Sony NEX Launch – detailed transcription

The user interface

We have completely changed the way that you operate the camera. As we said right at the beginning people think digital cameras are too complicated and too confusing. They can handle a digital compact, they have every confidence in that, so what we have tried to do in the NEX is try to deliver a compact style experience, bringing the functionality and control of a digital SLR. So the back of the camera is very clean.

You have two soft keys, top and the bottom, which control various functions that appear on the screen here depending on the mode setting. You have a control wheel which has a North, South, East and West input and rotation so you interact all the camera between these three button controls and the control wheel. It’s actually quite a speedy process, the software guys have learned from compact cameras, mobile phones, and incorporated it in the NEX.

The screens are are very colourful, animated interactive screens. You can have a black background, you can have white, you can have blue. We have an electronic dial which responds just like a normal wheel would do by rotating the control. This I think is absolutely fantastic.

Every camera comes with an instruction manual. What’s the first thing that the customer does, particularly if they are a male? “Don’t need that.” Straight in the bin! Straight in the recycling box! What we’ve done is build in a photographic guide better than the instruction book. The instruction book just tells you “this is the feature and this is what it does”. It doesn’t tell you how to use it. It doesn’t tell you when to use it. So we’ve got eighty screens of English with full photographic explanation of settings, controls, lighting, composition, how to take a better picture built into the camera and you can read that like a book.

In the menu there is an option to go straight into the screen and scroll through all eighty pages and learn photography but actually, when you’re out shooting with the camera, dependent on the settings at the time, only the relevant pages of the shooting tips are shown to you. So you can read it as a reference book when you first get the camera, think you understand it, you’re out in the field taking pictures and you think “I read something about how I could do x, y, z and I can’t remember it now”.

Shooting Tips is a soft key at the bottom of the screen, so you press it and all the relevant information is there for you to digest and get a better picture. It teaches you photography. So you’ve got that built in – Shooting Tips.

We’ve also got a Help Guide. Now this was introduced with the Alpha 230s and 380s. The Help Guide as you’re scrolling through the various setting is actually telling you what those settings are for. The Help Guide can be turned off, so once you’re familiar with your settings than you don’t need those to get in the way and slow down the operation of the camera you can turn that particular feature off – but Shooting Tips is always there.

Intelligent Auto (iAuto)

We have introduced Intelligent Auto to Alpha for the first time. This has been in Cybershot, so anybody coming up from a digital compact will be familiar with this. It’s also in our Handycam products as well. It has scene recognition, automatically recognising that it’s a landscape, or a portrait or whatever it might be and setting the appropriate settings. This is just fantastic. The first time you buy a digital SLR and you are met with ƒ-numbers, pphhf, you don’t understand it and… “oh it’s the aperture”… then you get into a full conversation… oh, that controls depth of field.

Depth of field? What’s that mean? Agricultural term? It’s too complicated. There’s too many phrases used, there’s too many acronyms and numbers and mathematics and… ppphhhh oh no! It doesn’t excite me, sorry, I just want to take nice pictures.

Okay, let’s change this completely. Let’s completely change the way that you work the aperture. You’re in Intelligent Auto or any one of the scene modes, you’d like to control what we know as the depth of field. Easy, ‘background defocus’ – you press the centre of the control ring and the background defocus screen appears just as you see here, and there’s a scale on the right hand side, going from crisp at the top to defocus at the bottom.

As you rotate the wheel, this dot moves between the two, so you’ve got it there with a crisp background. You might like it with a defocused background. You see the result before you shoot because the camera is closing down the aperture live. It’s doing it for you. It’s showing you a live preview of what your end result will be and it’s using gain-up on the sensor to keep the exposure consistent, so it’s not like depth-of–field preview on a digital SLR which doesn’t give a very good consumer experience. That shuts the aperture down, makes everything go dark and you can’t see what’s in focus or not. It can be impossible to use in some dimmer lighting conditions. You have to have a fantastically bright view finder and lovely lighting conditions to be able to get the benefit. Here, somebody who doesn’t understand apertures, doesn’t understand depth-of-field, gets the result they’ve seen in magazines but without complication. Very easy. A totally different way of interacting with what is a photographic control.

If you look in scene selections, you’ve got landscape, macro, night portrait, night view, portrait, sports action and sunset. All built into the camera and all selected by the user and usable further with background defocus mode adjusted. For those that are conversant with their photography and want the interaction control, you have got the usual Alpha display of shutter speed and aperture combination.

When you play back the images, if you wish, you have the full display of histograms and EXIF data shown. So it is as “complicated” if you like, as a DSLR candid so somebody coming down from that niche market has the things that they look for but at the same time we’ve tried to accommodate as possible the user of a digital compact camera with their expectations, their knowledge without making it overly complicated from day one.