Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX5

Shooting Modes (14.75)

For real point & shoot use, the TX5 offers program mode, Intelligent Auto Adjustment mode or the Easy mode. As the names suggest, these offer varying amounts of user control; the program mode lets you configure most settings, while the Intelligent Auto Adjustment mode cuts down on the number of options that the user is presented with. The Easy mode puts everything into automatic; the only thing the user has control over is the image size, if the flash is in auto mode or is off and the self timer. This is obviously designed for the novice or nervous shooter, and it works well, simplifying the process of shooting and increasing the font size for those who may have difficulty reading the small on-screen text.

One thing that is missing from this camera is any sort of manual control: there is no way to set the shutter speed or aperture directly on this camera.

Auto Mode Features

Focus – We found the auto focus of the TX5 to be generally speedy in both normal light and low light. It usually took less than a second to find the right focus point, and was often much quicker. There are also a number of ways to control the focusing, including a neat feature where you tap on the touch screen to select the focus point. This is useful if you are trying to take a photo with the subject off-center. You can also set the camera to either automatically use 9 focus points, or to the center of the screen as the focus point, looking either at a small area or a single point in the middle.

Face detection is also available, with the camera being able to recognize up to 8 faces in the frame. You can either select the face to use as the focus point by tapping on it, or set the camera to prioritize on adult or child faces.

Exposure – A limited amount of control over how the camera exposes is available: in program mode, you can apply up to 2 stops of exposure compensation, in one third of a stop steps. This control (which Sony calls EV) is a little buried, though; you have to go into the main menu and select it, then set the level of compensation with a draggable scale on the screen. This camera does not support auto exposure bracketing: there is no way to get it to take a series of exposures at different levels automatically.

Metering – The usual metering mode options are available in program mode: there is an automatic evaluative mode (called multi), center weighted and spot metering. Enabling face detection also sets the camera to meter correctly for the faces in the image.

Aperture – The TX5 has a decent aperture range for a compact point & shoot; it has a range of f/3.5 to f/6.3 at all zoom settings.

Shutter Speed – The shutter speed range of the TX5 is also decent: it can go from a 1 second exposure down to 1/1600 of a second. Night owls might miss the longer shutter speeds that some cameras offer, but that’s a wide enough range for a general use camera, especially when there is no manual mode that gives you direct control over the shutter speed.

Self Timer – As well as the usual options of a 2 or 10 second delay, the TX7 also uses its face detection as a self timer. It can hold on taking the photo until it detects either one or two faces in the frame for self portrait or couple shots. There is also a smile detect feature that can be used to take a smiling self portrait by holding off from taking the photo until it detects a smile.

Scene Modes

A wide selection of scene modes are also on offer: 12 in total. These include options such as Twilight, Gourmet, Pet and hi-speed shutter. In addition to these, the TX5 offers 4 special shooting modes:

iSweep Panorama – This mode allows you to take panoramic shots with a single sweep of the camera: you press the shutter, sweep the camera around in the indicated direction, and it takes a series of photos and stitches them together to form the panorama. These can be either vertical or horizontal panoramas, and we were impressed with the quality of the results: the camera did a good job of producing smooth, clean panoramas with little evidence of clipping or where the frames are blended together. This mode pioneered with the DSC-HX1 that was launched last year, but Sony claims to have improved it since then. It still needs to be used carefully, though, as objects can get chopped up. If you look closely at the buoy on the right of this panorama, you can see that it appears to get transparent, because of the movement of the buoy in the choppy San Francisco bay. You can see the full version of this file in our sample photos section.

Anti Motion Blur – In this mode, the camera takes 6 shots in quick succession, then amalgamates the shots to produce the sharpest image. The results are processed to make the image as sharp as possible. We found this to be fairly effective in reducing blur; in the photos below, the one at the top was taken in program mode, and the bottom one in Anti-Motion Blur mode. The right one is much sharper because the camera detected the motion of the car and used the multiple frames it captured to produce a sharper image. It isn’t perfect, though; the car is still rather blurry.

Hand-Held Twilight – Shooting in the evening hour can be tricky: low light means that you have to use a longer shutter speed, which means a blurry image. This mode tries to get around this by quickly taking 6 photos, then combining the images to form the final one, discarding any images that are blurry. We found that this produced very attractive results, producing sharper images with more dynamic range than images taken in the standard night scene mode.

Backlight Correction HDR – This mode uses HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing, where the camera combines two images taken at different exposure settings to increase the dynamic range of the camera, so shadow details are more visible. The camera takes one photo metering for the background and another metering for the subject, then combines the two to try and capture the detail of the subject. In the examples below, the left photo was taken in program mode, and the right in Backlight Correction HDR. Below each image is a 100 per cent crop of the edge of the tree to show the difference.

Picture Effects (0.00)

The TX5 doesn’t offer any picture effects, although you can do some basic editing after the photo is taken.

Manual Controls (6.83)

The common options are also available for white balance: you can set it to auto or any one of 7 presets (which include an option for flash). A custom mode is also available, where you take a photo of a white object and the camera uses this to judge the white balance point.

Drive/Burst Mode (5.50)

The fancy Exmor R sensor chip inside the TX5 camera gives it an edge: Sony claims it can capture a burst of 10 images at full resolution in around a second. We found it was a little slower than that (see below), but it is still a pretty speedy camera. There are also three options for burst mode; high, medium and low. The low speed captures about 2 frames a second, but is still limited to 10 shots. Unfortunately, there is no mode for continuously shooting images and saving them to the memory card, or a mode for shooting images at a preset interval. With all of these modes, you have to wait for some time for the camera to write the images out to the memory card; typically about 10 to 13 seconds.

Shot to Shot (10.49)

The TX5 is a speedy camera: we measured the fastest burst rate at 8.88 frames per second, a whisker below the 10 fps figure that Sony quotes. Some other point & shoot cameras can achieve similar speeds by reducing the resolution, but the TX7 still captures the full resolution 10 megapixel images at this speed, which is impressive.