Going backwards - A580

[classiccameras]

What a refreshing thought and quite logical.

Never mind if a camera has less features or is missing some compared to its rivals, there are features on my camera I never use or are likely to use any way.
They can dump my vid feature and give me a cheaper stills camera.
I never bought my camera on the basis they had crammed in so many features it had to be the best buy, Bull---.

[alphaomega]

Never mind if a camera has less features or is missing some compared to its rivals, there are features on my camera I never use or are likely to use any way.
They can dump my vid feature and give me a cheaper stills camera.
I never bought my camera on the basis they had crammed in so many features it had to be the best buy, Bull---.

classiccameras, the problem is that there is a myriad of other potential purchasers who have a different view of feature sets than that preferred by you. Making a variety of cameras on the same basic body and sensor would lead to a production and distribution nightmare and in the end provide you with your preference (if ever) at a higher cost than buying a camera that covers your requirements plus other features you would rather not have. The World is not perfect and compromise will alway rule.

[bfitzgerald]

The problem as I see it isn't so much "those features" you don't want, but if the camera is designed to allow you to do other things and not compromise your shooting.
Personally I never use the smile shutter, but I don't really need to see it on the overlay on the LCD (full info overlay) when I don't have a full time flash ready indicator! (Guess which is more important!)

I turned off the video button as I expect a fair few others have, but we have a red button that sits there doing nothing for me in still mode. Now if you could customise the button to do something else (when it's turned off for stills), that would be great. But you can't "face palm" as the Americans would say! But I can change the buttons I don't want to, like ISO (double face palm!)

It's not the end of the world, but it's not as well thought out as it should be. Why have access to gimmicks in the fn menu when you don't even have a setting for raw/jpeg there? In some respects Sony need to overhaul the way they approach this stuff. I find the nag screens very annoying, and worse even shooting raw + jpeg you can't use many of the "gimmicks/features" so that kinda kills that. Somebody didn't sit down and think it through properly. Like I said it's not a big deal to me I can work around it, but why can't we have the basic stuff sorted out like proper jpeg NR control, user set Auto ISO.

I'd love a less cybershot gimmick approach from Sony DSLR type users don't really care for them much. How about dual dials on a 6 series body another example. This would be far more useful that consumer newbie gimmicks to me. Many of these gimmicks should be hidden away from users or in the scn mode and not taking up useful setting space on the LCD. And why does Sony have a exp comp scale on the camera at the bottom of the display and insist on plastering some big display of it when you press the exp comp button?

Why have the main scale there at the bottom of the camera? Strange I find that quite distracting at times.