Sony RX100M2 (RX100 Mark II) review
I just got an RX100M2 for Christmas. My previous camera was an Olympus EP-1 (micro four-thirds). Here are my thoughts on the RX100M2:
- It is pocket sized. Not jeans-pocket sized, but definitely shirt-pocket-in-fleece-jacket pocket sized.
- It takes good pictures.
- It has a flash.
- It has plenty of menu options.
- It is fast (e.g. the latency to take a picture is small).
- It has an in-camera panoramic stich function.
- It has an in-camera HDR function, with a configurable exposure bracketing range up to 6EV (i guess this means +-3EV). It takes three shots with exposure bracketing, saves the middle shot unaltered, produces and saves an HDR picture by combining all three shots, and discards the original high and low shots, leaving you with one unaltered picture and one HDR picture. You cannot save RAW files when using HDR. The camera HDR's tonemapping gives a natural look, not an artificial HDR look.
- The only flaw that really gets in my way is that it doesn't have a way to command infinity focus. Usually this can be worked around by focusing on something far away then moving the camera to your desired composition, but that takes time.
Update:
- after a few months, i think it is awesome. It is (except for infinity focus) everything i need in a camera, and better than any other camera i am aware of (due to its combination of image quality, small size, and features).
Compared to the EP-1:
- The EP-1 was too big (i couldn't fit it in a pocket) and heavy (my neck got tired after walking around with it for a long time) for me to take with me except when i was planning to take pictures, so i usually left it at home. This meant that with the EP-1 i missed a lot of unexpected photo opportunities. No more! I carry my RX100M2 everywhere.
- The EP-1 had no built-in flash. The RX100M2 does. This allows me to use it for social shots at night.
- The RX100M2 seems faster than the EP-1. Although i haven't actually compared them directly, i have a sense that there was a significant amount of time powering on the EP-1 and holding down the button waiting for it to focus and take a shot. With the RX100M2, i feel like i don't wait very long for these things.
- The RX100M2 autofocus seems to work very well. Although i haven't actually compared them directly, with the EP-1 i found myself using the manual focus quite a bit. Not so with the RX100M2.
- The RX100M2 doesn't have interchangable lenses, but i found that i just used the kit lens on the EP-1 anyways (i am not a 'real photographer').
- So far i have not found any manual control that the EP-1 had that the RX100M2 does not -- the RX100M2.
- The RX100M2 sensor seems better at night than the EP-1's, even though the EP-1's is bigger. It seems like i can take shots in restaurants with the RX100M2 with no flash with less grainy results than the EP-1, although i haven't actually compared them directly.
- The in-camera HDR is great. I need this because one of my favorite things to shoot is pictures of a landscape right after sunset. I usually want to capture both some sort of interesting cloud formation, which is bright, and also the landscape below, which is dark. So i use this a lot. The EP-1's maximum exposure bracketing step was +- 1 EV, which often isn't enough, and the RX100M2's is +- 3 EV. With the EP-1, i took saved both RAW and JPEG of every shot, and every shot was exposure bracketed. But i found that i never had time to actually go back and postprocess the RAWs, or to HDR the bracketed shots. With the RX100M2, i do give up the RAWs, which i never used anyways, but i immediately get HDR JPEGs without any further work.
- The full auto mode works well. When i am just taking random pictures of things to show people stuff or to remember events, i just leave it on full auto. The camera's software in general errs on the side of overexposure, which isn't good for the difficult shots with both landscapes and bright clouds that i mentioned in the previous bullet point, but for everyday shots it works great.
- Movies look great. There do appear to be some artifacts when the camera moves (horizontal lines, they look like scan lines, it's like every alternate row has a different brightness momentarily); i'm not sure if this is actually in the movie or if it's a problem with the AVCHD format or if it's a problem of my VLC player.
- i can take a good picture of the moon with the RX100M2
Random notes:
- the auto-HDR does indeed appear to work even in full manual mode
- any interlaced video format, including the default, 50i 17M (FH), has terrible motion artifacts unless the video player uses deinterlacing. In VLC, deinterlacing is off by default, but you can use the '--deinterlace -1' option to turn it to 'auto'. Another option is to switch the video format on the camera to progressive scan (50p 28M (PS)).
- Sony says you shouldn't directly delete video files from the sdcard using your computer ( http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3538332 ). What you can do is (assuming you are using AVCHD) copy all of the files in PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/ to your computer, then on your camera, go into playback and select the AVCHD folder, then hit MENU and Delete and then there's an option to delete all of the files in that folder at once.
- The pictures/videos look slightly better on my computer screen than on the camera viewfinder, probably because my computer screen is better than the viewfinder:
- for still pictures, some regions that look completely underexposed on the viewfinder can actually be seen a little, and the same for movies, but less so
- for still pictures, the picture will come out looking brighter/more exposed than it looked on the viewfinder, and the same for movies
- for still pictures, regions that look overexposed are generally actually overexposed. By contrast, movies look generally the same as they look in the viewfinder
Later Note: Now there is an RX100 III. It has a 24mm-70mm equivalent zoom (compared to the 28-100mm for the II that i have). I would prefer the III because i like the wide angle.