So as many of you know i’m going on a month long European Vacation in July. And i like to geotag my images in iphoto and on flickr. So i went out looking for a camera with GPS built in. Finding GPS cameras online was harder than i thought. Amazon.com list was mostly non camera things. Newegg doesn’t have a GPS camera options. I ended up having to go to each of the major manufacture and even then GPS was like a hidden feature no one wanted to talk about….
So i finally found a youtube review of the Cybershot DSC-HX5V and it a ton of features including GPS so i went ahead and bought it instead of spending more hours searching for Camera.
I got the Camera on Thursday and it is amazing!!!!
Now a quick review of some of the features.
GeoTagging (GPS)
First the bad, the GPS only works if your out side. If i am in a car i need to put the camera close to the window or it won’t be able to get a signal. Ontop of that you need to update the GPS assist data. With out it the camera can take minutes to get a position. With it normally respond really quickly (while outside). Sony only provides a way to update this data on Windows, but if you have a Mac like me, people have already created a work around. http://blog.brixandersen.dk/?p=153
If the camera can’t get a GPS single it will use the last known location. I with the GPS was strong, but i believe for the trip i am taking this will work in most cases.
Panoramas
I love this feature. All you have to do is push a button and move the camera to the right until it gets a 150 Degree i think view and then the camera stitches the panama together for you.
I took a few in my back yard. It did a damn good job too, i honestly can’t see where the images where stitched together .
On top of that one of the really cool feature of the panorama mode is the ability to capture moving objects with out breaking them in parts. One of my afgan hoods was walking in this picture. By the time i finished he was in that door, when i started he was at the line in the middle of the picture. The camera was able to place just one of him in the picture and not bits and pieces, which is pretty epic.
Intelligent Auto Adjustment
This feature is epic. This is the standard shooting method, it will pic the best Scene selection in the camera for what your taking a picture of. And it works really really really well. 95% of my picture are going to end up being taken in this mode because it just works.
Backlight Correction HDR
This allow you to take 2 picture. A dark one and a light one and combine them together. I tried this out by point the camera at 2 trees in our back yard when the sun directly behind them. Normally the sun would create a huge flair. But in the quicker dark picture not as much light was captured you can see the trees with out the sun flair.
Face Recondition, and Smile detection, and anti blink detection
I am going to group these together. The camera can detect up to 10 (or maybe 8) faces at a time. You can give priority to a face as well. The closes, to an adult face or a child face. If you have it set for priority on the face then the smile/blink detection is only on for that face.
The smile detection works.. kind of. If you smile it automatically take a picture. Some time it a good picture.. other time its not and it really funny. The anit-blink detection pretty much just take a second image if someone blinks.
- A few other small features. The camera can take 10 pictures in a second (but then take 10 second to save them all).
- Wide screen mode sucks. It takes the 10MP 4 by 3 image, cut the top and bottom off and not you have a 16 by 9 image that is 7MP…. That not true wide screen that just cutting off the top and bottom off a picture.
- The quality seem 100 times better than my 7PM canon camera.
Over all the 349 bucks i spent on this camera was well worth it and i hope to have a ton of great picture for you guys in July from Eroupe
