We got our hands on the HX1 last night, and snuck our own Memory Stick into the camera to get a better look at the images and video. Overall, the results are impressive. The panorama is only flawed because of unavoidable challenges posed by the environment. Low light performance is pretty good. Video is some of the best from a point and shoot, again within the limitations of our imperfect testing environment. Check out the samples after the jump.

Macro shots can be really useful, and this camera does a nice job. In fact, it can get so close to objects that it casts a shadow on them, creating a bit of a lighting challenge, but this is a really nice feature to have.

This panoramic image has a resolution of 7152x1080. For the most part there's no defects in the scene apart from the moving people at the edges of the frame. This was a handheld shot as well. The camera makes an amazingly simple job of this typically arduous task.

HD video can be somewhat tricky on small cameras, but the HX1 does a really good job, even under artificial lighting in a relatively dark ballroom. You can download the 30MB native MP4 file if you'd like to see the video as it came straight out of the camera.