Camera Review: SONY DSC-H5

by Dave Hanson

For the past four years many butterfliers have been using the very versatile Sony Mavica CD line of digital cameras. These are the CD250, 300, 400, and 500. The allure of these models was the excellent human interface and the large sunlight visible LCD screen. The CD-300 was reviewed by this author in the Summer 2002 issue of American Butterflies. The CD-300 had a 300 Megapixel (Mp) resolution and its macro capability was astonishing. Storage for all the CDs was on a removable compact disc that could be placed into any computers CD tray and the images became available at once. Discs were cheap and offered an easy way to archive your valuable photos. By mid 2004, the CD-500 (5Mp) had become the gold standard for many digital butterfly photographers. Then in late 2004 Sony introduced a new prosumer camera, the DSC-H1. Jeffrey Glassberg purchased one and demonstrated its capabilities several times in his trips to the Rio Grande Valley and NABA International Butterfly Park. The 12x telephoto, and image stabilization raised several eyebrows but old habits die hard and many of us were reluctant to give up our CD-500s since the H1 had no better resolution (5Mp) than the CD-500. In February 2006 Sony announced new H models. The H5 has a resolution of 7.2 Mp and a HUGE LCD screen. Although the H5 was not shipped to stores until mid May, the internet was buzzing. The new H5, in addition to the 12x zoom and large LCD had super image stabilization, many preset scene selections, ultra fast autofocus, almost instant on, an ISO 1000 setting for shooting in impossibly low light levels, a 30 fps 640x480 movie mode with sound, a real optical color viewfinder, and a storage chip the size of a postage stamp that can hold currently as many as 4 gigabytes of data. I have noticed recently that these 46 American Butterflies, Summer/Fall 2006 chips can be purchased for as low as $20 per Gigabyte. These chips plug directly into your computer and can transfer 100 images in about a minute. The batteries are two standard 2500 MaH, NiMH rechargeables and can be purchased for about three dollars apiece. They last a long time and a three hour charger comes with the camera. Independent reviews of the camera have been gratifying. You may go to the website: www.dpreview.com and see a complete and detailed review of the H5. The customer rating for the H5 is 4.25 stars out of 5. Jeff Glassberg reports that unlike the telephoto systems on other digital cameras he has tried, the H1 (and now the H5) usually finds and focuses on the butterfly even at 12x (although the quality of the image is inferior to that obtained in macro mode). For example, the first record of a Cafe-au-lait Hairstreak from Mexico (see American Butterflies 13:3, Fall 2005) was established with the H1 at a distance of more than 20 feet. In summary, the Sony DSC-H5 is a very versatile yet easy to use digital camera that should be considered not only for all outdoor nature work but also for family use as it has a wonderful point and shoot mode right on the selector dial for those folks who tend to shy away from the technical aspects of digital photography. Current street price on the H5 ranges from $379 to $479 on the internet. My advice would be to go to Circuit City (and possibly Best Buy) who advertises it for $404 and has a liberal return policy. One further note: I have recently discovered that the H5s zoom lens can be extended out as far as 2.5x and it will still focus down to an inch away from the subject. This really grabs super high resolution shots of small butterflies. If you still havent gone digital there is no time like the present.
Dave Hanson Jeffrey Glassberg
Top: A Crimson Patch lords it over a Red-spotted Patch for the H5. Nov. 9, 2006. Bentsen SP, Hidalgo Co., TX. Right: The image of an Orange Mapwing, captured by the H5 at full 12x telephoto extension. Aug. 6, 2006. Lagunas de Montebello, Chiapas, Mexico.

Comparison of Dark Flash Data with Sony DSC-WX1
Dilip Krishnan, Rob Fergus Computer Science Department Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

November 11, 2009

We compared the performance of the Dark Flash camera (modied Fujilm S5 Pro) with that of the Sony DSC-WX1, noted for its performance in low-light conditions. The Dark Flash camera had a 28mm Nikon lens tted. 3 sets of images were taken. The rst 2 were indoor shots of 2 subjects: Stanley and Matt, at 0.7 Lux and 1.0 Lux under tungsten illumination. The third set was an outdoors shot taken in a park at night with lights in the background, and the illumination was measured to be 1.1 Lux. For each set, rst we took an image with the Sony camera set to the High Sensitivity ISO mode, which is the special mode provided by Sony for photography in low light. When the camera is set to this mode, it automatically adjusts various parameters such as ISO, aperture and exposure time. We then adjusted the settings on the Dark Flash camera to match as closely as possible the settings for the Sony camera. Then we took a pair of ambient/dark ash images and reconstructed a clean ambient image with our software. In the table below, we list all the image le names. For each lename, we provide the settings for the Sony camera as well as for our camera; for each image, we provide exposure time in seconds, the ISO setting (automatically selected by Sony and manually adjusted by us), and the aperture setting (F-stop). It can be seen that our reconstruction is sharper and clearer, and also that the colors (for example, on the color chart) are better reconstructed. We were unable to extract the RAW image les off the Sony camera, so only JPG compressed les are available. It can also be seen that the ambient images taken by the Fujilm camera are much noisier than the output of the Sony camera. Despite the inferior sensor, we are able to extract a better signal from the input images and beat the performance of the Sony camera.
Figure 1: From Left to Right: Noisy ambient (1.0 Lux illumination) captured by Dark Flash camera Fujilm S5 Pro (ISO 3200, F 2.8, 1/4s); Reconstructed image from ash/ambient pair; Sony DSC-WX1 output (ISO 3200, F 2.4, 1/4s). Note loss of detail and color delity in the Sony output. 2
Figure 2: From Left to Right: Noisy ambient (0.7 Lux illumination) captured by Dark Flash camera Fujilm S5 Pro (ISO 3200, F 2.8, 1/4s); Reconstructed image from ash/ambient pair; Sony DSC-WX1 output (ISO 3200, F 2.4, 1/4s). Note loss of detail and color delity in the Sony output.
Figure 3: From Left to Right: Noisy ambient (1.1 Lux illumination) captured outdoors by Dark Flash camera Fujilm S5 Pro (ISO 3200, F 3.2, 1/5s); Reconstructed image from ash/ambient pair; Sony DSC-WX1 output (ISO 3200, F 3.2, 1/5s). Note loss of detail and color delity in the Sony output. 3
Filename stanley 1lux ambient.tiff stanley 1lux uvirash.tiff stanley 1lux reconstruction.tiff stanley 1lux sonyoriginal.jpg stanley 1lux sonycrop.tiff stanley p7lux ambient.tiff stanley p7lux uvirash.tiff stanley p7lux reconstruction.tiff stanley p7lux sonyoriginal.jpg stanley p7lux sonycrop.tiff matt 1lux ambient.tiff matt 1lux uvirash.tiff matt 1lux reconstruction.tiff matt p7lux ambient.tiff matt p7lux uvirash.tiff matt p7lux reconstruction.tiff matt p7lux sonyoriginal.jpg matt p7lux sonycrop.tiff outdoors 1lux ambient.tiff outdoors 1lux uvirash.tiff outdoors 1lux reconstruction.tiff outdoors 1lux sonyoriginal.tiff outdoors 1lux sonycrop.tiff

Details Stanley 1.0 Lux Noisy Ambient: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Stanley 1.0 Lux UV/IR Flash: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Stanley 1.0 Lux Reconstruction Stanley 1.0 Lux with Sony DSC-WX1, 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.4 Cropped version of above for ease of comparison Stanley 0.7 Lux Noisy Ambient: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Stanley 0.7 Lux UV/IR Flash: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Stanley 0.7 Lux Reconstruction Stanley 0.7 Lux with Sony DSC-WX1, 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.4 Cropped version of above for ease of comparison Matt 1.0 Lux Noisy Ambient: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Matt 1.0 Lux UV/IR Flash: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Matt 1.0 Lux Reconstruction Matt 0.7 Lux Noisy Ambient: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Matt 0.7 Lux UV/IR Flash: 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.8 Matt 0.7 Lux Reconstruction Matt 0.7 Lux with Sony DSC-WX1, 1/4s, ISO 3200, F 2.4 Cropped version of above for ease of comparison Outdoors 1.0 Lux Noisy Ambient: 1/5s, ISO 3200, F 3.2 Outdoors 1.0 Lux UV/IR Flash: 1/5s, ISO 3200, F 3.2 Outdoors 1.0 Lux Reconstruction Outdoors 1.0 Lux with Sony DSC-WX1, 1/5s, ISO 3200, F 3.2 Cropped version of above for ease of comparison
Table 1: Table with lenames for the different test images taken with Fujilm S5 Pro and Sony DSC-WX1 camera, as well as reconstructions by our software.