In "Sony Time" it seem like we're getting close to a refresh of the RX10 series. What would I like to see?

The Sony RX10iii in a Camvate cage topped with a Zoom H5 audio recorder equipped with an SSH-6 stereo/shotgun microphone. 

I'm a huge fan of the Sony RX10 series of cameras but I am not blind to their shortcomings. I get a sense that we'll be seeing another RX10 (or two) in the next few months and I'm hoping that Sony makes a few tweaks to the RX10iii product to make it even better. At the same time I'm hoping they introduce a new, more niche-y variant which I'll flesh out below.

The original Sony RX10 was a breakthrough product; a highly capable video camera, wrapped up in a high performance, one inch sensor photography camera. The two things that made the original such an important camera (for me) were the introduction of a really good sensor, at an interesting size, as well as a remarkably good zoom lens with a range I found to be just about perfect.

The original camera had a mediocre video codec but this was remedied in a firmware update which elevated the camera from having an AVCHD video file system that capped out at 28 mbs to a more advanced XAVC-S video file system that delivered 50 mbs; which delivered more detailed video images.

The next generation; the RX10ii kept the lens and body pretty much the same but delivered UHD 4K video and a much improved (higher resolution) EVF. Along with the UHD implementation the camera also offered faster fps settings in 1080p.

The current generation; the RX10iii, more of less blew the lid off

Fun with belts. A video that our talent thought up during our still shoot for Klikbelts. Go to Vimeo to see the video in 1080p. It's just 800 pixels wide here....

klikbelts 2K Final from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.
This video is about klikbelts 2K


Here's the client's site: https://www.klikbelts.com

One night at one theater then the next night at another. Bag of mini-cams in tow. ISO and mixed color insanity.

Sony RX10 at 3200 ISO.

When we last left off the chairman of the Visual Science Lab had just written about a lovely evening at the theater shooting an hilarious but traditionally produced play called, In the Room Next Door. The folks at Zach Theater were rehearsed to the nth degree and the production staff were as flawless and accurate as a computer.  And not just a generic computer....a really good computer. Go see that essay (which is a paean to the RX10) here: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-theatrical-test-of-sony-rx10-and.html

Well, yesterday I went to a different kind of theater production. No less fun but where the production the night before was perfectly regimented yesterday's fare was all about improvisation and on the fly, on the stage direction. The production was: The Bowie Project: A Rock and Roll Soundpainting. And you can read more about it in the Austin Chronicle, here: http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2014-01-31/the-bowie-project-a-rock-and-roll-soundpainting/

I was pre-recession busy yesterday with raw post processing in the morning, some accounting for Ben's college apps over lunch and a bunch of portrait retouching for a large medical practice for the first half of the afternoon. I remembered (almost at the last minute: thanks, iCal!!!) that I'd promised my friend, Colin, that I'd photograph the final dress rehearsal for his project (The David Bowie Soundpainting) and I needed to be right in the middle of downtown in less than half an hour.

Fortunately it's VSL policy to charge batteries and back up cards the minute we walk into the studio from assignment so the cameras were packed and ready to go. One Sony RX10, two Panasonic GH3s and a couple of fun lenses for the m4:3 camera. Should have just left it at home since the RX10 worked charmingly.

So, here's the deal. The Bowie play is completely improv. There's no script. There are snippets of choreography. There is a modern dance company involved. A Bowie singer. A rock band. A guy who let the fog machine run wild and two guys named Steve who loved playing with all of the cyberlights and catwalk mounted gelled spots---sometimes all at the same time. The direction? Shoot whatever you want from wherever you want. The play will last for between about 45 minutes to maybe 70 minutes. It might be longer. There's no intermission. Go!

I love most of David Bowie's music and it's always fun to see entertainers engaged in pure play so I just went for it. Here's a selection.....

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

 Panasonic GH3. 25mm.

RX10 wide open at 3200.

My Theatrical Test of the Sony RX10. And what a fun romp it was.

My mistake. I used the clear digital zoom (interpolated pixels) feature on this one 

to get a 400mm equivalent that I could handhold.... 

One shoot. One camera. One Lens. (Not shown here, but still yummy: 24mm equiv. shots 

of the whole stage. And yes, the lines are straight).

By Austin Photographer, Kirk Tuck ©2014

If you've read the blog for a while you know that I shoot a lot of marketing images for the best live Theater in central Texas, Zach Theatre here in Austin. I've been doing it for twenty years now and I'm finally getting proficient at the whole thing. A lot of our shoots are studio productions done weeks or months before a play is ready for an audience. We used to do that kind of assignment with big strobes and Hasselblad film cameras and now we press whatever really good digital camera we happen to have into service. Any of the major brands, with more than 8 megapixels can do a great jobs when you have the camera anchored on a stout tripod, when you are using the best lenses and when you hot glue the ISO dial solidly to 100.

But the other portion of our photo assignments from Zach Theatre are what we call, "running shoots." These are the images that we take at the final dress rehearsals, and since the opening of the new Topfer Theatre (Zach's premier theater and stage) we do those dress rehearsals with an audience of "family and friends" in the house.

In the past I've tended to shoot these with full frame cameras and fast, long lenses but from time to time I've tossed in lots of Four-Thirds, micro 4:3s, and a never ending mix of strange birds like the original Sony R1 (still have some great shots from the Janis Joplin show from that camera...).
When I do a running shoot I try to cover everything so the marketing people have a wide range of images they can use across diverse marketing opportunities. That means I shoot a lot frames. So I get to know the camera I'm shooting with inside and out.

If you've shot live theater before you know that the light levels on the stage change constantly. You know that the light levels can get pretty low.  You know that the color of the light changes all the time (you can thank programmable LEDs for that...). And you know that actors constantly move and that their hands move even faster (1/250th and above can help stop hand blur. Sometimes).  You either want a camera that can read all that complexity or you need a camera that you can make adjustments and changes to almost automatically. A poorly set up camera can be a nightmare. A slow focuser will drive you nuts. And, you'll shoot at ISOs starting at 800 and, if you are lucky, cap at 3200.

In earlier digital days I found the Nikon D700 to be a wonderful theater camera when it came to focus and ease of exposure adjustments. It was great when we worked in tight. The big revolution for me came with the introduction of great EVFs.  Especially the one in the Sony a99. For the first time I could make "real time" adjustments and have a high degree of certainty that the images out of camera would match what I was previewing through the eyepiece. No more shoot-and-chimp.

I've been happy with the a99 and the 70-200mm 2.8 G lens but the entire universe is our lab and our newest infatuation here at VSL is the new baby Sony, the RX10. So, with a bit of trepidation I decided to go totally "bridge-cam" for the dress rehearsal of, "The Room Next Store."  Also known, in the theater circles as, "The Vibrator Play."  According to the camera critics I would be facing insurmountable odds. I'd be gnashing my teeth at the contrast detect auto focus. Especially on moving subjects going in and out of the shadows. The zoom of the lens would be too slow to catch any decisive moments, and the depressing capper to the whole gloomy undertaking would be the sheer nasty-ness of the microscopically small sensor. Even smaller than in the Olympus "world champion" camera. According to some critics I'd be better off using my cellphone....

Well. I'll cut to the happy ending. None of the crazy negative stuff came to pass. And the play is really fun, and funny and filled with clever examinations of sexual politics and hilarious plots twists. Well, just imagine a victorian society circa the invention of electricity and the idea of "curing" female and male "hysteria" with a vibrator.... I messed up a few frames from laughing too hard. I enjoyed it so much I was even able to ignore the woman in front of me who pulled out her cellphone and texted a bit...

Let's talk about camera set up. I have to face some limitations. The RX10 is not going to match the a99 or any full frame camera at ISO' above 800 so I decided to try to stick to ISO 800 and use 1600 as my high limit. Then I go backward and try to figure out what combination of shutter speed and apertures will match up we with that. I aimed for 1/200th of a second as a target shutter speed but I was willing to go all the way down to 1/80th since the image stabilization in this camera is very good. I knew I'd spend most of the evening at the long end of the lens so the extra stability was nice to have.

I was sitting in the middle of a (non-paying) audience (and I'm not a "dirty baby diaper hold" shooter) so I turned off the rear LCD and depended exclusively on the very good EVF. And that's actually a battery saving move as well. You see, there's a proximity sensor at the eyepiece and if you have only the eyepiece implemented whenever you move your eye from the finder it shuts off the monitor. Instant "eco" mode.

I usually shoot in large/finest Jpegs but I though I might need some extra finesse in noise reduction so this time I shot RAW which also freed me up to shoot in automatic white balance, thinking I would do my color corrections in post. I used the movable AF focusing protocol and selected "smallest" for the AF box.

S-AF for the mode. No weird modes like HDR or DRO engaged. But I did enable the Clear Image Zoom. High ISO noise reduction was not set as that menu item is grayed out in raw.

Here's what I found: The camera never failed to lock in quickly and accurately to the subject on the stage that I selected. The focus, unless the subjects were in deep shadow, was as quick as nearly every phase detection autofocus DSLR I've ever used and quicker than several camera from a few generations ago that were four to six times the price of the RX10. Sorry phase detection fans.

Here's the big news....The color the camera kept deciding on in AWB mode was, when I pulled the raw files into Lightroom 5.0, exactly like the color I was seeing on stage. Now remember, I've been fine tuning previous cameras with exact custom settings or exact kelvin settings in order to manage color but no other camera I have ever used for this kind of work ever got me so inside the ballpark before. After a while I just presumed that the files would be close enough to not need tweaking.

At 100% (the land of the pixelphilia) and at 1600 ISO the images have the mushy, painterly kind of appearance we've gotten used to seeing from high resolution, small pixel well cameras, including the Nikon d800 and the Sony a77 and Nex 7. The files at both 800 and 1600 are a little flatter (in contrast) and have softer detail than files at lower apertures. But this is only apparent at 100%. As soon as you pull back to 66% or 50% the entire image on the screen looks good.

There's that pesky digital zoom again. But you know....sometimes you want to get close.

That's as close as I could get with the (handheld) 200mm equivalent. But I sure like the skin 

tones and the detail.

I wanted the image to be a little contrastier so I used a slider setting of 10 in clarity. I went down to sharpening and pushed the amount slider to 70 and at 1.0.  Then I went one menu down and invoked a bit of noise reduction mostly in luminance but ramped up the detail slider a bit. Once done I applied these settings to all 972 files I'd shot. Then I went back through and did little exposure tweaks to groups of images.

While the files are not as good as my a99 they hand 1600 ISO better than the Sony Nex7 or the Sony a77 and I think that's also a big deal out of a camera at this price. But what really impressed me was the lens performance. This will sound heretical but I decided, given the pixel sizes and the sensor size, that the lens was probably diffraction limited wide open. All that means is that the lens is probably computed to be as good as it's going to get wide open. The next two stops might be better but probably not by much. I thought, "what the hell. Let's go wide open." Since I rarely needed more depth of field and I was generally trying to nail focus on the main actor or speaker I didn't have problems with areas going out of focus. On a couple of occasions I dived down to f4 but mostly out of curiosity. Hello sharpness.

The files out of Lightroom were done at their full pixel dimensions of 5472 by 3648. Most of the images will be used on the web or offered to magazines and other printed publications at a "press room" size of around 3000x2000 pixels so they'll be downsampled in half. If you print the images in a tabloid you'll still greatly exceed the print specs for any rational size use.

But wait, there's more. After pounding through 972 images over the course of two and a half hours of shooting via the EVF the first (and only) battery was still showing 23%. WTF???? I thought this camera was supposed to be a monster battery sucker and I thought the battery was supposed to be lame. Not in my experience. In fact, I should have mentioned that I got well over an hour and thirty minutes of "camera on" time when I helped my friend Chris shoot video on Saturday. I know what the specs say but they are based on focusing, shooting and refocusing while using a flash 50% of the time. Your mileage will definitely vary.

So what am I to think of all this? The perfect little video camera combined with a great still camera for theatrical work. Huh? Who would have guessed it? And who would have been crazy enough to test one under these conditions? Well, for that you can pretty much always count on the crazies here at VSL. We love that kind of thing.

My advice to you would be to avoid this camera at all costs. If no one buys it the prices will drop near Summer and our staff will be able to buy bucket loads of them for much lower prices. We'll use them for everything. Hell, what am I saying? I'm already using them for everything. I'll reconsider when I hit something that doesn't work. Don't hold your breath.

in other news: Belinda and I finished working on, The Lisbon Portfolio. The photo/action novel I started back in 2002. I humbly think it is the perfect Summer vacation read. And the perfect, "oh crap, I have to fly across the country" read. It's in a Kindle version right now at Amazon. The Lisbon Portfolio. Action. Adventure. Photography.  See how our hero, Henry White, blows up a Range Rover with a Leica rangefinder.....

Remember, you can download the free Kindle Reader app for just about any table or OS out there....

Getting comfortable with the Sony RX10.

After a stressful weekend I finally got time on Tues. evening to take a walk through downtown Austin with my Sony RX 10 and put it through its paces on a bright, sunshiny day. The camera exceeds my expectations in a number of ways. Quick reviewers complained about the speed with which the zoom operates. I find it to be just right in that you can make extremely fine adjustments without the zoom mechanism overshooting. A slow and steady turn on the zoom ring gets you from 24-200mm in just 2.5 seconds and unless you are doing zoom whips (shades of 1960's comedy movies) the pace seem appropriate. 

The real story with the RX10 is about image quality and the combination of features which makes it such a good "hybrid" camera. Hybrid seems to be the predominantly used term for video and still capabilities in the same box. And the RX10 is a low cost exemplar of that conjunction. Why do I call a $1300 camera "low cost"? Because it is. The closest competitor to the RX10 is either the Panasonic GH3 or the Olympus EM-1. But each of these cameras is roughly the same price as an RX10 without a lens!!! When you buy an RX10 you are also getting a hell of a lens included in the total price of the package. To get the same reach and the same speed with the Panasonic or the Oly you'll need to add the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 and the 35-100mm f2.8 which triples the price.

While the sensor is smaller in the Sony it's not that much smaller and unless you are shooting everything with very limited depth of field it hardly matters. Based on the stuff I've shot with the Sony so far, in decent light, I'd call it a pretty even playing field. Turn the lights down a bit and the bigger sensor may have some advantages but.....we might be talking low single digit percentages. 

I always smile when people come out against smaller sensors. Many act as though there's some sort of dividing line of square millimeters that signifies a barrier between cameras that can be used professionally and cameras that can't. I thought about this yesterday as I was having coffee with a very good friend. I mentioned that the fourth book I produced for Amherst Media called, Photographic Lighting Equipment, was primarily shot with a Canon G10 point and shoot camera. 

I never mentioned it to the publisher because of the stigma that small sensor cameras seem to have but we've subsequently sold thousands and thousands of copies of that book and no one has ever complained about the technical quality of the images in it. The images I used the G10 for were all the illustrations of the gear. Not the sample images. 

That camera used a small, dense sensor with 14 million pixels. If you tried to shoot it at higher ISOs it didn't look great but if you worked on a tripod, exposed well with 80 ISO set on the dial and paid attention the camera worked great. And for still life images the live view and deeper depth of field were both convenient and positive. 

So, Tues. I walked through the city and snapped away at whatever I wanted. I wasn't doing great art. In fact most of the images will get tossed and not archived for anything. It was a therapeutic walk as much as it was a "break-in" session with the Sony. I could tell by looking at the monitor that the camera was doing what I expected it to. It locked onto subjects quickly. The exposures were all very good. I'd chosen "A" mode and vacillated between wide open and f4 for nearly everything. I dropped to f5.6 when I wanted deep focus.  I was satisfied with the ergonomic side of the camera but I generally wait on judging overall image quality until I can toss the images up on the monitor and really peek at the the fine details and the edges of the frames.  I noticed one thing that bothered me a bit. At 100% I could see a few sharpening artifacts. I went back to the camera and looked through the settings. I had increased the sharpness in the Standard profile by +1 based on someone's observation that the camera files in their test had been a bit soft. Now I see that it's not so. At "0" the sharpness is very well done in Jpeg. +1 is too much. I can only think that the person who suggested the sharpness needed to see his oculist. 

One area of performance for the Sony RX10 that I haven't seen mentioned much is the performance of the image stabilization. The camera has two levels of image stabilization. Normal and Active. In "normal" you get routine lens based image stabilization and you can see the effect in the finder. When you bump the control to "active" you combine the physical I.S. with computed I.S. and while you lose a bit of image area around the edges you gain a level of I.S. that is almost on par with the legendary I.S. of the newer Olympus OMD cameras. When you couple that with a sharp (wide open) 200mm equivalent lens you have a really powerful imaging tool.  One that preserves sharpness well.

I've learned the menu and I'm re-mapping my brain to more quickly discern which function buttons control what. There are enough external controls to make typical operation of the camera straightforward though I've come 180 degrees and wish it had a touch screen on the back like the Panasonic cameras I use...

And I guess that brings us to video. While the zooming of the lens slows down in video mode the focus doesn't. I'm pretty good about setting a focal length and sticking with it through a short sequence and the slower zoom is less obvious that a faster one but it would be best if the camera offered a variable speed zoom. One sad aspect of not having a touch screen is not having the ability to do "focus pull" by just touching a different area on the LCD screen. We never had that before the Panasonic GH3 cameras so I can live with it. 

Here's the interesting part for me. At high quality codec settings the Panasonic GH3 makes wonderful video. It's better than the Sony in most ways. When you bring down the throughput to something more manageable in editing the Sony catches up. And then, at a certain point you can compare apples and apples. Either camera is a step up from the previous generation of even much more expensive DSLRs when it comes to nearly every parameter of image quality. While a D4 gives you lower noise in a file that's just about all it gives you. It's important to remember that no matter how many pixels you have in your D800 or Sony A7r they are all still being down sampled to 1000 x 2000 pixels. That's why they call it "2K."

But the full time live view in the Panasonics and the RX10 provides much better image control and autofocus. And here's where the RX10 races ahead of the bigger DSLRs and even the Panasonic, it's got the things that make making video easier. The ability to set zebras at various levels is even better than having a live histogram because you can program the point at which the zebras manifest. The focus peaking is great and works well in video mode (hello Panasonic GH3...). That makes focusing on the fly quicker and better than all the rest (shared by the Panasonic G6). When you combine all those attributes with manual audio controls and a headphone jack and then overlay very impressive image quality I think you have a package whose feature set brings much greater value to the table than most other current cameras out in the market. 

It's not possessed of the highest res but at 20 megapixels it's more than most of us will ever need. It's not the quietest camera at high ISOs but is certainly professionally usable to 800 or 1600 ISO (depending on lighting conditions).  It's not the smallest camera on the market, but I rarely try to put my Sony a850 in a trouser pocket either.  For what they've combined inside the size is perfect.

So, who is this camera targeted at? How about a whole new generation of image makers who demand both high quality stills and pro level video in one package. How about any photographer who needs to travel light but still have a great lens range, with great speed in one small package? How about videographers who need high performance and great zoom range along with the features they are used to getting on dedicated video cameras (sorry, no S-Log)?  If you understand that camera size is becoming less and less important and that small sensors can be made to be high performance imaging "film" then the camera shouldn't come as much of surprise. 

The biggest feature to my way of thinking? The absurdly low price for the bundle of capabilities. 

I need to spend a lot more time with this camera in order to really get to know it but what I'm seeing right now is pretty cool. A week or so ago I posited the question about whether or not a person could functionally run a medium to high end imaging business with this camera. I'm not ready to issue an unequivocal statement on that just yet but it is the only camera I'm taking out on assignment this afternoon to do an interior group shot around a conference room table in a downtown office building. The depth of field will certainly come in handy! 

I have three or four pocket knives that people have given me over the years. Most knife enthusiasts tease about it but the one I keep in my pocket is the Swiss Army knife. I probably couldn't do much combat with it but it does everything pretty well and when we need to open bottles of wine on remote locations the "knife experts" come to me for that service. I like having the well made scissors in the SAK as well. The Sony RX10 is an imaging Swiss Army Knife done really, really well.

Playing around with video in the Sony RX10 and goofing on camera.

sony rx10 from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

Goofing around with the video part of the Sony RX10 camera. It's me mugging to camera. Click through the link and go see it on Vimeo to see the HD version. Note the detail in my hair, etc. It should give you a small idea of what the Sony is capable of....

Please, no fan mail...

Sharing my first impressions of the Sony RX10 video. And a little twinge of hesitation.

No beating around the bush here. I wanted to know what the RX10 would do if pressed into service as a video camera. I had some time this afternoon, no models around, no ready subject matter and the ominous threat of rain so I pressed myself into service as on camera talent. That's probably why I'm showing you a still of the camera instead of some web compressed footage...

Two cameras that point to the new direction in photographic tools.

Sony RX10.

As camera imaging sensors get denser and denser with pixels the last remaining frontier in current camera design is the exact marriage of the optical system to the sensor. Sony, beginning with their RX1 and continuing with the RX10 has this just exactly right. With fixed lens cameras (cameras where the non removable lens is an integral part of the design and manufacture) the makers have the ability to precisely match everything in the system. According to interviews with Sony the 35mm Zeiss lens incorporated into the RX1 sits very close to the sensor and every RX1 camera is individually calibrated down to less than a micron of error. 

The usual interchangeable system has tolerances that are ten times or more looser. But even beyond the mechanical linkages a fixed lens camera system let's the design team have precise aim points for everything from lens fall off to pixel well rationalization and correction. Instead of designing a system that is a jack of all trades a fixed system is optimized to a much higher level because all variables are known and can be accounted and compensated for. 

To my mind the RX1 (at the high end) and the RX10 (in the average consumer space) go a long way toward inciting a new revolution in camera design. While these two products may not exactly suit your needs I think we'll see more and more products that have a closed loop design aesthetic because it makes engineering sense. I shy away from the RX1 not because of reviews that reference slow AF and not even because of the high price. My objection is to the 35mm angle of view. I think it's too wide for nice portraits and way too short for dramatic vistas. If they were to come out with a version with a fixed, f4 zoom that spanned 28 to 70mm I'd be first in line.  Another alternative (probably not palatable for most camera buyers) would be to create optimized versions in popular single focal lengths. I'd want to see a classic trinity of (the existing) 35mm, 50mm and 85-90mm lenses. But I don't think that's on the horizon. 

But the camera that really caught my attention this year, and is steadily working its way onto my "want to buy!!!" list is the RX10. In part my desire for the camera is driven by its video capabilities but having owned several Sony R1 cameras I understand just how good a well designed lens, coupled intimately to a good sensor, can be. And how convenient it can be in day to day shooting. 

While the sensor in the RX10 is smaller than m4:3 I have to believe that the tight integration (both in design stages and in manufacturing) of the holistic system will allow the camera to compete on par with its bigger sensor rivals and perhaps exceed them in terms of sharpness, due to tighter tolerances.  

The RX10 is one of those cameras that falls outside the current vogue of being able to "customize" your camera with lenses from hither and yon. It is also out of fashion by dint of having a smaller sensor. I'm sure these things will keep traditional photographers somewhat at bay but I'm equally sure that a small subset of photographers will recognize the camera for what it truly is: A powerful, portable multi-media tool kit with great optics and great output. 

My one gripe is the continued use by Sony of the hobbit-sized Nex battery. I would love to have seen Sony use the same battery that's graced the Alpha camera for many generations. There's a lot of screen real estate to power, including a very good EVF. Oh well. That's what aftermarket batteries are for..... And I'll want a batch of them.

I wouldn't be considering this camera if I weren't trying to straddle both video and traditional photography and, if I were solely a videographer I might not consider it either. But for anyone for whom narrative filmmaking has allure and fast moving photography is daily bread I think we've finally got a digital camera that's nearly the perfect all terrain vehicle. 

Beyond the specs and details of the two Sony products I mention I think the time is ripe for other manufacturers to take a step forward and optimize lenses and sensors into more effective and cohesive packages . For a generation or two the products that result may be pricey or feature-limited but I do think it's a rational path forward in the pursuit of ultimate image quality.

In the same vein I would also point to the Leica Vario X. Samples I've seen point to the same kind of inclusive design philosophy. While that camera's marketing and general acceptance is crippled by the apparent slowness of the lens camera cognoscenti who have embraced them have come to find that the lens/sensor combination can produce breathtaking results. 

Whether you are ready to give up lens interchangeability or not these optimized packages are a very interesting story in the world of camera design.