Bought the H5 from Amazon.com at 406 US $. Convert to INR 18200/- (Sonyshowroom price 29990/- .So didn’t rate it that good for value formoney)
Ease of use: Use the auto mode for regular shooting. It will takehardly 2 secs to shoot a sudden incident with no compromise on imagequality if light is not too low and if u have experience with point andshoot cameras.
Super steady shot: Simply awesome helps a lot at 12X zoom. As longas you are not a heavy smoker that your hands shake a lot when you holdthings, you dont need a tripod.
Shutter speed: Literally helps you shoot anything in darkness that you cannot see with your eyes.
You can put reduce the shutter speed to 30 secs. Keep the camera onsomething, click half way down, set 2 secs timer and then clickright away. I shot at 10:15 PM when it was total dark, I was amazed atthe image, no one would believe I took the shot at night, it seems Itook it at sunset.
- Zoom: whooping 12X zoom, reach places which you cant see. I shot anaircraft taking the last turn before preparing to land. I couldsee the passengers in the cabin peeping outside from the windows. Hadit been a bit more I could have used it to see if there are people Iknow in it. ;-)
Anyone from bangalore, I took a shot of the tall Utility building in MGRoad from the dairy circle flyover. I Could see thru the windows.
Sports mode: Shoot anything from fast moving cars or shoot anythingmoving fast, it wont blur if there is a bit lack of light.
The flash is very powerfull. One can have bright images in pubs where the light is deemed.
LCD: Its simply a big portable high resolution TV. Reviewing pics will no longer need a PC.
Continuos Auto focus lets you shoot unexpected objects without wasting time on focusing the object.
And in manual mode you have lots of options to play with, in theright combination you can shoot anything at whatever surrounding withthe perfect picture quality and effect.
Create DVDs with the MPEG VX mode, 30 frames per second at 640X480resolution. Clarity would be same as that of Original Hollywood DVDs.
macro mode is superb: It can focus objects as near as u can, I meanu need to keep some space between the lens and the object to let lightfall on it. Now imagine I came to know that the hairs in the legs of acockroach had sub-hairs, only after shooting a dead cockroach inverted.
CONS:
Do not expect it to slip in your waist bag or pocket. It is heavy soyou cannot hang it on your neck for long with the straps supplied with.
Support and availabilty of memory sticks of Capacity more than 8 GB I felt is required if you shoot video in fine mode.
You need to get used to it to hold, else accidently u might end uppressing the macro button and end up with unfocused images. The reararea of the camera is too much taken up by the huge LCD.