Sony CyberShot DSC-H1 Review

Overall Rating

Excellent ergonomic design (physical balance, shape, control and menu layout)
Outstanding focus accuracy down to total darkness, thanks to its focus illuminator (no hint of 'slow focus' problems some reviewers claim it has).
Excellent colour with good exposure control, producing very clean natural-looking pictures.
Image stabilization makes sharp, often astonishing hand-held extreme-zoom photos possible.
Excellent macro capability.
Large bright LCD monitor.
Fast USB 2.0 PC connection.

The electronic viewfinder is smaller than on my Olympus C-740, and can be hard to see properly in bright sunlight.
It is not exactly a 'compact' digital camera, but it is still much smaller and lighter than a 35mm or digital SLR.
The USB connector cover does the job but looks cheap.
There isn't simply a handbook, but a huge 'Read This First!' sheet which the handbook constantly refers to. This is an inconvenient and stupid way to do things, and there should only be one comprehensive owner's manual.

I've owned my Sony CyberShot DSC-H1 digital camera for only 17 days, and I have only had time to take about 200 photos so far. I bought it primarily because sample DSC-H1 images on the net were extremely sharp, well exposed and looked natural. Almost all user reviews were positive and recommended it. I was expecting an excellent digital camera, and I haven't been disappointed... quite the opposite!

It feels great in my hands, and all the controls are exactly where a right-handed person like me needs them to be.

As digital cameras go, this is a fairly large one which looks like it means business. I don't like to be conspicuous, but the DSC-H1 does tend to draw attention to itself with that huge lens. Good for show-offs, of course!

To sum up, I thoroughly recommend the DSC-H1 for people who are looking for a digital camera which gives full control over the picture-taking process so they can give free rein to their creativity. Of course it also has various preset settings for those who don't understand the finer points of photography.
It also takes high-quality movies with sound, but that's not what I bought it for.

Members' Comments onBobTech's Review

• ianux48 on 27th May 2006

  A good review, I find the only dissapointing aspect of this camera to be the lack of a Zeiss lens as fitted to 95% of sony image products, This would have improved the resolution of fine detail in the images, which is sometimes lost, otherwise a good review and a great camera for the money. I bet the replacements H2 and H5 will be better perfoming but will lack the build quality

• BobTech on 30th May 2006

  Re: Sony not Zeiss optics. I read somewhere that Carl Zeiss were not happy with the implementation of the image-stabilizing element and wouldn't put their name on it for that reason. I understand that the 'Zeiss' optics in other Sony cameras are actually made by Sony under license to Zeiss anyway. I thought about this before I bought the H1, and carefully studied photos from it, mainly on the Steve's Digicams website. I was impressed by their great sharpness and no more chromatic aberrations than I was getting with my faithful Olympus C-740. Now that I've owned the DSC-H1 for almost 4 months and have taken over 1,000 photos with it, I'm even more impressed than I was when I wrote that review. The photos it takes are consistently exceptionally sharp and I couldn't hope for anything better. Two things I'd like to add to my review: (1) The mode selector knob is highly polished and so reflective that it's hard to see the symbols in sunlight. Luckily the camera shows a graphic of the knob in the viewfinder/LCD while it's being adjusted, so it's not a big deal. (2) As others have commented, the flash tends to seriously overexpose in some situations, but mostly it's OK. The DSC-H1's been superceded as you noted, but it's still a very good camera. BobTech