Sony DSC-H55 digital camera review

When I got my last camera, I was 14 and John Kerry was running for president. I chose a camera with a rather generous 4 megapixels and 3x optical zoom, and I got a 128 MiB memory card so I could take a whopping 64 photos at a time... or almost 6 minutes of 640x480 video at 16 frames per second! Best of all, it only cost $300 ($338 in 2009 dollars).

How times have changed. After barely surviving a trip through Europe in my pocket last year, my beloved Sony DSC-P73 conked out in January as its refusal to read memory cards spread like a cancer to my last one. Clearly, it was time for an upgrade.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a photography expert, just an ordinary dude.)

I originally decided to go for the new Sony DSC-HX5V, but when I found out about the more affordable DSC-H55, I decided to wait until it came out in April. Recently, I ordered it from Amazon ($238.66) along with an SD card (finally, new Sony cameras support them), and I got them in the mail on Thursday.

So here's the skinny. The H55 has 14 megapixels and can shoot 720p video (1280x720, which is considered HD) at 30 frames per second. It has a 25-mm wide-angle lens and 10x optical zoom (which you can use while shooting video!). It also offers manual controls, which is a must for me because sometimes I can pick out better (or more creative) settings than the camera can.

I thought I wouldn't like the hand-holding features, like automatic scene selection and image stabilization, but they've turned out to be pretty handy in producing great photos and videos, respectively. Automatic orientation is cool too, even though probably every camera has had that for years. Oh, and I can set the time zone, so I won't have to update the clock twice a year. Again, probably something that every camera has had for a while.

Video shooting is one of the first features I tried out. It's as good as I could possibly hope for. The manual warns that the sound of the lens zooming in and out will be recorded, but in my limited experience, it's usually silent. I never took too many videos with my old camera, but since the quality is so good (and Linux video editing software is coming into its own), that will probably change now that I have this one.

As a technical note, videos are saved in the MP4 format. I prefer it to QuickTime, which I've seen some cameras use. Also, my 2:11 test video weighs in at 142 MiB (yes, I'm using IEC binary prefixes now because they're unambiguous), so consider that if you're thinking about buying a new memory card.

Aside from the video, my favorite feature has to be the wide-angle lens, which gets a lot more stuff into the shot than I'm used to. Here I've gotten a floor and a ceiling with four stories between them:

Not only can I get wider shots, but the 10x zoom lets me take narrower shots. That means I can take better pictures of things I don't want to get close to, like this alligator with a football in its mouth (seen here tightly cropped and at half the actual size):

The camera treats colors well. The automatic white balance does a good job of correcting for different types of light, like the incandescent bulb in my bedroom, whose light my old camera would leave as orange. The H55 is also kind to sunlight, as seen in this late-afternoon photo of the historic Florida Gym (which I've uploaded to Wikimedia Commons):

This camera isn't perfect. It seems pretty slow between shots (roughly 5 seconds, even with a Class 6 SD card), and it forces you to review each photo after you take it (maybe to help the time pass?). But there is burst mode, in which you can take up to five full-size photos in rapid succession. Also, I haven't noticed any speed-related problems when recording HD video, so I don't think the memory card is the issue.

I'd also read in reviews that the camera responds poorly to low light. That is correct. If it's at night and there aren't super-bright lights (or the camera's flash) around, you're going to see some noise, which ends up looking splotchy as the camera tries to smooth it over. It looks like one of those crappy Photoshop filters. To illustrate, here's a detail from a photo taken with automatic settings. (The splotchiness is still noticeable if the photo is scaled down further.)

There's one other thing that annoys me. There are some decals on the front of the camera that advertise the features, and they don't seem to come off.

Those are about the only faults I can find with the camera. I'm happy with it overall. It takes fantastic photos if there's more than a little bit of light. If I need to do some shooting at night and I can use the flash or set a long exposure, I will. For example, here's a 10-second exposure at night:

Not bad, I'd say.