Mike Sandman
Leading Member
Presumably the NEX-6 is aimed at serious photographers who want a pocketable camera with as large a sensor as possible, and who want the option of changing lenses. It does need a pretty big pocket in a blazer or suit jacket. The camera is almost perfect for that audience. The lens's relatively small aperture at anything except a wide angle setting is probably the weakest link but image quality is OK - certainly not as bad as a couple of the postings on dPreview indicate. It focuses quickly in real life, and it feels reasonably solid. The barrel distortion seen in raw files at 16mm is correctable in Photoshop manually and will be less of a problem once Adobe comes up with a lens profile for Camera Raw. (And the camera compensates for it if you shoot JPEGs.)
Shot-to-shot times are quick and there's no significant shutter lag. There is a lag, however, when you are reviewing a shot on the LCD screen and you press the shutter button halfway to get ready for the next shot. The controls are small but well placed. The viewfinder is NOT a perfect replacement for an optical finder, but it has advantages an optical viewfinder can only dream about. Because it's mirrorless, the camera is always working in Live View, and without a mirror, Sony can give you fast focusing that my Canon 5D Mark II cam only dream of.
The flash is better than I expected. In fill mode, it's powerful enough to help in a 15 x 15 foot (5 x 5 meter) room, although it wouldn't work as the primary light source. You can pull it back on it's spring to bounce light off the ceiling. (Do this at your own risk!)
If you take time to read the PDF manual (something that works very well on a tablet) you can customize the controls to an amazing extent, which makes the NEX very satisfying to use.
Problems:
The external control buttons are small; they need dexterous fingers.
If something (like your hand) gets in the way of the pancake lens as its deploying, you may get an error message saying that the lens is not properly attached. Removing the lens and re-attaching may clear the error, or you may need to "reboot" the camera by taking the battery out.
The WiFii-feature is poorly integrated with the menu system. The instructions in the manual for using apps are clear as mud, although the instruction on the Sony app website are OK. But the app website is NOT on the main site for the camera! The remote control app is pretty basic - you can only control shutter release, set a 2 second delay and adjust exposure compensation -- nothing else.
Shot-to-shot times are quick and there's no significant shutter lag. There is a lag, however, when you are reviewing a shot on the LCD screen and you press the shutter button halfway to get ready for the next shot. The controls are small but well placed. The viewfinder is NOT a perfect replacement for an optical finder, but it has advantages an optical viewfinder can only dream about. Because it's mirrorless, the camera is always working in Live View, and without a mirror, Sony can give you fast focusing that my Canon 5D Mark II cam only dream of.
The flash is better than I expected. In fill mode, it's powerful enough to help in a 15 x 15 foot (5 x 5 meter) room, although it wouldn't work as the primary light source. You can pull it back on it's spring to bounce light off the ceiling. (Do this at your own risk!)
If you take time to read the PDF manual (something that works very well on a tablet) you can customize the controls to an amazing extent, which makes the NEX very satisfying to use.
Problems:
The external control buttons are small; they need dexterous fingers.
If something (like your hand) gets in the way of the pancake lens as its deploying, you may get an error message saying that the lens is not properly attached. Removing the lens and re-attaching may clear the error, or you may need to "reboot" the camera by taking the battery out.
The WiFii-feature is poorly integrated with the menu system. The instructions in the manual for using apps are clear as mud, although the instruction on the Sony app website are OK. But the app website is NOT on the main site for the camera! The remote control app is pretty basic - you can only control shutter release, set a 2 second delay and adjust exposure compensation -- nothing else.