With the specs of this camera combined with a price special from Sony, I thought I found the best belated Xmas present ever. Those thoughts were crushed right out of the box. The supplied softwear will not load on an XPx64 operating system. This is printed on the CD and verified when I attempted to install. There may be other options but with my lack of patience my short fuse was already lit....Strike 1.
Accepting that I may not be shooting any video I turned my attention to stills. I found some colorful jars on my pantry shelf and took a shot in auto mode. The focus was not sharp so I tried another subject (with less contrast, less color and poorly lit). The result was exceptional so I returned to my pantry shelf and zoomed in somewhat. The camera would not focus and got worse with each increase in zoom. After further testing with various subjects in various lighting conditions the results were unpredictable and unacceptable.....Strike 2.
I returned to my first subject and tried the manual focus (which does not work in auto mode) using program mode. It would not focus on anything and jumped around unpredictably.....Strike 3.
With three strikes of this magnitude in the first half hour I did not bother trying any other features on this camera. I returned it to the Sony Store and discussed the problems with the salesman. He was not aware of the software limitation and agreed that the manual focus did not work. The auto focus worked fine in the store. Out of curiosity we tried to manually focus the store demo camera and it also failed to work properly. I assume this focus problem is only in this batch of product and others will work fine but I have lost interest in the HX100.
There will be something else ready for next Xmas.
PS. The panasonic FZ150 uses the same softwear and apparently has the same limitation noted above.