I just recently purchased a Sony HX9v compact camera so I can take some photos while out on my bike.  The camera also shots 1080p video at 50fps which is amazing for this price.  I just had to test this out, so took a mixed bag of shots out and about Belfast.  The video quality is impressive, but since there is no manual control your options can be quite limited and the low light performance is pretty poor.  I crushed the blacks in this video to hide the massive amounts of noise in badly lit conditions.

There is limited control over focus but if careful you can trick the camera into pulling focus from an object to centre screen.  To do this you set a focus point and tell the camera to track it, then deactivate the tracking while shooting and the focus will pull to the centre mark.

Overall it’s a good camera offering amazing video quality for the price.  I can definitely see myself using it for specialist applications where a bigger camera will physically not fit.