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Camera Review: Cyber-shot DSC-H527242679481Sony CybershotDSC-H5I was on my vacation, cooking my family breakfast when my phone rang. It was my editor from PopPhoto.com touching base with me. He asked about the cameras that I was using and reviewing and I told him that I loved the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 (Click here to see this review) but hated the Cyber-shot DSC-H5. Well, after sleeping on it for a few nights I've decided that hate may be a little strong. I think a better description would be that I have a love/hate relationship with this camera. With the H5, there really is no middle ground because the features are either wonderful or horrible. I had to wonder how one company could design two cameras that are so diametrically opposed. There are many features that I truly loved about this camera, but others that caused me total frustration. And unfortunately, those that caused frustration are some of the most important in making images. Hands Feel & Primary Features: The H5 (street $385) is a 7MP camera that reminds me of the old Bronica medium format cameras. It has a long, sweeping pentaprism-style bump that houses the Electronic View Finder (EVF) and under this, it has a gentle curve that fits your left hand well and is filled with the Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 12x optical zoom lens (36mm-432mm f/2.8-3.7 35mm equivalent) that incorporates Sony's optical image stabilization system. Holding the camera in your hands, you see how large and comfortable the hand grip is. The shutter release is big and covered in highly polished chrome that begs your finger to touch it. The function dial is oversized and very easy to read and use. The zoom toggle is placed precisely under your right thumb and the rest of the buttons are well laid out and exactly where you'd expect them to be. Put simply, the H5 is an ergonomic thrill ride.

I was on my vacation, cooking my family breakfast when my phone rang. It was my editor from PopPhoto.com touching base with me. He asked about the cameras that I was using and reviewing and I told him that I loved the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 (Click here  to see this review) but hated the Cyber-shot DSC-H5. Well, after sleeping on it for a few nights I've decided that hate may be a little strong. I think a better description would be that I have a love/hate relationship with this camera.

With the H5, there really is no middle ground because the features are either wonderful or horrible. I had to wonder how one company could design two cameras that are so diametrically opposed. There are many features that I truly loved about this camera, but others that caused me total frustration. And unfortunately, those that caused frustration are some of the most important in making images.

Hands Feel & Primary Features

The H5 (street $385) is a 7MP camera that reminds me of the old Bronica medium format cameras. It has a long, sweeping pentaprism-style bump that houses the Electronic View Finder (EVF) and under this, it has a gentle curve that fits your left hand well and is filled with the Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 12x optical zoom lens (36mm-432mm f/2.8-3.7 35mm equivalent) that incorporates Sony's optical image stabilization system. Holding the camera in your hands, you see how large and comfortable the hand grip is. The shutter release is big and covered in highly polished chrome that begs your finger to touch it. The function dial is oversized and very easy to read and use. The zoom toggle is placed precisely under your right thumb and the rest of the buttons are well laid out and exactly where you'd expect them to be. Put simply, the H5 is an ergonomic thrill ride.

The camera has nice aesthetics as well, featuring a bold ring of chrome that calls attention to the superior quality lens and the high carbon plastic body that has a matte black finish sprinkled with flecks of silver. The camera feels solid and well built and the buttons have a precise feel to them when pressed. For the price, the build quality is amazingly good. Other features are a huge, 3-inch (230,400 pixel) LCD screen that can also be used as a viewfinder when swapped with the EVF via the toggle button that's located to the right of the EVF prism. The LCD is sharp, bright and viewable from a very wide angle. The EVF has a 200,000 pixel screen and a well-hidden diopter correction located under the viewfinder that works well and gives the image in the finder some additional sharpness.

Another cool feature of the H5 is that there is a plethora of add-on features that can be purchased separately. These include a macro lens and ND filters (the lens has  standard 58mm threading, so you can use any photo filters that are 58mm), as well as telephoto and wide angle converter lenses. The H5 also comes equipped with a nice lens hood as well. Which begs the question: with all of these great features available, why didn't Sony include an external flash (maybe even with TTL) as well, like it's Kodak competitor, the EasyShare P712? Anyone who is interested in mounting different accessory lenses for this camera would probably like the option of a more powerful flash as well.

Battery

The H5 uses AA-sized lithium Ion batteries that ship with a charger. The advantage of using the AA design is that in an emergency, you can throw in an alkaline set of AA batteries and go. This may have been intentional because the charger that comes with the H5 is fairly slow. In some instances it took almost six hours to recharge a set of batteries. But when fully juiced, they are CIPA rated at 340 shots, respectable for this camera class.

I was also impressed with the quiet operation of this camera when all sound is turned off in the menu. The shutter in the H5 is so whisper quiet that I dare say you could take this camera into any situation where there's a need for silence and shoot available light images without interrupting. The only other camera I can compare it to as far as the low level of audio noise is a Leica.

Video Features

The H5 can also shoot extremely high quality video and has the ability to use the zoom lens at a reduced rate of speed in comparison to racking the zoom while shooting still photos. By slowing the zoom down, it eliminates most of the noise introduced when racking the lens during video capture. At its highest quality, the H5 can shoot 12 minutes of  uncompressed NTSC quality (640X480 @29.9 frames per second) video on a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card. At its lowest quality, the H5 is able to produce MPEG VX videos that use 8 fps at a resolution of 160x120. It is however, quite choppy and should be a last resort for video. There are other quality levels in between these that balance high quality video with storage economy that should serve just about anyone's needs.

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