RX100 first impressions and snaps (low light and brilliant light)

I have been using my RX100 for the last couple of weeks while on vacation in Mexico. It's the first time after buying it in December that I use it in the real world (spent the first 3 weeks at home testing it against my older compact cams and enjoying how much superior it is, it's been a pastime in itself lol). Using it while travelling is even more fun. More than any other camera I've owned before. So much that I'm still focused on testing the camera's capabilities rather than the photography itself... I've never owned a DSLR, or in fact anything with a sensor bigger than 1/1.6, so obviously I'm hugely impressed at the leap in quality I'm seeing in casual snaps.

So overall I am really happy with it. Even if I think I own a "slightly below average" copy in terms
of QC variation. When I got it I noticed that towards the long end of the tele, the right upper
corner blurs noticeably more than the others. Stopping down to f8.0 reduces the effect to mild, so I decided to keep it. I couldn't be bothered trying various units until I found a good one, especially since I had read here about this exact issue and how people tried more copies, only to find the same issue to one extent or another.

The camera is critically small in that I carry it in my light jacket's front chest pocket at night
without it being really visible or weighing down too much. I don't like the idea of putting in the
dust of my jeans pocket, at least yet, but during the day I carry a small bag anyway.
Its body is smooth and I have to be careful when I take it out so that it doesn't slip. I find the build quality and feel overall superb, it really does feel like a premium product in a way that my previous G series Canons didn't. It's small, heavy and with clean lines, it oozes quality. The only exception being the battery and USB doors which are on the flimsy side.

Its picture taking speed (AF/shutter lag) is impressive, a lot faster than anything I had used before. Not so with its switching on/off or reviewing times, which are average. It has a lot of options one can choose from and it takes some time getting used to them. I still find myself forgetting I had set it to HDR for example. Speaking of which, I'm not convinced of its use as a DR expanding feature (I don't care for the unnatural HDR look). I feel its implementation can be improved. While it does what it says and it is smart in dealing with not too fast moving subjects, it alters the mid-tone colours somewhat and the image is (very slightly) softer than its non-HDR counterpart. It also seems to not help the highlights as much, so I have to start with a negative EV and relying on HDR to lighten the shadows. Not sold on the DRO feature either, as again it only boosts the shadows and I think I prefer lifting them myself in pp. Panorama is definitely good, though I haven't mastered it yet. I have got a few good ones with no flaws, but others with visible stitching points, mostly when I think I was panning the camera too slowly. Not sure what's the optimum rotating speed yet, or how it affects the resulting size of the panorama. Multiple frame noise reduction seems good, though I have only used it once. In general all these modes that rely on multiple shots being combined are really helped by the burst speed of the camera. I'm still amused by the speed of it and try it just for fun.

So, overall I am still learning on how to get the best results out of it, but it is definitely an enjoyable process. Here are a few quick and colourful snaps, all jpegs mildly post-processed, mainly shadows/highlights. You can also see more in my gallery. I'm sure these could be improved in RAW, but I don't have LR yet and I don't like the results I get from IDC.





It was actually a lot darker (almost completely dark) than it looks here. The naked eye couldn't see the details, long exposure plus lifting shadows in pp enables one to actually see what couldn't be seen.









Shot from very close. Involves considerable stretching for distortion correction, yet corners not that bad.