Longtime Pogue readers already know that I'm a huge fan of Sony's recent cameras. This company came out of nowhere - well, out of something like seventh place - to seize the leadership of the industry where it counts: in sensor size.
The bigger the sensor chip in your camera, the better and sharper the low-light pictures. The less blur. The better the color. The more likely you are to get that professional soft-focus background look.
In pocket cameras, there's still nothing that can touch the amazing Sony RX-100. It's expensive, but its sensor dwarfs all of its rivals.
In interchangeable-lens cameras, Sony has made tremendous progress with its NEX family. These are, for all practical purposes, single-lens reflex cameras: huge sensors (APS-C size, same size as in the Canon Rebel line), swappable lenses. Yet somehow, Sony has managed to shrink these cameras to about half the size of the smallest S.L.R. You can easily slip an NEX into your coat pocket, with the lens on.
For the last few months, I've been carrying around the NEX-6 ($650, body only), which is in the middle of the line. (Through June 22, it's $800 with lens, case and memory card.) Unlike the cheaper NEX cameras, it has a built-in flash, a built-in eyepiece viewfinder and a flip-out screen, so you can shoot low-down shots or up-high shots.
In essence, the NEX-6 is a less expensive version of the top-of-the-line NEX-7 ($950, body only). In fact, the 6 has a feature the 7 lacks: Wi-Fi, which lets you zap fresh photos over to your iPhone or Android phone for instant sending. You can also use your phone as a remote viewfinder, or as a remote trigger. I tried out the iPhone Wi-Fi app, called PlayMemories Mobile. It's a little clunky to set up, but it works. (Basically, the camera acts as a Wi-Fi hot spot, to which you connect your phone. At that point, the latter controls the former.)
A few other apps are available, too. A free one lets you post directly from the camera to Facebook over a Wi-Fi hot spot; a $10 one adds time-lapse movie creation.
The NEX-6 also has a newer autofocus system that focuses almost instantaneously in good light, and in maybe half a second in dimmer scenes.
It's been an extraordinary year of events and travel for me, and this camera has been fantastic. It's small enough that it's always with me, but it's camera enough that it rarely lets you down. I've posted a selection of NEX-6 samples on Flickr.
As you flip through them, you'll see a few of the NEX family's specialties:
Low light. With a typical pocket camera, you'll get blur if you try to shoot nighttime street scenes without a tripod. This one does fine. Soft-focus backgrounds. A big sensor and large aperture make possible this classic photographic effect - one that small cameras usually can't achieve. Crazy wide-angles. I've written before about how transformative Sony's Sweep Panorama feature is. Now becoming common (it's even built into the iPhone, for example), it lets you swing the camera in an arc to capture a huge wide panorama. But if you turn the camera 90 degrees, you get a huge tall photo that doesn't seem like a panorama at all - just a sweeping, amazing vista, as though you had the world's widest-angle lens.
Food, people, critters, landscapes, and architecture all benefit from these features. Battery life is 360 shots, which is excellent for a mirrorless compact like this one. You charge it over a USB cable, although you can buy a dedicated charger for $60.
There are some things that need fixing. Here we are, in something like the sixth generation of these cameras, and Sony is still using a ridiculously awkward menu system. I wish the screen would flip all the way forward, so you could use it for self-portraits. I wish you didn't have to switch between Photo Playback and Movie Playback modes. Why can't movies and stills be mixed together, as they are on any other camera?
I used the 16-50mm power-zoom lens (about 3X zoom), which is remarkable for the way it collapses flat when the camera is turned off. It does a beautiful job of zooming while you're filming, quietly and smoothly. But I really wish it didn't distort anybody standing near the edges of the frame.
But in general, this is an extremely rewarding camera that occupies an impressive spot on the size/quality spectrum. Over time, you develop a trust of a camera like this, an emotional bond: “I'm having an experience I want to remember, and I know you're not going to let me down.†Sony is most definitely on the right track.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 13, 2013
An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to the aperture feature that makes possible soft-focus backgrounds. It is a large aperture, not small.
