Sony HX90V First Shots posted: pixel-peep the perfectly pocketable, EVF-sporting 30x travel zoom

posted Friday, June 5, 2015 at 5:14 PM EDT

More goodies straight from the IR Lab! This time around, it's First Shots from the brand new Sony HX90V pocketable travel zoom camera. If you love the aesthetic and size of the compact Sony RX100 III, but perhaps want a bit more zoom reach than what that larger-sensored compact camera offers, you might want to consider the Sony HX90V. Offering a very versatile 24-720mm eq. focal length range, the HX90V lets you shoot wide landscapes and far-off subjects all with a camera that slips in your pocket.

However, what you gain in zoom, you lose in sensor size compared to a camera like the RX100 III. The Sony HX90V comes as update to 2013's Sony HX50V 30x zoom camera, and despite being the newer model, the HX90V's 1/2.3-inch Exmor R CMOS sensor is actually slightly lower in resolution that the previous model -- 18.2-megapixels compared to 20.2 in HX50V. While this might seem like a downgrade, both cameras use a 1/2.3-inch chip, so the HX90V's individual pixels are larger, which should, in turn, result in improved image quality. Now, compared to the 1-inch CMOS chip in the RX100 III, well, that's a different story.

So, how's the image quality? For the full series of lab Still Life shots, head over to the samples page for the Sony HX90V to view full-resolution images. In meantime, below are a couple 1:1 comparison crops from the HX90V against both the HX50V predecessor and the RX100 III. Of course, you can also compare images from the new Sony HX90V to any of our past cameras using our Comparometer.