Sony RX100 - a compact DSLR

Thursday, 25 April, 2013

I’ve gotten far more in to my digital photography recently - see gallery - and my DSLR (Nikon fanboy!) is my constant companion. However when I’m on the daily grind it’s far handier to have a compact to allow me to get that shot when I need to. After much gnawing and gnashing of teeth I plumped for the Sony RX100 - this is one of a new breed of compacts designed for the professional. What makes these types of camera amazing is packing a very large sensor in to a tiny body and making full manual controls available with a great lens. There are several competitors on the market, but the Sony offers a stunningly large 1” sensor and a fast Zeiss f1.8 10.4-37.1 optical zoom. In short, it produces amazingly sharp photos with remarkable light sensitivity. Minor shortcomings include the lack of ability to attached filters and the lack of time lapse and IR remote release.

There are two things I briefly wanted to touch upon here, namely filters and setup. So….

1. Filters: the camera as it arrives cannot take any kind of filters on the front. UV, ND or CPL would all be very useful to add. Thankfully after market comes to the help here - Lensmate make a glue on plastic mount that allows you to add a 52mm (for Nikon) screw-thread. I then use a 77-52mm stepper ring to use my telephoto filters on the camera.

2. Setup: the camera menu is far from simple to use and there are a myriad of settings. On the back of the camera is a control wheel surrounded by 4 menu buttons. My adjustments here include reassigning the functions to allow great control over the shooting. These are:
a. Centre: focus point. Camera is set to single focus point and pressing this allows you to move the focus point to your subject.
b. Up: screen display (default setting)
c.Left: drive mode. Change from single, multi, bracketed or timer modes.
d. Right: manual focus (yes it has a manual focus mode!!)
e. Down: exposure compensation. Adjust under or over exposure of the image

OK, that gives me huge granularity over my day-to-day shooting however I need quick access to other settings as well, so hit the Function (Fn) button to bring up a custom menu that you can edit. For me this is:

ISO (I have auto as the default to increase ISO at low shutter speeds)
Metering Mode (change between centre weight and spot)
Flash Mode: I have it off by default

Finally you can use the Control Wheel around the lens to access specific functions - this is just way too confusing and easy to knock. I turn this OFF and only use it for focusing in manual mode.

And finally, for those searching desperately for a way to multi-select and delete images in Playback mode, it isn’t there!!! You actually need to press the “Menu” button, go to the first “Playback” menu and select “Delete” (counter-intuitive!!).

Fabulous camera - buy one!

Add comment

Fill out the form below to add your own comments