Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS10 Camcorder Review

Color

The Sony Bloggie Touch performed well in our color accuracy test, which is noteworthy for an ultracompact camcorders. Many similar models—like the Kodak Playsport and the Flip series of camcorders—struggle mightily with this test due to their poor auto white balance systems. The Bloggie Touch did run into this problem at times, but for the most part it was able to produce accurate colors in our bright light test, hence its strong score. More on how we test color.

In camcorders that struggle with white balancing properly, we often see orange or red hues associated with our bright light test image. You can see this in the color comparison table below with the comparison models. The sample image from the Bloggie Touch, however, looks quite good. According to our color error map, the Bloggie Touch did very well rendering brown and certain blue tones, while it had more trouble with green, yellow, and purple colors.

The Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS10 definitely had one of the best color accuracies we've seen from an ultracompact camcorder. This is just based on our testing, of course, and results do vary quite a bit depending on what kind of lighting you shoot under. Outdoors, under natural light, most ultracompact models produce fine colors. It is when you're inside, with mixed lighting, that you'll see problems like what we saw from the Flip SlideHD, Kodak Playsport, and to a lesser extent the Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5 as well.

Low Light Color

As is usually the case, the Bloggie Touch showed a significant drop in color accuracy when we dimmed the lights for our low light testing (compared to its bright light results). Still, the Bloggie Touch did a decent job in this test overall, although the other camcorders we compared it to had marginally better numbers. More on how we test low light color.

One thing you should notice from the comparison images below is how much brighter the Bloggie Touch's image is than the Kodak Playsport and even the Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5. Yes, the Flip SlideHD also produced a bright image in this test, and it managed an excellent saturation level of roughly 100%. We'd like the Bloggie Touch to have captured deeper colors in low light, and we noticed the saturation level dropping even further during our sensitivity test (when the lighting was minimal), but we're still adequately pleased with the camcorder's results here.

Noise

Continuing its strong performance in our bright light testing, the Sony Bloggie Touch managed some very good results in our noise test. The camcorder averaged 0.5% noise, which is less noise than we saw on its predecessor, the Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5. This is a strong overall score, and only the Flip SlideHD measured less noise out of the camcorders shown below. More on how we test noise.

The Bloggie Touch records 1080p Full HD video, but its recorded image didn't appear any sharper than the competition. In fact, when you look at the crops above, you'll see the Bloggie Touch has a less crisp image than its predecessor, the Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5. We chalk this discrepancy up to the fact that the CM5 has a better lens (with optical zoom) than the Bloggie Touch, which can help produce a sharper image.