Smart Zoom
Digital cameras in the past had precision zoom (or digital zoom) that just blow up the picture by cropping and enlarging the image. Smart zoom actually lets you digitally zoom into an image size smaller than the 5mp maximum and yet with little or no loss in image quality. Smart zoom, when coupled with this megazoom camera results in outrageous zoom (48X in total).


No zoom, image taken at about 1.5m away.


12X optical zoom taken at same position. (Shaky hands here affected the image quality.)


48X zoom (12x optical, 36x smart zoom) in VGA mode (640x480)

Who needs a telescope when you had a camera like this. Sucre started to worry for our everyday privacy after she saw the capabilities of this camera. Thankfully, I stay at the top floor so it effectively reduces the probability of being watched.

White Balance
Besides offering 5 preset white balance settings and auto white balance, this babe comes with a manual white balance. You just show the camera something that is white and set the white balance against this white object, the camera will adjust other colours respectively. Though I know nuts about white balance (I don't take many photos under weird lighting conditions), I decided to play with this feature by telling the camera yellow is white.


Original photo with auto white balance showing the colours of the book nicely.


"White balanced" photo that seems blue-shifted. (note, the yellow used is from the same book)

The effect is not as dramatic as I thought it would be. That the yellow part of the book will become totally white or something. Perhaps the difference was too big for the camera to correct for. Anyway, since yellow is a warm colour, to correct for the warmness the image became cooler (bluish) so it works to a certain extent. I will be looking forward to a day, if ever, when I had to use this feature.

I think that's about all the stuff I had explored for this camera and I won't be adding on in the near future until I discover some more fun stuff or interesting issues with my H1. In the meantime, if you want to read a professional 13 page review of the DSC H1, you may read it here. While those who are looking for professional unbiased review may go here. The merit of this site is that they only list the pros and cons found with the camera and do not give a score for the camera so it is an unbiased review.

Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1