I am happy to hear Sony acknowledged the H9's sports-mode issue - clearly they got it completely right on the H2/H5, and then messed it up with the H9. Now they claim to have restored it to proper operation as on the H5 - with the added advantage of the predictive focus which might finally get a chance to be used to its potential.
And I'm happy to hear of the addition of user-selectable noise reduction. It's a nice addition, restoring some control back to the hands of the user. If you don't want to deal with removing noise, go with high, and it will smear as before but eliminate much of the noise. If you'd rather process noise yourself to take advantage of the likely-better results you can get with aftermarket removal tools, go with low, and clean the noise yourself.
Here is the complete news: http://www.**********.com/News/2008/.../sony_w300.php