Got me a Nex toy...

[agorabasta]

Quite a surprise - no body/mount cap. It's a two-lens kit, so I guess the 16mm prime is supposed to serve as a cap
The cam is packaged with the 18-55 mounted - I guess the bayonet must be very strong. And there's only one lens hood; it fits both lenses, though. And there's only one reap cap, coming with the 16mm. I guess every p counts Wonder what's it with the Nex3, since mine is a more 'expensive' '5...
And you can't put lens hood in storage position with 16mm mounted - the lens release button gets in the way of the greater hood's petal and the flash cannot completely fold down, if mounted.

Okay, now a bit of 'impressions' of the lens quality. The 'horrible' 16mm has got some very complex distortion profile - it's geometry is 'coca-cola', we know that already; but the lateral CA also does a 'coca-cola' if the focus plane is about 5-7m away; and then when focusing above some 20-30m away, the CA is again simple and easily corrigible, as it also is at about 1m. At the focus distances of 5-7m the CA in the corners is purple/green while being red/cyan at 15-20% off the corner - not easily correctable without building a very complex lens profile dependent of the focus distance.
The good news is that if the corners/edges are cropped away till 15% off the edge, the rest of the image is very nice. But it means a 7Mp crop of 4/3 crop factor, that's about 21mm on APS.

The 18-55 seems much better, but the corners still show some very strange bokeh - it appears like having a sharp edge into corner, while having a very smooth long defocussed tail out off the corner.

The UI is OK even after four pints, quite unlike some Lx3's. Image quality about the same as a550. It doesn't overexpose, it's simply that '0' contrast is too high and needs a '-3' dialled in along with saturation '+1', the 'landscape' style seem to be the best (least bad) just as with the a550. LCD default brightness is lower than that of a550 - that's unfortunate, but expectable due to smaller battery; it can be adjusted at the cost of battery consumption, though - it's basically the same screen as with a550.

What I noticed right away is that it's very easy to get no blur at 1/13s hand-holding with both hands at the waist level using the 16mm non-stabilised 'cap' - weight/balance help quite a lot...

That's it for now...

[pakodominguez]

Congrats!
did you get the E to A adapter? or the wide or fisheye lenses?

Regards

[agorabasta]

did you get the E to A adapter? or the wide or fisheye lenses?

All those not yet available here at the moment (I'm currently in Moscow, Russia.)

[Dr. Harout]

Congratulations.
Post some nice shots with it.

[Dusty]

I'd say congrats, too, except that IQ seems so poor.

Dusty

[bakubo]

Post some nice shots with it.

Yeah, that would be cool!

Enjoy your new gear!

[KevinBarrett]

Thanks for the report! I have to say, as a leisure camera, the NEX-5 seems very appealing, but I could never decide what lens to mount to it without that E-to-A adapter. For lower cost of entry, I suppose I'd get the 16mm (since when does an f/2.8 prime cost less than a kit zoom?).

[agorabasta]

No pretty pix for now.

Here are two crops from in-cam JPEGs, showing the CA and corner sharpness with the 16mm and 18-55 at 18mm, both are f/11. I have pushed up saturation/vibrance, adjusted exposure to match and cropped.

The raw, if developed with IDC, is the same or worse. It adds oversharpening halos at contrasty edges, so doing the CA corrections afterwards is hardly possible at all.

All in all, the best use for the 16mm pix is to crop them to about 7Mp. But some kind soul could later make a decent lens profile, and we could get the combo supported in Lr3/CS5... That would be a few months wait.

[Danjojo_Resurrected1]

I was converting several Raw images last night with Silkypix and displaying them on the big screen, seemed pretty easy to get them looking very nice.

Several of them were with the 16mm lens and looked about the same as all other $300-600 primes....just added in some juicy perspective correction for the ones composed poorly.

What does the full image look like?

[agorabasta]

What does the full image look like?

It looks nothing pretty being shot to provoke the ill effects for the test purposes.

Here's the 16mm shot resized -

[agorabasta]

Now if the 16mm 'cap' is used for shorter distances of about 1m from the object, it's quite another story - it's almost a good lens, if it were not for the geometry. Still even as it is, it's quite OK. Whatever CA there is can be corrected even in JPEG, and it's quite sharp.

Below is a left upper corner non-resized crop and a full resize. (It's my office ceiling.) It was shot with contrast '-3' and sharpness '-1'.

[Danjojo_Resurrected1]

Thank you agorabasta

Look forward to seeing your further impressions and photos. Do you like it best with -1 sharpness or still experimenting?

[agorabasta]

Do you like it best with -1 sharpness or still experimenting?

You simply need some negative sharpness setting if the JPEGs need further PP. The '-1' seems enough/optimal so far for doing the CA corrections and sharpening.

I've already got an idea of how to use the only two lenses available for Nex - the central square crop area (that's 24/36mm APS/FF equiv diagonal FOV) of the 16mm one is good enough with some further PP to JPEGs and it's quite OK for raw, so with that lens you may just consider the cam sensor square and never bother to take it to 'portrait' orientation. (And they'd better put that option for aspect setting with correct representation on the LCD...) But it's still advisable to only shoot the close/distant objects while avoiding the 3-10m range, if possible.
And then the 18-55mm produces very nice JPEGs above 30-35mm.

Given the very consistent exposure in matrix mode, the Nex JPEGs may be very usable even with the current limited lens choice. The JPEG compression artifacts that plagued the a5x0 output at higher sharpness have truly got all eradicated.

[Danjojo_Resurrected1]

Appreciate the further info.

I have been planning to cut off 5-10% of the outer image frame with the 16mm kit lens since first keeping tabs on these cameras and image samples. Keep it with me all the times when the SLR would stay home and use an adapter and other lenses for more specific photography when wishing to travel light.

At dpreview new users are reporting the camera is continuously focusing in all auto-focus modes, do you see a way to turn it off? I'm wondering if Sony did this to keep it so the AF performance is always "snappy", it would definitely extend the battery if we can turn it off though.

[agorabasta]

At dpreview new users are reporting the camera is continuously focusing in all auto-focus modes, do you see a way to turn it off? I'm wondering if Sony did this to keep it so the AF performance is always "snappy", it would definitely extend the battery if we can turn it off though.

It does some constant prefocussing for sure. Still it's rather some rough prefocussing that happens only if the LV image gets too blurred out; it surely is not a precise AF-C always on. And if you keep it in A mode at some f/11 and don't let it look at some constantly moving close objects (like your hands or people moving very close to you), then it prefocusses far less intensively...