Today Sony announced two new compact cameras, the TX55 and WX30. The TX55 is the most interesting camera which is the world’s thinnest camera in its class (among cameras with an optical anti-shake function). It has 16.2 Mp backside illuminated CMOS sensor and a 27-135mmlens. It records 1080i60 videos. It has a 3.3 inch OLED touch screen. The “coolest” new feature is the ‘Super Pixel Resolution’ digital zoom mode: “That boosts magnification without lowering the pixel count in the final image. Exclusive to Sony, ‘By Pixel Super Resolution’ processing further extends the camera’s 5x optical zoom range, allowing full-resolution 16.2 megapixel images with a maximum 10x zoom.”
You can already preorder that camera at Amazon US (Click here).
18 Responses
Seems sony is garbing the photo industry by the balls
Back-lit illuminated sensor, small, light, HD video… Nice features.
sony should make an android device with a really good camera… like an apple touch with a good build in camera.
than you could use all those nice android photo apps.
people are already making pretty cool pictures with their iphones.. thanks to the build in apps.
http://web.stagram.com/popular/
“backside illuminated”? Really?!
I always knew the sun shone from Sony’s a***.
Its a special illumination for shooting the backside
It will illuminate your backside when shooting … so people/cars/etc won’t hit you from the back.
“Super Pixel Resolution’ digital zoom mode”
“That boosts magnification without lowering the pixel count in the final image. Exclusive to Sony, ‘By Pixel Super Resolution’ processing further extends the camera’s 5x optical zoom range, allowing full-resolution 16.2 megapixel images with a maximum 10x zoom.”
This is the most interesting feature. Put this into the A77 and I won’t have to spend mega bucks on a 500mm lens for the odd occasion that I’d need one.
Yes please Sony.
I thought that digital zoom is dead, perhaps it was dead long enough that sony decided people already forgot the flop…
So you don’t crop your images then? 😀
The translucent mirror was dead as well.
Perhaps Sony have found a way of improving digital zoom and making it useful again with no loss to picture quality.
“Perhaps Sony have found a way of improving digital zoom and making it useful again with no loss to picture quality.”
Impossible.
+1
I’ve no knowledge of the technical side of photography but can’t Genuine Fractals software increase an image size by 1000% without any loss of pixel quality? I haven’t used it but that’s the makers claim. It sounds as though Sony are doing the same thing in camera.
A nice idea if it works. It would be great to turn my 300mm lens into a 500mm maybe with a box on the EVF screen showing the cropped image that’s being captured at 24mp when digital zoom is selected.
The “coolest” new feature is the ‘Super Pixel Resolution’ digital zoom mode: “That boosts magnification without lowering the pixel count in the final image
What’s cool about that? All it means is that the camera will interpolate the extra pixels and the resulting photo will take up more space on the storage card (albeit that’s not too much of an issue these days). There’s nothing the camera can interpolate to produce the extra pixels that a computer couldn’t do at least as well (and probably better) in software. However, there is one proviso to that – if the camera could save images in raw mode. Now that would be cool – a compact camera that had the option to save in raw so we could do all this post-processing properly.
There was this kind of feature in F-828 bridge camera years ago. It did the extrapolation to RAW data and it was quite good. At least in theory it should be better than extrapolation of pixels from packed JPEG image. Probably it is the same thing all over again.
Unfortunately no Sony P&S camera will record images in RAW mode. Why?
Cause SONY believes its users are really ignorant and will be confused by such an option.
Sony probably uses a photo-stacking approach where they take a couple (or more) photos very fast and then process them to get more details. This technique does miracle in astro-photography.
Just want to know how clever does the in-camera interpolation could be.
Intelligent interpolation?
Which can recognize patterns? and make a better guess to the missing pixels?
IMHO, Not much use but interest to know how good it could be. or just gimmick.