Sony alpha NEX-5 Review

Sony Alpha NEX-5 Review

The Sony alpha NEX-5 is “The world’s smallest lightest interchangeable lens camera”.

NEX 5

Reading the spec the Sony alpha NEX-5 sounds like the most amazing camera ever invented, I just can’t get over the fact that they made the body smaller than the lens diameter. Still that’s just my SLR preference speaking. What the Sony alpha NEX-5 is is a mirrorless, interchangeable lens, system camera. The system is very small, but clearly Sony have tapped into the market niche opened up by Panasonic and Olympus with their Micro Four-Thirds system, and it will grow. This camera, with its 16mm (24mm equiv) pancake lens is light and will slip into a pocket or a bag quite comfortably. And what this gives you is SLR quality JPEG or RAW images straight from the camera.

Still, the Sony alpha NEX-5 has a hefty price tag, so what do you get for your money?

The advertised selling points:
· DSLR-quality images with 14.2 megapixels Exmor APS HD CMOS sensor (The HD added to the HPS on the sensor just means that you can crop, in camera, to a 16:9 ratio)
· AVCHD Full HD 1920x1080i video (that’s technical for it’s a video camera too – it also does MP4 at 720p if you prefer)
· High-speed shooting up to 7fps
· Sweep Panorama (you click the shutter and ‘sweep’ your camera across the scene, and the NEX stitches it all together into one image)
· 7.5cm/3″ tilt-angle TruBlack LCD, with 920,000 dots
· Simple operation with on-screen Help Guide (hints and tips to help you take better pictures built in to the camera – it’s a book, it’s a video-cam, it’s a panoramic cam…)
· E-mount interchangeable lens system
· Sony claims the battery is good for 330 shots (though this will vary depending on view screen usage)
· ISO200 – 12800
· Max image size 4592×3056 (3:2)
· Max panorama size 12,416×1,856
· Stylish magnesium body
· 1.5x crop sensor (for ex-35mm users, multiply lens focal length by 1.5 to get the 35mm equivalent lens power)
· Jpeg & RAW
· Takes memory Stick and SD

NEX 16mm F2.8 pancake lens

The Magnesium alloy body, which despite its tinyness, allows a good two-handed grip, has a real quality feel. A range of 3 ‘E’ lenses is available at the time of writing: a 16mm F2.8 pancake; a standard 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 stabilized zoom; and a stabilized 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 superzoom. Now although Sony is marketing the NEX range under its alpha brand, these cameras do not take alpha mount lenses (I don’t pretend to understand this), the NEX range has its own E-mount range. However with the purchase of the LA-EA1 Camera Mount Adapter it allows you to make use of your collection of alpha DSLR lenses. This adapter is also compatible with A-mount optics by Konica-Minolta.

NEX E18-200mm F3.5-6.3 telephoto zoom lens

One of the features that made me smile is “Background Defocus Control – Just turn the jog dial to adjust depth of focus and see beautiful blur effects previewed on screen. Create professional-looking images with a crisp foreground subject against a smoothly blurred background, just like a DSLR camera” This is a highly hyped aperture control, but of course to people who just want to click and have a great picture, ‘aperture’ is starting to sound scarily technical. All cameras have this (they don’t all let you control it) – it’s the hole the light goes through. But as soon as you mention something like f5.6 you’ve probably lost a lot of customers, so this is a clever move on Sony’s part to sell you something you can’t not have in a camera as a new feature – brilliant! Hat’s off to you Sony.

The sweep panoramic feature needs a little practise but works acceptably well. And is so much easier than using stitching software to join up a series of separate images.

The flash is not built into the camera, but comes in the box and has a guide number of 7, which is not very powerful but will be adequate for the indoor social situations where it is most likely to be used.

Still, you probably want to know if it’s worth buying, and I think it is. For a compact camera the picture quality is very good, the menus are simple, clear, and helpful as well as giving you handy hints and tips, not only on the camera’s use, but also on photography. And if you just want to point and click, that works very well, and if you want to get a bit more involved with the creative side, you can do that too. And if like me, you like a proper viewfinder – you can have one, it’s an optional accessory. But if the price is just a little high, you might want to consider the NEX 3 almost identical, slightly different body shape, not made of magnesium and around £80 cheaper.

Michael Hadfield


1 Comment

  1. Author

    Personally I’d go for the Sony. Sensor getting a little dated on the Lumix. Lumix RAW image quality excellent but jpegs leave a little to be desired. One or two other little niggles with the Panasonic also.

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