In 2018, when the best smartphones take phenomenal photographs, it is hard to justify a standalone camera. If you have a passion for photography, making the leap to a DSLR or mirrorless camera makes sense, but only if you’re prepared to invest in lenses and carry them with you wherever you go. Purchasing a point and shoot seems ridiculous, and yet, the photos I’ve taken with Sony’s RX100 VI — which is essentially a compact point and shoot camera — are some of the best I’ve taken.
The RX100 VI shines when you don’t have control over the subject or your environment.
Despite the tiny size of the RX100 VI, it has a massive inbuilt zoom lens and super fast autofocus that allowed me to grab portrait shots of people on a stage from ten rows back, something no smartphone camera could offer.
Most of the time I left the RX100 VI on auto, snapping landscapes, portraits, close ups and crowd shots, and letting the sensors do all the work. It was incredibly difficult to take a bad photo with this camera.
Optical image stabilisation smooths out video and eliminates hand-held blur in stills; in the few hundred photos I’ve taken, I can’t find one out of focus.
Video is just as impressive. The Sony features Hybrid Log Gamma, a HDR video specification developed for broadcast television. The one letdown is no support for an external microphone, which rules out the RX100 VI for “run and gun” video journalists.
When I wanted a little more control, mainly to adjust the aperture, it was simple to do. It’s easy to manually override the most common adjustments like aperture and focus without leaving the Auto settings safe space. Or you can take complete control with the standard modes available on most high end shooters.
Photos and videos can be transferred to a smartphone with Sony’s Playmemories app which, like all camera transfer apps, is a usable but fairly awful experience.
It hurts that even Sony makes a terrible transfer app, considering the company is capable of making some of the better Android phones on the market. At this point I’m hoping for GoPro’s collapse, if only so a traditional camera company can buy the software team from them.
Sony RX100 VI review: a peerless point-and-shoot with a DSLR price tag
Reviewed by Knowledge Valley
on
October 01, 2018
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