What was important to me, the following criteria were:
a) The camera responds quickly, ie, faster autofocus and the camera, after I pressed the shutter immediately shoots an image (before the moment I wanted to capture, once again is over). My last camera was a disaster in this regard. The Sony HX20V contrast is great here! One tap on the shutter release button and immediately the camera focuses, press the shutter button and it shoots really almost immediately an image. These are the feelings after less than half a second. Even under low light conditions (dusk, street lighting at night, dark room) there is hardly any delay during focusing and after pressing the shutter button.
b) image quality in low light conditions. My last camera has not only forever to focus, and for the actual recording used in low light conditions, but it was completely in a fix without a flash in the dark. Pictures in low light without flash were actually almost completely black or you have yet recognized any shadowy, hazy figures. Not so the Sony HX20V. This camera has the extremely hot feature that you quickly make a series of images in low light after triggering (mostly so at the 5 piece, lasts more than one second as long as you have to shake the camera pointed at the subject and hold) and these images superimposing. This is more light "captured" and the picture looks as if from behind at the location of recording much more light than is actually the case. So you have to at night (as long as it's not really pitch black) not use the flash (which unfortunately always right arising hard, ugly pictures), but gets quite without flash relatively sharp, bright and high-contrast images down.
(Addition of course go with this technique of superimposing image details are lost and some pictures are a bit blurry You can not expect the quality of the images is just as good as in daylight or that you always immediately get a sharp image, the.. image quality is sufficient for snapshot claims.)
c) image quality in general (if I can tell as a layman). The camera captures in daylight a lot of details, sharpness is excellent. The colors are reproduced very realistically. What for me was important and what was now less to do with the objective than the subjective image quality: the camera takes beautiful pictures. I can not say exactly what it is, but some cameras do mainly of people / faces simply no nice shots (was at my last camera so). This camera here makes it very well.
Those were the three most important criteria for me. However, the camera has many more great features. Here are just a few examples.
Panorama function: the camera can do amazing panoramic shots. You just have to select the appropriate mode, press shutter button and then move the camera from left to right. The frames, which makes the camera with me, they then cut together automatically and you get the final panorama image as a result. Looks great and works very well!
Zoom: the camera has a 20x zoom !! This is especially great if you want to do on a trip somewhere in nature pictures, where you often can not go so close to the subject. The stabilizer works very well, so that nothing blurred.
Video: The camera takes excellent videos. Toll is mainly the stabilizer: even if you hold the camera in hand and thus running around and the camera actually as stupid wobbles back and forth, the camera resembles the wobbling out so that the video does not contain behind stuttering. From ruckeligem Gewackel the camera then makes a kind of "soft waves". Is hard to describe, but on Youtube, there to sample videos.
Built manual: if you do not know how a particular feature of the camera is to operate or the like grade, you can look in the digital, stored in the camera manual. So off with wait at home and look in the printed manual - you can directly go just briefly to scroll through the help pages in the camera.
For battery unfortunately I can not so much to say. Have only about 130 pictures taken, to date no Aufladebedarf.
The biggest drawback of the camera is probably the size. She's really quite unwieldy for a compact camera. You have to know beforehand and think twice about whether that represents a itself an exclusion criterion. Will still fit you with me in the jeans pocket (a relatively narrow, straight-cut jeans), but then you have just a very nice package in my pocket - the place that probably uncomfortable one or the other. For me it was easy in the end more important to have a camera that makes great pictures as a camera to have that disappears invisibly in your pocket.
