SONY NEX-5 (45mm, f/5.6, 1/80 sec, ISO200)

Camera reviews today:

At the beginning camera reviews on the internet were a great source of information. The biggest advantage of these reviews was that they were totally unbiased. Just take a look at magazines. A substantial part of their profit comes from advertising. Someone needs to be a real naive person if he expects a critical review of a product of a company that places big ads in the magazine. You just don’t bite the hand that feeds you. On the internet it was different. But it seems that’s not the case any more. Today most reviews are at least very positive and some just read like they were written by the marketing department of the camera maker. But why is that? Why are simple users or reviewers not unbiased anymore? I think there are two reasons:

1. Reviewers depend on camera makers to get their equipment before it’s officially available in the stores. Nice and friendly reviews make sure that they get the cameras early. Overly critical reviews and they need to wait till the product is officially available and today to be the first is the most important thing.

2. Most of these reviewer sites have support buttons. If you buy equipment via the link from their website they get a small commission. Nothing wrong with that. These websites are great and I like to read them but if reviews become ads I have a problem with it. If the only purpose of a review is to make you buy the product something is wrong. If somebody recommends that you should sell your Nikon D800 to get a D600 it starts to get crazy.

Why I’m telling you that? Because this review is different. I don’t care if you will buy this camera or not. I try to give you my unbiased and critical view of the product. If you are used to extremely positive reviews you might be shocked. Maybe you will even come to the conclusion that I don’t like the camera at all or even regret that I bought it. It’s far from that. In fact I like it a lot I’m just not telling you that this is the best camera ever made.

Please read the lines above first! 

 

Here is the review:

The best camera is the one that you have with you when you want to take a picture. Most of the time I’m without a camera and my iPhone became the camera. The iPhone is a great tool. It’s so much more than a phone but it’s not a proper camera. It performs not too bad in perfect light but for everything else it’s pretty useless. I short: It’s a phone not a camera.

My most used cameras today are either my Fuji X100 or my Sony NEX 5. I used the NEX for all outdoor activities like hiking and biking because of the flexibility of the zoom ( on hikes ) and because of size ( with the 16mm lens when on my bike ). Most of all I used it because it’s faster than the Fuji and I would not cry as much if the camera get’s hurt or even destroyed in a crash.

 

1. Build quality:

Sometimes even a NEX is too big. This is where the Sony RX100 comes into play. It’s very compact. It has a 28-100 zoom with IS. It’s quieter than a mouse and beside the flimsy battery/SD-card door it’s built like a tank. The way the mode dial is made shows that Sony is very serious about the haptic perception of this little camera. Even the little jog dial on the back feels nice. Much better than the one on my Fuji X100. Everything is made in a solid way and I think that Sony knew that if they want to charge a higher price they can’t rely on the sensor alone. A point Sigma ignored with their first big sensor compacts.

Even though the way the camera is made has nothing to do with the images it takes everybody prefers to handle something that feels well made and solid. When I changed from Nikon to the Canon 5D it was a real problem for me to get used to the cheap plastic feeling of the camera. But I was willing to accept it because image quality was outstanding. Why I’m writing that? One thing I like about Sony is that they understand that a camera should feel good too. The NEX 5 is very very well made and the RX100 is just about the same.

 

2. Handling:

Is the only thing I don’t like about the RX100 is the “aperture” ring. The idea is just great and combined with the function button it’s very useful to change settings fast but the it’s execution is poor. It’s just a ring that moves without stops. It gives the whole handling a vague feeling. It would be perfect if they made it click mechanically like the mode dial. This would be the perfect implementation and would change the operation of the whole camera. I don’t understand why they missed on that.

It’s a shame because beside that handling is great. On DSLRs I never was a fan of mode dials. I shot either in A or M-Mode and did not change in between the modes during a shooting so the dial was just a waste of space. With the NEX or RX100 it is different because I can change from A to Panorama or video and back without touching the menu. And that is a great thing because I hate camera menus. I try not to use them during a shooting if possible. It takes me away from the picture taking process. This is the main attraction of the Fuji X100. You don’t have to use the menu.

On the RX100 there are many ways to change settings. There is a perfect way for everyone. I prefer to change aperture on the back dial and ISO on the front ring. The good thing is to have the choice to use it in different ways. I tilt screen would have been nice. I got used to it on my NEX but what I really want is a viewfinder. But I think the camera is too small for having a high quality viewfinder and just to add one like the pathetic viewfinder in the Canon G1X makes no sense any way. I can live without a viewfinder on the RX100 but I think it was a terrible mistake that Sony designed the Sony RX1 without a proper built in optical or even better hybrid viewfinder. It’s a fixed lens full frame camera that costs more than a full frame DSLR and they did not include a viewfinder. I have no problem with the fixed lens. Actually I prefer it over a zoom lens and 35mm is just perfect but not having a viewfinder was a shop stopper for me.

Back to the RX100. There are two things that spoil the otherwise very good handling of the camera. One can easily be changed via firmware but the other one is nothing but a poor joke. There is no charger for the battery! The battery needs to be charged in camera! The only time I have seen this was on my Fuji F31fd and hated it. Nothing has changed: This is just ridiculous and there is no excuse for it. It’s a dollar or two saving on a rather expensive camera that maybe will not put off people buying it but for sure will annoy most buyers.

The second is just poor programming and I really hope that Sony will change it. Problem is that there is no way to set a minimum shutter speed in the AUTO ISO menu. Even worse: There is no AUTO ISO in M-Mode. But the biggest problem is that the camera selects a very slow shutter speed of 1/30s@f1.8 to avoid higher ISO settings. Combine that with a very ineffective image stabilization and a lens that isn’t very good wide open ( in the corners ) and you get blurred shots because of camera shake and unsharp corners because of the lens. The only solution for me so far is to use P-Mode plus program shift to make sure aperture is at least f2.8 and to set ISO manually to get a shutter speed of 1/50s or shorter to avoid blur.

And all this just because Sony forgets to implement one additional line in the AUTO ISO menu. Well, let’s hope for a firmware update.

To end with a positive thing: The spirit level meter is really great. I’m the kind of person that have a real problem to keep the horizon straight in my pictures. It’s not a big deal anymore thanks to the digital photography and LR but it is annoying. Especially when shooting buildings, the best way to avoid aberrant lines is to keep the camera absolutely straight. The RX100 helps you to avoid horizontal and vertical tilting. What a wonderful feature.

SONY NEX-5 (18mm, f/4, 1/40 sec, ISO200)

My hand looks really big in the picture above. I got big hands but not that big. It’s because I used a wide angle for the shot and that’s why my hand is bigger than in real life because it’s closer to the lens than the camera it’s holding. I still prefer to shoot the camera with the original case ( see first picture ) because of the better grip and added size.

I never got a case for the NEX. It wasn’t available when I bought the camera and after I returned from USA it already had a big scratch on the screen so it was too late. I bought the case for the Sony RX100 because I did not realize that it is not made of leather. Steve Huff mentioned it in his review and than I checked it again. It’s 89.-EUROs and it’s made of plastic! Come on Sony! I would have paid an even higher price for a nice brown leather version.

 

3. Performance:

The camera is reasonable fast. AF feels very fast in good light but get’s slower indoors. In very low light it fails to focus on a small area. All you get is a big dashed line frame almost as big as the screen. It never failed to focus but sometimes it pumped before it took the shot. In general the camera feels snappy but there are three situation where you can feel that all it’s processing power is struggling with the massive 20MP files.

1. If you take two images and push the playback button too fast you get a message that it’s not possible to display the image because the camera is writing it on the card. Of course it is a lot of data to be transferred to the card but today you should not have to wait for the camera to clear buffer before you are able to review a shot.

2. If you zoom into the image in playback mode there is a massive lag before the camera zooms in to what seems to be almost pixel level. This is kind of strange in 2012 and I try to get used to it.

3. the panorama mode seems to be much more sensitive regarding the way you move the camera. You need to keep it very straight while panning and you should not move it too fast. My NEX 5 is much less sensitive and never gave me error messages.

If you start to worry now that the RX100 is a slow camera. It’s not. I just think that sometimes it struggles with the amount of data that comes from it’s 20MP sensor. Of course a company like Sony wants to impress with what they can achieve but I think the camera would have been even better if it has a little less resolution.

part II dealing with the most important property of any digital camera, it’s image quality, is coming soon.

I appreciate your feedback. You can do so by sending me a message in the about page. I used to have a comment field but got spammed. Because I have no idea how to avoid that spam I have disabled comments on my blog.