Another newly acquired camera

by Posted in Cameras, Sony DSC-H50 Leave a comment
sonydsch50-1-of-2

A friend recently gave me some old cameras. There were two film cameras: a Minolta Maxxum 7000 and a Pentax MG. I already have a couple of Maxxum 7000s, and I wasn’t very interested in having another one. I was momentarily interested in the Pentax until I realized that the MG was the lowest in the line that included the much better MX, ME, ME Super, MV etc.. In any case the MG’s mirror was stuck in the up position and the film advance wouldn’t…er…advance. I might keep it as an illustration of a Pentax MG, but I don’t see ever using it.

sonydsch50-2-of-2

That just left the other two cameras: A Kodak P880 and this one: a Sony DSC-H50. This was fine because nowadays I’m mostly interested in trying older digital cameras.

I couldn’t use the P880 immediately because I didn’t have a memory card that was old enough, and low capacity enough to work with the camera: the smallest memory card I had was 4gb and it appears that the camera would support only up to 2gb. So off to see if I could find one.

That just left the Sony DSC-H50 to try, which I did. How did I like it? Well, actually quite a lot. For social media posts and small prints, it’s more than adequate. The things I liked most were:

  • Lots of features
  • Tilting LCD
  • The size (small) and weight (light).
  • Ease of use. I figured out how to use it quickly and with no difficulty.
  • The images are sharp.
  • The colors are pleasing.
  • The zoom lens: very broad range (31–465 mm f/2.7-4.5) for a camera this small.

What I didn’t like:

Of course, you have to bear in mind that this is a sixteen-year-old camera and as such suffers from the technological limitations of the day: low resolution, noise related problems, limited ISO, less than stellar focus etc. But I knew that would be the case.

There were a few disappoints though:

  • No RAW.
  • Terrible chromatic aberration
  • Control pad/scroll wheel combination is fiddly
  • Menu/Home options are confusingly ordered and divided up

There’s are a number of reviews around. After perusing a number of them I think I liked this one most.

For more pictures taken with this camera see here.