Product Tour
In size and shape, the H20 is midway between a compact and an ultrazoom - it lacks the thin profile and sleek design of a compact camera, but is much smaller and thinner than its long-lens-equipped cousins such as the Sony HX1. The H20 has a rather blocky design, but it is practically, rather than flashily styled.
Front
On the front of the camera, the main feature is the lens. To the right of this is the AF illuminator, and the small holes to the left of the lens are for the microphone. Above the lens you can see the hump that holds the flash.
Back
The back of the camera is the location of most of the controls. At the right are the playback button, the 4-way controller and the buttosn for accessing the on-screen menu and deleting images. The patch above the buttons is where the thumb of the right hand rests while holding the camera.
Sides
Both of the sides are relatively feature-free. The only feature on the left is a small strap loop at the top.
On the right side is a similar loop, and you can see the edge of the mode dial.
Top
Several more controls are located on the top of the camera. From the left, we have the on/off button, the smile shutter (which takes a photo when it detects a smile), the shutter and zoom control and the mode dial. As the legends indicate, the zoom control doubles as a playback zoom.
Bottom
The bottom is where the power goes; the cover over the battery compartment is on the left. Above this is the connector for the multi use cable that provides video output or connects to the optional dock. On the right is a tripod socket, which is filled with a security device in this demo unit.
Hardware
Viewfinder
There is no viewfinder on the H20; all photos are framed and displayed on the LCD screen.
LCD
The LCD screen of the H20 is a 3-inch model with 230,000 pixels. We found the screen to be clear and bright when we looked at a demo unit at the PMA show, but we were not able to test it in the bright daylight that can turn many screens into pale shades of their indoor selves.
Flash
The H20 has a rather small flash that lives in the hump above the lens. This pops up when required, and can be easily pushed down again when not needed. Sony claims that the flash has a range of 23 feet, but this seems a little optimistic to us; we wouldn't be surprised if it was not much use beyond a few feet.
Lens
The H20 is built around a 10X zoom lens, with a focal length equivalent to a 38 to 380mm lens on a 35mm film camera. While that's plenty at the telephoto end, the wide angle is disappointing, as 38mm won't allow you to get in a large group of people, or an expansive landscape. The aperture of the lens is also on the weak side; it goes from f/3.5 to f/8 at the wide end and f/6.3 to f/8 at the telephoto end.
Jacks, Ports & Plugs
The H20's connection to the outside world is through a single port on the bottom of the camera. The supplied multi connector cable plugs into this and provides video and audio outputs, plus a USB connection.
Battery
The battery of the H20 has a claimed battery life of around 290 images, which is decent, if unspectacular.
Memory
Like most Sony cameras, the H20 uses Sony's own Memory Stick Pro Duo memory cards rather than the more common SDHC cards .
Design & Layout
Design & Appearance
The H20 has a rather blocky, chunky design that makes it look more like a piece of industrial equipment than a camera. But it is significantly smaller than many ultrazoom cameras, such as the Olympus SP-590UZ.
Size & Handling
The blocky design of the H20 means that it fits well into the hand; the sizeable grip gives plenty to hold onto and the shutter and zoom controls fall naturally under the hand. The mode dial is a little bit awkward, but it is possible to change modes using the thumb while holding the camera in one hand.
Menu
Sony has adopted the same cross-bar menu system that many of their products use for the H20; you move up and down with the 4-way control to choose which menu item to change, then left and right to choose the setting. This does involve a fair amount of button pressing to get to some options in the program mode, but the camera restricts the list in most of the modes; in Easy mode, there are only two menu options; image size and flash.
Ease of Use
The H20 strikes a decent balance between having a long feature list and being easy to use; we found that most operations were easy to do, but that you could dig in and tweak the settings if required.
Modes
Auto Mode
The H20 has two auto modes; easy mode and the Intelligent Auto mode. The former is a full auto mode; everything but the image size and the flash mode is controlled by the camera, leaving the user to focus on framing and taking the shot. The intelligent adjust mode provides a bit more control for the user, as settings such as white balance can be controlled.
Movie Mode
The H20 is another camera to follow the trend of adding high definition video recording; it can shoot video at up to 720p resolution. That's an improvement on the standard definition video that most capture, but it is lower in resolution than cameras such as the Sony HX1 and the Canon XS1, which can record full 1080p video. And there is no HDMI digital video output; the high definition video output is analog only, via component cables. Videos are stored as MP4 files, and there are additional options to capture video at standard definition resolutions.
Drive/Burst Mode
The H20 is a middling camera in terms of the speed at which photos can be captured: it can only manage a relatively pedestrian 1.8 frames per second, although it can keep this up for 100 frames.
Playback Mode
The usual selection of preset controls is present; images can be viewed as slideshows, as thumbnails (up to 9 on the screen at once) or zoomed in up to 10X. Videos can also be viewed, and there are a few basic image editing tools, such as a crop and resize option.
Custom Image Presets
The H20 has 11 scene modes; High Sensitivity, Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Soft Snap, Landscape, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, Hi-speed Shutter, Underwater and Gourmet.
Controls
Manual Controls
A full manual mode is on offer by turning the mode dial to M. The user can then set the shutter speed and aperture directly using the 4-way control. This will be welcomed by photographers who want to take more control of the shooting process; having manual controls allows for more creative freedom.
Focus
There are nine focus points and three different focus modes: center weighted, spot and a semi-manual mode where the user sets the approximate focus distance and the camera refines it from there. There is no full manual focus mode on offer, but there is facial recognition, which can recognise, focus on and expose for up to eight faces in the frame.
ISO
The ISO range is from 80 up to 3200; a decent range that allows for shooting in everything from bright daylight to almost total darkness.
White Balance
The usual suspects are offered for setting white balance, with a full auto mode, 11 presets and a one-push set mode that uses a white or grey object to judge the white balance.
Metering
The H20 uses a muti-pattern measuring system to judge the appropriate settings for shooting a screen, but does not include the usual center weighted and spot metering modes.
Shutter Speed
The shutter speed ranges from 1 second down to 1/2000 of a second in the program auto mode, or 2 seconds in the Easy mode.
Aperture
Sony quotes the aperture range as being f/3.5 to f/8.0 at the widest zoom point, but doesn't specify what happens to it at the other end of the zoom range.
Image Stabilization
The H20 has the ubiquitous SteadyShot optical image stabilization, but Sony also claims that the wide ISO range of the camera will help take sharper photos, and the modes are apparently designed to take this into effect.
Picture Quality & Size Options
Five different options are offered for image size, ranging from the maximum 10.1 megapixel size down to 2 megapixels. There are no options for different image compression levels, but there are fine and standard quality settings for video recordings.
Picture Effects
Several image editing tools are provided, including the ability to turn images to black and white, a fisheye filter and an unsharp mask filter. We find it hard to see who would use these; you would get better quality and more flexibility using an image editing program on a PC or Mac.
Conclusion
Meet the tester
Richard Baguley is a veteran writer who has written about technology ranging from Alphabet to Zip file utilities. He has contributed to pretty much every major tech publication, including Amiga Format Magazine, PC World, Wired, CNET, Toms Guide, Forbes, and many others. He lives in the Boston metro area with his wife, dog, and an indeterminate number of cats.
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