvement over the other touch screen cameras I’ve used, but I will still prefer my buttons. Thanks to the high resolution screen, the image preview and menu icons are crystal clear. Navigating around the menu was actually simple enough, and you could do some neat post processing to your photos thanks to the touch screen. Sony includes a small stylus in order to use its ‘paint’ software on your taken photos. My big issue with the TX100V is that the responsiveness of the touch screen wasn’t perfect. It can’t compare to the responsiveness of a smart phone, but in most cases you should have success when tapping the menu icons.
As I’ve mentioned before, the design of the TX100V allows for easy pocketing. I was very pleased to see how well it handled traveling in my pocket. You always expect something with a big screen to get scratched easily, but the TX100V’s OLED display does not exhibit this; a welcome change from my testing of the Zoom Q3HD, which did suffer some scuffs/scratches on its LCD screen from travel. With the TX100V, I didn’t have to worry about applying a protective film over the screen, saving me from less responsiveness or a loss of image quality of the OLED screen, which was really beautiful, even trumping my Canon T1i’s 3” 920K screen.


Image Quality:

The TX100V packs a ton of consumer friendly features for your photo taking enjoyment. I can only say consumer, because the TX100V lacks manual control. I always love a camera that allows you to go into AV/TV/M modes, as it can allow someone to Segway into real photography by learning the concepts of shutter speed/aperture/ISO. You don’t get that with this camera. For all intents and purposes, the TX100V is a point and shoot. It is designed to be easily pocketed, taken out, powered on, and taking a picture of a group of friends. It features many scene modes for different….scenes (who would have thought?) as well as some unique modes. The TX100V allows you to take 3D images with its one lens through use of multiple photos/software magic. Unfortunately, how you can view these kinds of pictures is very limited. You can view them through special software on your computer, through your PlayStation 3, or what I did; simply showing friends on the camera itself after the image was taken. It’s a nice little feature to show at a party when the cameras are out, but it’s pretty gimmicky, and I don’t think these settings will occupy most of the photos you take. I was a big fan of the panoramic sweep mode, which is more universally viewable. Even with moving subjects in the frame, the pictures come out pretty nice, with minimal noticeable stitching. I also loved the HDR mode, which allows you to capture great dynamic images without fussing with Photoshop. For low light performance, the TX100V has a limited f3.5 aperture, but thanks to features like the superior auto mode, the camera can take a series of 6 pictures and layer them together for a nice looking photo even at night. Another feature which makes up for the f3.5 aperture is the blurred background mode, which is a macro mode of sorts. You do need to be close to the subject for the camera to be able to blur the background, but when it works, it looks very nice. As far as ISO goes, your only manual option is turning on high ISO mode which kicks the camera into ISO 1600, where yes, there is noise, which is to be expected at that level on a point and shoot. Other than that, setting ISO was up to the camera, though in superior auto mode, when looking at the EXIF for my night pictures, the ISO was clocked at 3200, and at that level, the noise handling was pretty impressive.





Video:

As stated, the TX100V is part of the batch of the first 60p 1080p cameras. On paper, it doesn’t get better than this. However, when using the video mode in the TX100V, there were things I liked and disliked. First and foremost, the quality of the picture itself is great; amazing for a point and shoot camera. The color/sharpness of this camera exceeds what you’d find in SD camcorders obviously, as well as HD flip camcorders. The motion can be a bit shaky when shot handheld, it is a smaller lens/camera itself, so it’s understandable, but in the past, I’ve regarded video with point and shoots with a “better than nothing” kind of mindset; it seems I will have to change this thanks to the TX100V. The TX100V also allows you to optically zoom when shooting video; something I’ve been wishing canon would add to their S95/G12 cameras. The zoom is smooth and silent, so you won’t have any motor sounds intruding your video clips. However, what I didn’t like about the video mode is you have to be mindful of how you hold the camera. You want to make sure your fingers don’t cover the microphones, get in the lenses way, and the zoom button is very small on top. What I also don’t like about the video mode is that while this camera achieves 60fps video, that’s the only option you get. The video choices you get are pretty convoluted, only by hitting the question mark icon and then the different video modes can you see what resolutions they are. You get 1440x1080 60i, 1920x1080 60i, 1920x1080 60i (I imagine this is a higher bit rate), and 1920x1080 60p. I’m always a fan of choice, and the option to shoot 720p or 24 fps would have been appreciated. As for audio quality, it’s on par with other onboard microphones in camcorders and other point and shoots. The TX100V has stereo mics which deliver ok sound. Along with image/video samples, you’ll see in the review how the microphone sounds when dealing with loud audio, a la a small piano recital. There is some distortion with the audio when recording louder sources, so if your plan for the camera is concert videos, I don’t know how this will fare.


Wrap-up:

So with everything said, is the TX100V a worthwhile purchase at $380? It all depends on what your uses are. At the price, one might be inclined to spend a bit more for a DSLR, I’ve even seen Sony’s A230L for $350 on Walmart.com a few months back. But each product is for a different person. If you are serious about photography or you want to learn the fundamentals, you might be disappointed at the TX100V’s lack of manual controls. If you’re looking for a camera that can be easily transported, can photos easily, and are looking for high quality photos and different modes to choose from, the TX100V is a fantastic choice. The TX100V is an attractive camera with a bright beautiful touch screen, and many shooting modes to keep you and your friends entertained. If you’ve got the deep pockets, I would not overlook this camera if I were you.