PHOTO QUALITY. This 18-megapixel superzoom camera captured images with merely fair quality. We judged this model very good for outdoor performance, such as shooting landscapes in the daytime; good for indoor performance, such as photographing a well-lit basketball game in a gym.
FLASH. The Cyber-shot HX90V captured flash shots that were good. In our distance test, we found the camera's flash could illuminate subjects very well, both near and far. The flash also has good, relatively even coverage.
LENS. It has a very long 30x zoom lens that can be great for travel and sports shooting when you need to zoom in far to capture your subjects. The lens also has very wide-angle (24mm) capability that's very useful for landscapes and group portraits, although you may notice a bit of distortion when you're shooting faces up close, for instance.
IMAGE STABILIZATION. This is an important feature with a long zoom lens; taking hand-held shots at the telephoto end of the zoom range can generally blur or soften images due to the slight movement of your hands. Shooting zoom set at 4x in well-lit scenes, this model did a very good job of minimizing the effects of camera shake. Shooting telephoto in well-lit scenes, this model did only a fair job of minimizing the effects of camera shake. In low-light settings, its performance was fair and often produced blurry photos. Overall, the shake reduction results from our tests were fair.
SPEED. In terms of performance, the Sony Cyber-shot HX90V powers up in a moderate amount of time.
VIDEO. The Sony Cyber-shot HX90V takes good video. It captures full HD video at 1920 x 1080 60p. As for sound, it captures excellent audio in stereo.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS. It has an electronic viewfinder, a rarity for point-and-shoot models, which we found to be very good. Although it has a display with 921,600 pixels, which should make it sharper than most in its class, we didn't find that the display stood out from the pack. This superzoom is much smaller, thinner and lighter than most in its class.
