If you've been reading here recently, you've been following the details of my romance with the Sony DSC-H9 camera. The bad news is that it ended in divorce due to irreconcilable differences -- It had poor image quality and there were a number of design flaws that made me question Sony's judgment.

For me, breaking up with the DSC-H9 was not a trivial matter. I have been buying and using cameras, both as a professional photographer and as an artist for over fifty years. During that time, I have owned dozens of cameras. The DSC-H9 is the first camera, ever, that I have returned.

I returned it because I thought that it was poorly designed and, more importantly, had poor image quality. I first exchanged the camera for another DSC-H9 because I thought that I might have gotten a defective one. Although the second one worked a little better, it still didn't perform, in terms of overall image quality, anywhere near the other four digital cameras that I already owned. (The problems I found are covered in more detail in my previous posts -- see "Recent Entries" in the sidebar to the right.)

The four cameras I already owned -- Olympus C-2100UZ, Sony DSC-F707, Minolta A2, Panasonic DMC-FZ5 -- were all "classics." Each one raised the bar as to what to expect from a digital camera, and none of them disappointed. So now I look back and ask myself, why did I need yet another digital camera? I think it was a combination of boredom, new camera lust, and the hopes of acquiring another "classic" camera that would challenge me and change the look of the images that I produce.

Will the DSC-H9 change the look of my newer work? Yes. But not in the way that I had expected.

The first thing it did was to make me write about cameras again, something I had not done in over forty years, when I wrote for magazines like Modern Photography and US Camera. I ended up writing a set of posts in this blog that gave a detailed view of a new camera. It wasn't a formal review with pictures of test charts, but one from the viewpoint of someone who would be using the camera. It was probably one of the first reviews of the DSC-H9 to be published on the Internet. I suspect that the people who publish the more formal reviews are having a hard time with this camera and that's why you may have to wait a while for them. I think that they are finding the DSC-H9 a "challenging" camera to review.

But that's just the technical part. There's the philosophical side as well. During the twelve days that I struggled with this camera, I went on an odyssey that took me places I might not have otherwise explored. (The picture above is one of the places I visited.)

The first question I asked was, "Why are the images from the new camera troubling me so much?" Shots that should have been easy, were lacking corner-to-corner sharpness and had a number of other image quality issues. Or was I expecting too much?

So I started by examining the images from the new camera as closely as possible, at full size on my monitor (an HP LP3065). Then, I started the trek through the images from my earlier digital cameras.

I have most of them divided into three folders -- "current," "old," and "bad." All pictures start in the "current" folder and are then culled out into the other two if they don't make the cut. The ones in the current folder are eventually processed to produce the end result. In total, the folders hold about 50,000 images. (I never throw anything away. Storage is cheap.)

It took several days to go through these files. I felt like Robert Pirsig, and his search for "quality" that he documented in "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance."

The first thing I confirmed was that my new Sony camera's image quality didn't match up to the results from my other cameras. I ended up calling this aspect "coherence," the appearance that the entire picture was made with the same lens and camera. The Sony camera lacked this, and the other cameras had handled this so well that I never gave them full credit for their excellent performance.

The second thing that I discovered was that I had discarded lots of pictures into the "old" and "bad" folders that were, on further inspection, very interesting, indeed. I think that the pressure of culling images, especially when you're traveling, can cause you to err on the finicky side. So, in the near future, a lot of these pictures will be moved back into the "current" folder, opening up some new ideas to explore.

The third thing I found was a new appreciation for the cameras that I already own. I'm back with my Panasonic DMC-FZ5, a tiny marvel, similar to the Sony, that weighs only 12 ounces. Although it has only five megapixels compared to the Sony's 8, it still produces pictures that are sharper, clearer, and with virtually none of the color fringing that plagues the DSC-H9. It has a sleeve, like the Sony, that covers and protects the lens, but it takes normal-sized filters. (I use an inexpensive step-up ring that lets it take 58mm filters.)

But I liked the way that the Sony rendered colors better than the way that the Panasonic does. Poking around the Panasonic's menus, I found an option that let me jazz up the colors a bit, bringing them closer to the Sony's. If it hadn't been for the Sony, I never would have looked.

So here I am, having a fling with an old flame -- My Panasonic DMC-FZ5. After my odyssey, it looks like a new camera to me. Are we having fun yet? The answer is finally "Yes." And who knows what the future might hold. Perhaps a hot date with an A2 or a DSC-F707.

I want to say something about prints. Some have remarked that the Sony is good for prints as long as you don't make them too big. I have a Canon IPF5000, a 17 inch wide printer that I load with roll paper. I have printed panoramas that are 17 inches by five feet long.

All of my digital cameras, up 'til now, have produced fine prints at this size. The Sony wouldn't. It was, in terms of image quality, a step backward.

One final word, for all of the manufacturers of this type of camera. As long as you place features ahead of image quality, you're going to hear the same sort of report that I gave the DSC-H9. All of the reviews on the latest crop of "superzoom" cameras, from all of the manufacturers, have been less than glowing.

I looked at the reviews for all of the newest models and it's not clear that any of them would be a step up from the cameras I already own.