Sony NEX-6L/B 16.1 MP Compact Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera with 16-50mm Power Zoom Lens and 3-Inch LED (Black)
CUSTOMER REVIEW
In 1973 I bought a Rollei 35 - a 35mm camera with a collapsible 40 mm f/3.5 lens. It cost $200, equal to about $1,000 today. It was fully manual - no auto- anything. There was an optical viewfinder but no rangefinder. It took great pictures and fit in a coat pocket. Now we have the Sony NEX-6, only marginally larger than the Rollei, effectively for the same price when you adjust for inflation.
Even though I have a Canon 5D Mark II, a wonderful DSLR, its size and weight are a big deterrent to taking it with me routinely. So I wanted a camera designed in the spirit of the Rollei 35 - to fit in a coat pocket, have a sensor big enough to make 11 x 14 enlargements, have a zoom lens with a 24mm field of view, and a have a built-in viewfinder, not an add-on, and not just an LCD. Until now (11/2012) the options were the Sony NEX-7, upcoming Fuji X-E1 and the larger Olympus OM-D, all at $1300 or more.
I have now taken about 500 shots and the NEX-6 is close to perfect for my purposes - a digital reincarnation of the Rollei 35. But it won't be right for everyone.
The heart of the NEX-6 is an APS-C size sensor, the size in the vast majority of DSLRs. It's 1.5 times the size of a the "4/3rds" sensor found in similar Olympus and Panasonic cameras and 3 times the size of the sensor in Nikon 1 cameras. As a result, the image quality is excellent up to ISO 1600 and not bad up to ISO 6400. A new Sony kit lens gives a field of view equal to 24-75mm on a 35mm camera. The lens focuses quickly and collapses to a small size, so the camera fits in a coat pocket or the corner of a backpack. There are some complaints on Internet forums about the lens vignetting and about distortion at the wide end. The camera corrects distortion in JPEGs by itself (unless you turn that feature off). Although the raw images are not corrected, they're easily correctable in Photoshop etc. Adobe and Aperture both have offered the usual downloadable updates to interpret NEX-6 raw files, so if you prefer to edit raw files you can make distortion corrections with standard software tools.
All shooting parameters are readily adjustable. There's a standard "PASM" dial for selecting the shooting mode. The initial setup menu is complicated and not entirely logical but you can configure the controls very flexibly. Most notably, you can program the Fn button to call up the six parameters you change most frequently - ISO, drive mode, metering mode... There are 16 parameters to choose from. The LCD can display a full set of shooting parameters and you can adjust each one with the control dial on the back, so you after initial setup don't have to go into the menu to change settings.
The viewfinder is electronic, not optical as with a DSLR. It's like a little LCD with 2.1 million dots. It's sharp and very responsive, but not as good as an optical viewfinder in low light. (To get the full value of the viewfinder, be sure to adjust the diopter wheel to suit your eye.) The LCD screen folds up or down so you can hold the camera at your waist or above your head. The LCD is not touch-sensitive. Oddly, Sony's NEX-5N and the new NEX-5R cameras have that feature, A touch-sensitive LCD would be helpful for entering WiFi passwords and selecting menu options, but if you buy the Sony NEX-5R, you give up the NEX-6's PASM control dial and other control features as well as the excellent built-in viewfinder (though you can buy a clip-on accessory EVF).
You charge the battery via a USB cable, not a charger that plugs into the wall, which means you can charge it from a computer or in many cars, but there's no way to charge a spare battery. (There are inexpensive aftermarket charges on Amazon & elsewhere; it's probably best to buy a "genuine" Sony if you want a spare battery.) Battery life is just fair. The camera tries to autofocus continuously, which eats battery life. Supposedly Sony is going to fix that with a firmware update. The camera also has WiFi, which reduces battery life. WiFi lets you control the camera remotely with a smart phone and upload photos. Using it is non-intuitive and badly integrated with the rest of the menu system. Sony's instructions for WiFi setup are useless. Error messages appear to be literal translations from Japanese, like reading something from a 1960 made-in-Japan radio. The LCD does not have a touch screen, so entering WiFi SSIDs and passwords is done using a QWERTY soft keyboard that is a bit clumsy to navigate. Worse, your Sony password for downloading apps is entered using a soft version of a phone keypad, even though the QWERTY keyboard is available for entering WiFi access point info. Although WiFi setup is very clumsy, once it's done it does open up some interesting options. Example: with the remote control app you can see the image from the camera on you phone or tablet and use it for precise focusing, and trip the shutter, of course. But you can't adjust aperture or shutter speed, at least in the current version of the app. (Edit added 3/15/2013: There are aftermarket products that let you use an iPad/iPhone to do that.)
The positives - especially the excellent image quality and the ease of setting a wide range of shooting parameters -- greatly outweigh the negatives. If you already have a small DSLR like a Canon Rebel or Nikon 3200 or similar, the size advantage from an NEX-6 is marginal. But if you have a "pro-sumer" or full-frame DSLR and you want a highly capable camera you can easily take almost everywhere, the NEX-6 is a worthwhile choice, If you don't have a DSLR and you're think about getting one, the NEX-6 is a good alternative - a DSLR near-equivalent you can put in a coat pocket.
via Amazon Best Seller V2 copy copy http://ift.tt/QWkedY
