The image above was taken with the Sony Cyber-shot HX200V. The camera was set to Aperture priority mode with the aperture set to f4 and the sensitivity set to 100 ISO. The HX200V metered an exposure of 1/800 at f4.

Overall, results from the 18.2 Megapixel Sony Cyber-shot HX200V are pretty good. In these cloudy bright conditions it’s made a good job of the exposure and colour balance and produced a punchy image with a histogram that reaches to both ends of the graph. There’s good detail in the highlights and shadows, the white balance is accurate and the colours are bright and natural looking.

Turning to the crops, there’s a good level of detail visible and the edges are reasonably crsip and well defined. Taking all the crops together it’s clear to see that Sony has opted for a punchy, consumer-friendly approach to processing, particularly by comparison with the Lumix FZ60 / FZ62.

That works, up to a point. If you look closely at the fine detail it’s not hard to detect a slight clumpiness that gives these 100 percent crops a look not disimilar to that of an impressionist painting. No doubt this is the result of the particular combination of noise reduction and sharpening that Sony has employed and, in all likelihood, it’s the best result in terms of the balance of image detail and noise suppression that can be squeezed from the sensor and lens combination. If it’s a little too harsh for your taste there’s no RAW mode to apply your own settings to, but you do have the option of tweaking the sharpness, contrast and noise reduction settings from the main menu.

Compared with the crops from the Sony CyberShot HX200V the Panasonic FZ60 / FZ62 stands up very well indeed. They don’t have quite the punchy edge to them that the Cyber-shot HX20V crops have and neither are they noise free, but the slightly softer image detail and the organic quality of the graininess lends them a less processed, more natural look.

Compared with the Fujifilm FinePix HS30 EXR, the FZ60 / FZ62 crops fare better all round. The HS30 crops look highly processed and edge detail has an aliased ‘jagged edge’ effect which is particularly visible in the balcony dividers in the final crop. The HS30 EXR also suffers from chromatic aberration, but you have the option of shooting RAW and processing the file externally to deal with it.

See how these models compare at higher sensitivities in my Sony HX200V Noise results.

To compare noise levels under real-life conditions I shot this scene with the Sony Cyber-shot HX200V, Panasonic Lumix FZ60 / FZ62, and the Fujifilm FinePix HS30 EXR, within a few moments of each other using their best quality JPEG settings at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.

The zoom on all three cameras was set to produce an approximately equal field of view and, where possible, image stabilisation was disabled for this tripod-mounted test; sadly this isn’t possible on the HX200V.