First, some Pros:

- Very stylish camera.
- Love the touch screen. Very easy to use once you get into it.
- The indoor shots seem pretty good (I’m still working on this. It still doesn’t seem to be as good as my “old” cameras).
- Love the neat features, like the screen shows with music, panaromic shots, HD video, face detection. All of these things make this camera very “hip” and up to the times.

My concerns:
- Small zoom. For a camera of this price, I feel it needs a much better zoom. 7x would give more flexibility when taking pictures. It seems like most the Sony models lack on the zoom capability.
- Taking HD Video takes up so much space on the memory card. Be prepared to download to the computer, or a portable computer drive that stores a lot of gigs. I still struggle with how to edit these HD files and put them together to form a movie and burn to a DVD. The documents say you can take video in lower version, but I haven’t figured that out either. It seems all my video files are HUGE. This could be my user error, so I take some responsibility, it just seems like this should be easy to accomplish.

Overall it’s a great point and shoot camera. Some people might not like the touch screen, but it’s actually quite easy to manipulate. In the end the video capability might be too advanced for me and I had to return it in lieu of basic video functions. I need to educate myself on this. . . being able to edit and play with the HD video files.

Rating: 4 / 5

I own an old 6MP Sony T9 slim camera from 4 years or so back and this looked like a promising upgrade for a slim pocketable camera. HD MP4 video, 4x zoom, almost twice the MP, touch screen and this new touted Exmor R sensor.

The T9 isn’t a great camera, in fact it’s one of the worst at image quality of all of my cameras, and it’s memory stick duo format is constantly a hassle.

Unfortunately this new TX1 still uses Memory Stick Duo, and is somehow just as bad in terms of image quality as the old T9. It’s better in low light but still very grainy, however it’s worse in good bright light. Set manually to the lowest ISO (125) and placed on a tripod, the T9 produces shots with more detail and dynamic range while the TX1 has a grainy soft and blown highlight look to everything. This is with the best possible conditions, and in my opinion the shots from this camera are completely unacceptable. That means it only gets worse from there. Handheld shots in the automatic modes have much more noise and grain in them, even in full daylight. Trees in the distance look like water paintings. Neither camera is good with contrasty scenes, but all I want out of a small pocket camera is acceptable images to resize and post on facebook and so on.

The TX1 will do, but for the price the quality is terrible. Cut the price in half and I might think about keeping it but this is all about style over design.

It does have some neat features like a high speed burst mode, an anti shake mode that takes multiple exposures and combines and aligns in camera, face detection and so on. It also has one of the best touchscreen interfaces I’ve used on a camera, it’s not in the way and it’s easy and quick to use. Just double tapping on where you want the camera to focus is very nice as well. The zoom slider is probably the worst physical part on this camera, not very sensitive, and then when you finally get it to zoom, it shoots quickly from the wide end to the telephoto end which means you are always overzooming and having to back off, which is frustrating when all you want is to frame the image.

If this is going to be your only small camera I would choose something else probably from Canon or Panasonic, it will be a slightly larger camera but the jump in quality will be very noticeable.

I’m going to return it and keep the T9 for the pocket slim camera that I don’t care about, and use the SD870is and LX-3 as my other smaller cameras. Unless the price on this really drops, or you just have to have this for the style and don’t care about camera-phone quality pictures from a dedicated camera I would stay away from this model.
Rating: 2 / 5