Part II

In Part I, I discussed the background of my Nex-7 purchase, the benefits of the camera to a street shooter, and what the camera feels like to hold and carry – all positive. Now, in part II I’ll discuss the downsides.

Battery life

To put it simply, the battery and battery life are terrible. Keep in mind that my shooting modes is this: during the working week the camera is on as I leave home, and stays on till I get to work (½ – ¾ of an hour later). During the day it’s mostly off unless I see something interesting out the window or go walkabout at lunchtime. It’s on again on the way home from work or if I’m travelling to meetings or taking an early evening walk. At the weekends the camera is on whenever I’m out and about which may be hours at a time. In the case of the Nikon D300 a single charged battery easily lasts a week, sometimes 2 or 3 weeks. Whenever I buy a digital camera I always buy a 2nd battery with it and I always carry that 2nd battery with me, charged. So I ordered the Sony with a 2nd genuine Sony battery. Because the camera’s entirely electronic (no optical viewfinder) I couldn’t really do anything with it till the first battery was charged. That took over 4 hours Thursday evening (so I stayed up past 1:00 a.m. just to turn it on). I then charged the 2nd battery while I slept. Friday and Saturday I had few opportunities to shoot with the camera but Sunday morning early we left on the train for Washington. Those of you who watch this site will know I love to photograph landscapes and suburban blight at speed with the shutter speed set high enough to stop background blur but leave some in the foreground. The Sony made this easy to do. In standard mode, when you turn on the camera, a quick press of the button in the center of the control wheel changes it to a shooting mode dial so it’s very easy and intuitive to get to shutter-priority mode and from there the top left dial lets you set the shutter speed you want. Simple and obvious. A real pleasure. So I took shots out the window on and off for the 3½ hours of the train trip. By the time we got there the battery was all but dead. We took a cab to the hotel, got refreshed and headed out down H street for a walk and to find lunch. I had plugged in the first battery in the hotel room and slipped in the 2nd. We walked along the Mall to the Washington Monument and on the the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Then we walked back to our hotel to prepare for dinner. The 2nd battery was dead. So, in the course of a single day I’d gone through 2 batteries. As I discuss some of the other issues with the camera below you’ll see the problem can be compounded. My plan is to buy a third battery and carry the charger with me.

Knobs

The tri-navi system is really useful and works quite intuitively. The rear screen shows you what each knob is affecting at any given time. Other reviewers have pointed out that the initial settings are not ideal and should be reassigned. So far I haven’t gotten to that but I like the basic set-up. However all of these knobs are often accidentally shifted. In particular the right top knob, which controls exposure compensation is often shifted. I like to shoot Raw to the right at about ⅓ stop over the camera meter. But I constantly find the camera is as much as a full stop or two off that mark and has to be re-set. Similarly, the center control wheel on the back controls ISO in standard shooting mode. For walking around in the streets I usually leave it on Auto but several time I’ve found that it has crept up to as much as 800, seemingly by itself. I generally carry the camera in my right hand, down at my side with the shoulder strap wrapped around my hand. Perhaps it is brushing my leg – I’m not quite sure how the knobs are getting moved.

Video mode

I’m not terribly interested in video. It’s all I can do to learn how to make a good still image without figuring out how to make good moving ones. However, video is one of the strong points of the camera and I was happy to have it in case I ever do take it up. Unfortunately the dedicated video button, located on the top right rear corner of the camera seems to get pressed by accident quite frequently. On any given walk I will often find I’ve recorded 4 or 5 short videos of the ground without realizing it. To get rid of them I have to move into video review mode, choose delete, then confirm my deletion for each clip, then move back to still image review. On at least one occasion I went to take a picture and missed the moment because I didn’t realize the camera was already recording video. To make matters worse, video recording really drains the battery and you can actually feel parts of the camera warming up.

Eye Sensor

Cleverly, the camera switches from rear LCD to viewfinder mode when you put the camera up to your eye and back when you remove it. This is a feature I believe Minolta pioneered on the Dimage A1, my first serious digital camera, which I loved. However in the case of the Nex-7 it seems to be confused by being held at one’s side, flipping back and forth between LCD and EVF views and, thus, preventing the camera from entering sleep mode and further draining the battery.

Menu System

Other reviewers have commented on the confusing menu tree and it is worth mentioning. At the top level there are  6 choices: Shoot mode, Camera, Image Size, Brightness/Color, Playback and Setup. The only thing Shoot mode controls is the choice of exposure mode (aperture-priority, shutter-priority, manual program and scene pre-set modes which I never use). And these are all readily available without going in to the menus at all. Similarly, Image Size controls only the jpeg quality level (or Raw), the aspect ratio and the panoramic modes – so far I’ve set the camera to Raw and haven’t tried the others). Brightness/Color provides alternate ways to get to exposure compensation, ISO, white balance, metering mode and flash compensation, most of which are more easily available from knobs. It is in Camera, Playback and Setup where all the action is and these contain a bewildering array of items in no logical order I can figure out.

I mentioned in Part I how for subway shooting I have to individually set white balance, auto-focus assist and rear display on the Nikon. On the Nex-7, white balance is reasonably easy to get to (press the top panel “navigation button”  twice, then use the left control dial to select white balance; turning off the auto-focus assist lamp is a little harder (press menu button, choose Set-up and then find AF Illuminator which can be 20 choices away or already available, depending on where you left it, and switch from auto to off); and I haven’t yet figured out how to keep the rear LCD screen off altogether.

The only way I’ve found to format a memory card is deep in the Setup menu. Perhaps there is some combination of buttons and knobs that will get to it faster but I haven’t found it and it’s not in the index of the unhelpful camera manual. This is somewhat similar to my Canon G9 but is a real pain when you’ve just removed the chip from you computer and want to go shooting.

Preliminary conclusions

I am still enjoying the camera overall. It’s light and easy to carry. It feels comfortable and natural to shoot with and is quite responsive. It’s far less intimidating for street shooting than a big DSLR. But the items listed above are real annoyances. My next steps to overcoming them are:

1. buy a third battery to carry with me
2. modify how I hold the camera so as to:
   1. avoid accidentally moving knobs and settings (in the last 2 days I’ve managed to keep the ISO where I want it)
   2. not go into video mode unintentionally
   3. allow the camera to go to sleep and save the battery
3. delve deeper into the manual to see if I can customize things around the menu system

I’ll try to make one more follow-up report on my success with these things. I think the Nex-system is excellent for my type of street shooting. It combines high image quality in a small light package with a wide range of features and manual controls. Most of the issues I’ve described seem as if they could be improved through firmware upgrades and learning the camera better (and carrying 2 spare batteries). At this point I would recommend the camera to anyone who shoots in a similar mode to what I’ve described here.

Further reading

This has mostly been an impressionistic and subjective review from my initial handling of the camera for street shooting. You can read more in-depth reviews of the camera here:

• Luminous Landscape
• DP Review
• DXO

Also, you can see Michael Reichmann’s (the Luminous Landscape) 6-month re-assessment, a recommendation for solving the unwanted video issue and my 3-month re-assessment, here:

• LL 6-mo reassessment
• LL “redneck” fix to Nex-7 video issue
• my 3-month review