I haven’t had a chance to take my NEX-5 out for a serious shooting session so here’s a few impressions I got from playing around last night:
It’s small but heavier than you’d expect. Certainly very solidly built. The all-metal construction gives the 18-55 a great feel, completely unlike any kit lens I’ve used before.- The small size promotes a natural two-handed grip so you’re actually taking the weight of the camera with your left-hand on lens rather than with the small right-hand grip.
- Sweep panorama works incredibly well. There’s still going to be times when you want to use a dedicated stitching software on the computer, but this mode is going to get a lot of use from me!
- AutoHDR, again, works really well. I’m not a big fan of HDR photos (actually, I hate most of the overcooked, tonemapped HDR images you’ll find) but it has it’s place in difficult lighting situations where graduated filters aren’t suitable. The results are reasonably natural and it’s a big advantage to have it baked into the camera.
- 7fps is awesome and it should be really useful in my quest to capture bees in-flight
- Smile shutter works as expected, automatically taking the photo when your subject smiles
- The flash isn’t as bad as I feared, providing some good light and ok portraits (I generally hate popup flashes and only learned to love flash when I started bouncing it off the ceiling). The flash is quite fiddly to attach – certainly I’d be tempted to leave it on all the time
- The good news is that you might never need the flash as the ISO performance is so good. It blows my Sony a200 away! With the a200 I aim for ISO 100-200, or 400 if I’m stuck (yeah, it’s that bad). With the NEX I think I’ll be happy with anything up to ISO1600, and maybe more.
- The menu systems isn’t half as bad as some reviews have made it out to be. Yes, there are niggles, and I’d like quicker access to DRO and HDR modes, but I think I’m going to get used to it.
- The startup time is probably ~1.5secs and that delay is a little disconcerting to begin with, leaving you thinking “have I switched it on right?”. But overall, it’s not an area of concern for me and there are rumours of a firmware update to reduce it.
;)
I’m off for the weekend and the NEX-5 is going to get a through testing. Expect more thoughts early next week!