RX100 wow ! :-)

[alphaomega]

Thanks for your quick response to my plea on the RX100 performance question Bluebear. I have "grasped the nettle" and ordered one from Amazon UK at £457 delivered. From that I will get £50 back from Sony and that leaves me with a net cost of £407. I think that is reasonable for that camera.

[Bluebear]

I'm sure you'll enjoy it. It's worth considering the accessory grip from Richard Franiec too. Makes a difference to the handling.

[alphaomega]

So I got my RX100 today and was amazed by the size of this little thing (or rather lack of size). Amazing it contains a 1" sensor and 20Mp. Quick to grasp the menu items without looking at that silly little instruction booklet. No chance to take any test shots but hopefully we will get some decent weather shortly. I wonder if I should adapt A and use F5.6 as suggested by DK as a good aperture setting and then adjust ISO as I go along or try one of the fancy Auto settings. One sounds alluring at "The device beautifully shoots automatically while reducing blurring and noise" - Superior Auto. I presume I won't get RAW here so I will probably settle for A as I use on my NEX and Alpha cameras. At least I will then be able to default to raw if the Jpeg DR is found wanting with missing highlight details as DK alludes to in his review.

[alphaomega]

Re RX100 performance, just got the first batch of images taken with my new RX100 through Alamy. Most of the pictures were taken in Edinburgh with very large DR from dark shadow areas to fully lit bright areas (Princes Gardens). I could see immediately the the "out of camera" Jpegs were of absolutely no use due to lack of DR. However, the RAW images processed in LR4 responded well and provided the necessary ability to recover highlights and shadow areas. Noted some CA in towers/spires against a white sky, not removed by LR4's auto CA removal tool. Could not get rid of the residual CA in PS4. Some softness at corners at wide end of zoom lens. This is all as reported elsewhere. Apart from the "weaknesses" known, this is quite some camera. The sharpness of 55Mb images at 100% is amazing (apart from corners) The out of camera image size gives opportunity for cropping and reducing size to get 100% view sharpness if required. Despite lots of buildings I did not really notice any extra distortion in RAW images. I thought I would have had to use the LR Lens Correction tool excessively compared with Jpeg. Think that my NEX-6 probably have slightly more DR, but then the RX100 is even smaller than the Pana LX2 I still have. The RX100 is a true "pocket camera".

[mvanrheenen]

I'm not much of a techie when it comes to photography, so can't comment much on that, but I can tell you the body is robust.

I took some shots inside an old hotel last weekend. I made a wrong step on the stairs while holding the RX100 with lens and flash out. It took a hard fall from 3 or 4 steps and landed on the lens. It looked like it was stuck, so after I turned the power off and pushing the lens gently back. After turning the power on I tested it: no harm done... for the camera that is.

It's a great pocketcamera. I do feel the jpegs straight out of the camera lack detail, especially at higher ISO settings. The RAW files are great for such a small camera. The controls need getting used to coming from a dSLR, but the Fn button can be programmed for most of the important functions. Battery life is acceptable. I do find the startup time a bit slow, but maybe I'm spoiled by using a dSLR. I do remember my old Canon Ixus and Fuji FinePix compacts starting faster.

Using your finger to bounce the flash is handy indoors btw.

Mark