Ray Sachs
Legend
- Location
- Not too far from Philly
- Name
- you should be able to figure it out...
I received a loaner of the Sony RX-10 on Tuesday afternoon, just in time to spend a couple hours running through the menus and options and getting to know the camera before an onslaught of holiday visitors arrived later on Wednesday. My initial impressions were overwhelmingly positive and most of those impressions still hold after using the camera pretty extensively over the Thanksgiving holiday. Knowing the quality of the sensor from my brief ownership of the RX100 and having faith in the quality of the HUGE Zeiss lens, I was quite sure this camera would be an excellent all-in-one travel zoom, something I wouldn’t likely buy. But I also had hopes for this camera’s ability to work as a low light candid portrait camera; possibly good enough to replace part of my m43 setup AND fill in as a good all around travel zoom. No better time than Thanksgiving weekend with a house full of family to find out what the camera could do in this respect.
View attachment 81450
Stroud walk-51-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
After a LOT of indoor low-light shooting and just enough good light shooting on a family hike, I’ve concluded that it is a GREAT all-in-one travel zoom option for those content to live between 24 and 200mm. But also that it’s not quite up to the standard of current m43 gear as a low light candid portrait camera. It isn't terriblet for this purpose, but it's not something I'd ever use instead of m43 for this application.
On to the positives and negatives of this camera…
POSITIVES:
* A very comfortable and well-built body, and a nice size. About the size of the Olympus EM1 with the Panasonic 12-35 or the Olympus 75mm lens mounted, except that the diameter of the lens is quite big, almost enormous. While that’s a bit of a shock when you first see it, it doesn’t really add anything to the functional outlines of the camera’s size and doesn’t affect its carry-ability at all. The rounded shoulders of this camera also make it look at bit larger than it is, but this doesn’t affect its actual size or handling either. I believe it’s even reasonably weather resistant as well – a nice feature for a travel camera for sure.
View attachment 81451
Stroud walk-34-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* Excellent, awesome, wonderful, incredible interface and controls! I really like the controls of this camera. It’s got a dedicated aperture ring (which can either click or not click at the flick of a switch – brilliant!), a dedicated exposure comp dial at the right rear corner, and almost the same compliment of programmable buttons and options as the RX1, a couple of custom setting spots on the mode dial, etc. Functionally, it’s as close to a clone of the RX1 as a zoom camera could be and I count that as a very VERY good thing. It’s got two rear control dials that you might never use except to navigate the menu unless you use shutter priority or manual mode a lot. And the dial around the four-way controller can be set to be constantly armed to change a number of settings, including ISO – also a very very good thing. Probably because of it’s similarity with the RX1 and my familiarity with that camera, I felt very much at home with the RX10 almost immediately.
View attachment 81452
Stroud walk-24-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81453
Stroud walk-12-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* Better than too many auto-ISO setups, basically the same as the RX1. It allows for auto ISO in manual mode with the ability to designate minimum and maximum ISO and with full access to exposure compensation. This is a lot more than a lot of very good cameras offer. OTOH, the camera also follows Sony’s convention of not allowing the user to designate a minimum shutter speed while using auto-ISO in aperture priority mode.
* The EVF and flip up rear screen are both excellent, both useable in very bright light. I think I’ve read that the EVF is not as good as the one in the RX1, Nex 6/7, etc, but I couldn’t tell this by looking. Very big and bright and seems accurate.
Stroud walk-45-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* The camera is pretty quick and responsive in terms of AF, write times, startup, etc. There is only one notable area where it’s lacking in responsiveness – I’ll get to that in the cons.
* Silent Leaf Shutter – Dead silent operation all the time, Nuff said. I guess there are some max shutter speed implications, but there’s a built in ND filter too, so no worries there…
* The LENS LENS LENS! This is a really impressive lens. Once I’d worked with the RX100 a bit, I figured this was a sensor that could really sing if paired with a better, ie LARGER lens. Well, this is a VERY large lens, and it’s really nice throughout it’s 24-200mm range, all at f2.8. Which makes the camera highly useable in almost any light conditions except for the very lowest of light, where the limits of the sensor become apparent.
First RX10 shots-10 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* The sensor is the same sensor developed for the RX100 and RX100 MII, paired with the newest processor Sony has. I’ll leave the tech talk on this sensor to others, but it didn’t disappoint me in the least. It’s not as good as current m43 or APS sensors but it's not too far off of that standard - it’s quite good. The high ISO limits seem about a stop or maybe a bit more than a stop below m43 – I found 3200-4000 to be the effective limit for this camera. ISO 6400 is useable, but only in decent light conditions where you don’t really NEED 6400.
* Overall low-light performance (when you have time to set up the shot). For a bridge camera the low light capability of this camera is pretty astounding. With an effective ISO limit of 3200-4000, a constant f2.8 lens, and a pretty decent stabilization system, you can shoot in very low light. Here are a couple of sample shots taken in town on a recent night and it does quite well. The first of these shots is handheld at 1/8 of a second, so the stabilization is at least good enough.
View attachment 81456
RX10 night streetscapes-15 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81457
RX10 night streetscapes-9 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
This one is at the full 200mm extension:
View attachment 81458
RX10 night streetscapes-14 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
NEGATIVES:
Two fundamental negatives, either of which might prevent me from buying this camera, but might not be deal breakers for others:
* The power zoom is slow. There are two ways to control the zoom – with the zoom/focus ring (which switches from a zoom ring to a focus ring in MF mode – another very smart touch) or with the zoom rocker just in front of the shutter button. The zoom ring can either control the zoom as a step-zoom or a smooth zoom with no discrete stops. The zoom rocker does not have a step zoom option. So far, so good – all very smart design decisions. The problem is that regardless of which zoom control you choose, the sweep of the zoom is SLOW! It takes about two full seconds to zoom from 24mm to 200mm or 200 back to 24. I’d read about this and it didn’t really sound like a problem, but in practice I found it very frustrating. Two seconds is a LONG time when you see a shot and you’re trying to line it up. Most manual zooms can be adjusted across the full sweep in a fraction of a second. I found this slow zoom to be a real deal-breaker – something I wouldn’t want to deal with on an everyday basis. If this camera had a manual zoom over-ride it would make a huge difference. Given the difficult and varied roles the one ring (other than the aperture ring) has to play, I’d imagine adding manual zoom control would be impossible without making this already large lens even larger, but it’s a real functional issue that I’d expect would bother quite a few users.
* Low light candid portrait shooting. It’s not BAD with this camera, but not up to the standard of m43. In highly controlled shooting of a willing stationary subject, it does pretty well and arguably well enough, but it’s a bit softer and grainier than the EM1 or GX7 even at identical apertures, ISOs, etc. But in less controlled shooting, just winging it with a lot of people around in fairly low light, the m43 gear just gets the shot far more consistently and the quality is notably (if not overwhelmingly) better when it does. Notably sharper and cleaner images, seemingly better face detection – just better results more easily and consistently obtained.
This type of shooting may be an unreasonable hope/expectation for a bridge camera like this, but if it was going to find a place in my bag, this is something it had to handle better than it does. I’m not sure exactly where the differences are and it’s probably a combination of factors (sensor, face detection, stabilization quality, etc) but the sum total is that I just got too many misses and not enough clean hits in conditions where the EM1 or GX7 were nailing shot after shot, also at f2.8. Part of this is just the sensor performance – a full stop means a lot in these marginal shooting conditions - ISO 3200 looks about like 6400 does with the current m43 sensors and that matters.
First RX10 shots-102-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81460
First RX10 shots-119-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
First RX10 shots-67-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
For this type of shooting, the bottom line is that I was getting softer and noisier shots from the RX10 in situations where either the GX7 or EM1 would produce clean and sharp shots almost without fail. This is a big issue for me. Probably not a problem for everyone, but if it is, check this camera out carefully before deciding if it’s up to your expectations (or other gear!). The other thing I should be clear about is that I'm basing this on shooting without flash – I almost never use flash and so that’s the standard I’m checking for. I did a few of these type of low light portrait shots with the little built-in flash and the camera handled them well, dropping the ISO back down into highly useable levels and seeming to expose the shot pretty well. So, if you’re ok shooting with flash, this concern can be easily overcome…
One other point worth mentioning – jpeg vs raw. The first night I had this camera I didn’t realize that it’s raw files were supported in Lightroom version 5.3 (release candidate), so I was shooting in jpeg without really changing the default settings, including noise reduction. At web viewing sizes, the jpegs didn’t look all that bad even at 3200 and 6400, but with ANY degree of pixel peeping, the NR smearing and artifacts are really pretty offensive. Although at about ISO 2000, they’re not too bad even at 100%. Then I discovered that the raw files are supported (thanks Serhan!) and started shooting raw. And I then found that the raw files in low light at 6400 are ugly and noisy enough that I couldn’t really fix them presentably with the NR in Lightroom (which I find to be pretty effective for most manageable NR tasks). The noise still showed up at normal web viewing sizes and was really ugly at 100%. In general I’d always use raw with a camera like this – you can change WB, pull details out of the shadows and highlights that you won’t get out of the jpegs, etc. But in really low light at really high ISO, it kind of depends on how you’re displaying the shot. For small web images, the jpeg might look better because you can’t see the ugly NR at those sizes and you can still see the noise in the raw files. Here are a couple of shots of my brother, both taken at 6400, the first in jpeg, the second in raw, followed by 100% crops of both to illustrate this. The raw shot has a pretty good dose of Lightroom NR applied – about 33% on the luminance slider.
First RX10 shots-43 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
First RX10 shots-126-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81464
First RX10 shots-43 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81465
First RX10 shots-126-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
My overall conclusion is that the RX10 would make a phenomenal travel zoom if you’re OK with the range of focal lengths offered - I’d always want something wider than 24mm personally, but many people would be very happy with a range of 24-200mm. In almost any lighting situation, particularly for static subjects where AF isn’t too challenging, the image quality of this camera is quite good, probably almost indistinguishable from m43 except in really difficult low light and dynamic range situations where m43 still seems to hold a small advantage. But if you’re OK with the focal range and have reasonable expectations for how well an all-in-one camera can handle specific types of shooting you might have higher standards for, I’d strongly recommend taking a look at this camera. I'm unlikely to buy one, but it could eliminate the desire for a couple of very expensive m43 zooms and handle 99% of what I'd do with those zooms very very well. So I haven't ruled it out altogether and I should be able to continue using it through some Christmas holiday travels, so never say never.
It's a very very impressive camera....
-Ray
View attachment 81450
Stroud walk-51-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
After a LOT of indoor low-light shooting and just enough good light shooting on a family hike, I’ve concluded that it is a GREAT all-in-one travel zoom option for those content to live between 24 and 200mm. But also that it’s not quite up to the standard of current m43 gear as a low light candid portrait camera. It isn't terriblet for this purpose, but it's not something I'd ever use instead of m43 for this application.
On to the positives and negatives of this camera…
POSITIVES:
* A very comfortable and well-built body, and a nice size. About the size of the Olympus EM1 with the Panasonic 12-35 or the Olympus 75mm lens mounted, except that the diameter of the lens is quite big, almost enormous. While that’s a bit of a shock when you first see it, it doesn’t really add anything to the functional outlines of the camera’s size and doesn’t affect its carry-ability at all. The rounded shoulders of this camera also make it look at bit larger than it is, but this doesn’t affect its actual size or handling either. I believe it’s even reasonably weather resistant as well – a nice feature for a travel camera for sure.
View attachment 81451
Stroud walk-34-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* Excellent, awesome, wonderful, incredible interface and controls! I really like the controls of this camera. It’s got a dedicated aperture ring (which can either click or not click at the flick of a switch – brilliant!), a dedicated exposure comp dial at the right rear corner, and almost the same compliment of programmable buttons and options as the RX1, a couple of custom setting spots on the mode dial, etc. Functionally, it’s as close to a clone of the RX1 as a zoom camera could be and I count that as a very VERY good thing. It’s got two rear control dials that you might never use except to navigate the menu unless you use shutter priority or manual mode a lot. And the dial around the four-way controller can be set to be constantly armed to change a number of settings, including ISO – also a very very good thing. Probably because of it’s similarity with the RX1 and my familiarity with that camera, I felt very much at home with the RX10 almost immediately.
View attachment 81452
Stroud walk-24-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81453
Stroud walk-12-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* Better than too many auto-ISO setups, basically the same as the RX1. It allows for auto ISO in manual mode with the ability to designate minimum and maximum ISO and with full access to exposure compensation. This is a lot more than a lot of very good cameras offer. OTOH, the camera also follows Sony’s convention of not allowing the user to designate a minimum shutter speed while using auto-ISO in aperture priority mode.
* The EVF and flip up rear screen are both excellent, both useable in very bright light. I think I’ve read that the EVF is not as good as the one in the RX1, Nex 6/7, etc, but I couldn’t tell this by looking. Very big and bright and seems accurate.
Stroud walk-45-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* The camera is pretty quick and responsive in terms of AF, write times, startup, etc. There is only one notable area where it’s lacking in responsiveness – I’ll get to that in the cons.
* Silent Leaf Shutter – Dead silent operation all the time, Nuff said. I guess there are some max shutter speed implications, but there’s a built in ND filter too, so no worries there…
* The LENS LENS LENS! This is a really impressive lens. Once I’d worked with the RX100 a bit, I figured this was a sensor that could really sing if paired with a better, ie LARGER lens. Well, this is a VERY large lens, and it’s really nice throughout it’s 24-200mm range, all at f2.8. Which makes the camera highly useable in almost any light conditions except for the very lowest of light, where the limits of the sensor become apparent.
First RX10 shots-10 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
* The sensor is the same sensor developed for the RX100 and RX100 MII, paired with the newest processor Sony has. I’ll leave the tech talk on this sensor to others, but it didn’t disappoint me in the least. It’s not as good as current m43 or APS sensors but it's not too far off of that standard - it’s quite good. The high ISO limits seem about a stop or maybe a bit more than a stop below m43 – I found 3200-4000 to be the effective limit for this camera. ISO 6400 is useable, but only in decent light conditions where you don’t really NEED 6400.
* Overall low-light performance (when you have time to set up the shot). For a bridge camera the low light capability of this camera is pretty astounding. With an effective ISO limit of 3200-4000, a constant f2.8 lens, and a pretty decent stabilization system, you can shoot in very low light. Here are a couple of sample shots taken in town on a recent night and it does quite well. The first of these shots is handheld at 1/8 of a second, so the stabilization is at least good enough.
View attachment 81456
RX10 night streetscapes-15 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81457
RX10 night streetscapes-9 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
This one is at the full 200mm extension:
View attachment 81458
RX10 night streetscapes-14 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
NEGATIVES:
Two fundamental negatives, either of which might prevent me from buying this camera, but might not be deal breakers for others:
* The power zoom is slow. There are two ways to control the zoom – with the zoom/focus ring (which switches from a zoom ring to a focus ring in MF mode – another very smart touch) or with the zoom rocker just in front of the shutter button. The zoom ring can either control the zoom as a step-zoom or a smooth zoom with no discrete stops. The zoom rocker does not have a step zoom option. So far, so good – all very smart design decisions. The problem is that regardless of which zoom control you choose, the sweep of the zoom is SLOW! It takes about two full seconds to zoom from 24mm to 200mm or 200 back to 24. I’d read about this and it didn’t really sound like a problem, but in practice I found it very frustrating. Two seconds is a LONG time when you see a shot and you’re trying to line it up. Most manual zooms can be adjusted across the full sweep in a fraction of a second. I found this slow zoom to be a real deal-breaker – something I wouldn’t want to deal with on an everyday basis. If this camera had a manual zoom over-ride it would make a huge difference. Given the difficult and varied roles the one ring (other than the aperture ring) has to play, I’d imagine adding manual zoom control would be impossible without making this already large lens even larger, but it’s a real functional issue that I’d expect would bother quite a few users.
* Low light candid portrait shooting. It’s not BAD with this camera, but not up to the standard of m43. In highly controlled shooting of a willing stationary subject, it does pretty well and arguably well enough, but it’s a bit softer and grainier than the EM1 or GX7 even at identical apertures, ISOs, etc. But in less controlled shooting, just winging it with a lot of people around in fairly low light, the m43 gear just gets the shot far more consistently and the quality is notably (if not overwhelmingly) better when it does. Notably sharper and cleaner images, seemingly better face detection – just better results more easily and consistently obtained.
This type of shooting may be an unreasonable hope/expectation for a bridge camera like this, but if it was going to find a place in my bag, this is something it had to handle better than it does. I’m not sure exactly where the differences are and it’s probably a combination of factors (sensor, face detection, stabilization quality, etc) but the sum total is that I just got too many misses and not enough clean hits in conditions where the EM1 or GX7 were nailing shot after shot, also at f2.8. Part of this is just the sensor performance – a full stop means a lot in these marginal shooting conditions - ISO 3200 looks about like 6400 does with the current m43 sensors and that matters.
First RX10 shots-102-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81460
First RX10 shots-119-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
First RX10 shots-67-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
For this type of shooting, the bottom line is that I was getting softer and noisier shots from the RX10 in situations where either the GX7 or EM1 would produce clean and sharp shots almost without fail. This is a big issue for me. Probably not a problem for everyone, but if it is, check this camera out carefully before deciding if it’s up to your expectations (or other gear!). The other thing I should be clear about is that I'm basing this on shooting without flash – I almost never use flash and so that’s the standard I’m checking for. I did a few of these type of low light portrait shots with the little built-in flash and the camera handled them well, dropping the ISO back down into highly useable levels and seeming to expose the shot pretty well. So, if you’re ok shooting with flash, this concern can be easily overcome…
One other point worth mentioning – jpeg vs raw. The first night I had this camera I didn’t realize that it’s raw files were supported in Lightroom version 5.3 (release candidate), so I was shooting in jpeg without really changing the default settings, including noise reduction. At web viewing sizes, the jpegs didn’t look all that bad even at 3200 and 6400, but with ANY degree of pixel peeping, the NR smearing and artifacts are really pretty offensive. Although at about ISO 2000, they’re not too bad even at 100%. Then I discovered that the raw files are supported (thanks Serhan!) and started shooting raw. And I then found that the raw files in low light at 6400 are ugly and noisy enough that I couldn’t really fix them presentably with the NR in Lightroom (which I find to be pretty effective for most manageable NR tasks). The noise still showed up at normal web viewing sizes and was really ugly at 100%. In general I’d always use raw with a camera like this – you can change WB, pull details out of the shadows and highlights that you won’t get out of the jpegs, etc. But in really low light at really high ISO, it kind of depends on how you’re displaying the shot. For small web images, the jpeg might look better because you can’t see the ugly NR at those sizes and you can still see the noise in the raw files. Here are a couple of shots of my brother, both taken at 6400, the first in jpeg, the second in raw, followed by 100% crops of both to illustrate this. The raw shot has a pretty good dose of Lightroom NR applied – about 33% on the luminance slider.
First RX10 shots-43 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
First RX10 shots-126-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81464
First RX10 shots-43 by ramboorider1, on Flickr
View attachment 81465
First RX10 shots-126-Edit by ramboorider1, on Flickr
My overall conclusion is that the RX10 would make a phenomenal travel zoom if you’re OK with the range of focal lengths offered - I’d always want something wider than 24mm personally, but many people would be very happy with a range of 24-200mm. In almost any lighting situation, particularly for static subjects where AF isn’t too challenging, the image quality of this camera is quite good, probably almost indistinguishable from m43 except in really difficult low light and dynamic range situations where m43 still seems to hold a small advantage. But if you’re OK with the focal range and have reasonable expectations for how well an all-in-one camera can handle specific types of shooting you might have higher standards for, I’d strongly recommend taking a look at this camera. I'm unlikely to buy one, but it could eliminate the desire for a couple of very expensive m43 zooms and handle 99% of what I'd do with those zooms very very well. So I haven't ruled it out altogether and I should be able to continue using it through some Christmas holiday travels, so never say never.
It's a very very impressive camera....
-Ray