hey, Moss, I'm thinking of trading my D7200 for an a6400 (it's so much smaller).
I am wondering about your general impressions of the Sony and making this move in general.
Thanks
It's still quite early in my ownership, but overall the Sony is a very well put together unit and a great improvement over the early alpha 6K series. That being said, it is a very different experience than a DSLR, especially a DSLR with an excellent UI that you are very accustomed to.
So far, I really miss Thom Hogan's detailed guides. They launched me properly into the Nikon world. The A6400 has an on-line help guide, a detailed but more difficult to read reference manual - also on-line - and a smattering of blogger's setup guides. 3rd party guides are apparently still several months out.
The tracking AF of the a6400 is quite impressive, but as T. Northrup points out, you should consider it more of a 4-6 frames per second rig than the claimed 10-11. This is fairly typical of many cameras, and not much of a consideration on my part.
It is a bit harder to operate the a6400 in the style of a Nikon. You can do a BBF emulation, but it's more difficult to precisely preframe and set a focus point, or move the focus point precisely, on the a6400. This is understandable in part because you have 10x the density of focus points available on the a6400. But you never see where they are because of this density. Rather, if you want to use a focus-and-recompose style of operation, you set the camera to Tracking-flexible spot and then a focus zone will appear in-frame. Center on the subject, and the tracking will take over. It's backwards from what you do on a Nikon, although 3-D Tracking is a weak approximation to this system.
My problem is that I'm a lefty and my nose keeps moving the focus zone to the edge of the frame. You can restrict the touch operations to a segment of the screen, but that doesn't guarantee that the focus zone will be in an easily visible portion of the screen. You can lock down the focus zone position, but apparently you give up tracking when you do. This I think is a misstep on Sony's part. Persistent selection of focus zone should be independent of tracking mode. It's annoying, and I think there must be a workaround that, for example, allows you to easily center the focus zone and keep it there, then use tracking to compose.
Eye-AF is great, if you're tracking humans. Dogs and other animals need not apply, for now.
Aside from the issues of an OVF user moving to a limited DR/limited resolution EVF, as good as it is, you should be aware that the a6400 is like many mirrorless cameras in that its AF performance varies with the aperture of the lens used. In DSLRs, AF performance is largely independent of maximum aperture. When the ambient lighting gets dim, such as in an incandescent lit living room, the performance of the camera with a slowish lens like the 18-135 slows substantially and the EVF noise increases dramatically. For best low light performance you definitely need to pair this camera with a fast lens...of which the fastest zooms available are f/4. I can see where primes would sing here.
Sizewise, it's amazingly small, smaller than many smaller u4/3 cameras. As a traveler's camera, It will work well. At this point, would I sell my Nikon gear? No...it's too early.
And I bought this camera for a specific use case.
But if I were going full frame, I could see that I would be in the sweet spot of the Sony ecosystem and could be in possession of the best mirrorless camera on the planet. The a6400 is not a smaller A7. It's Sony's new entry-level E-mount camera, and remarkably potent. If you understand that, it's a wonder.
If anyone wishes to set me straight on what I think I've experienced, I'm all eyes.
