Sony F717 - First Impressions
Ok, I finally got my F717 camera in the mail, charged it up, and shot
a few pictures. Unfortunately, I haven't been bale to give the camera
a full workout, since it was a bit dark outside when I was finally
able to test it out. Still, I thought I might as well post some of my
initial impressions of F717, and compare it to my trusty old Kodak
DC4800Z.
Here are some random factoids about F717:
- This camera is big. It's huge. Take two Canon Powershot G3s,
stick them together in an L-shape, scale the whole thing by a factor
of 1.5, and that's still smaller than F717. This is the X-Box
of digital cameras.
- Holding the camera feels kind of weird. You are supposed to hold
the lens assembly with your left hand, and the camera body with
your right. This feels subjectively a lot steadier than
holding a regular camera, since you are steadying the lens
directly. Unfortunately, the essential thumb-operated controls on
the lens barrel can be hard to reach for someone who does not have
extra-long thumbs. In addition, holding the camera at eye level
forces me to bend my wrist in an unnatural way, which is
physically painful. Fortunately, the swiveling camera body compensates
for this a bit.
- Sony's UI is inferior to Kodak's. With Kodak, as soon as you
press the Menu button, your entire screen is replaced by a
full-screen menu, which is easy to read. Sony chose to show a
bunch of transulcent, overlaid mini-menus, instead. They may look
cool, but they're hard to navigate and read. In addition, Sony
doesn't have an "Ok" button; instead, you are supposed to press
the 4-directional controller straight down. This is convenient in
theory, but impossible to do in practice.
- Most of the features of the camera, are controlled with the jog
dial. You click the jog dial to scroll through the options, such
as aperture, exposure time, focus bracket location, etc., and you
rotate the dial to change the setting. Every other camera on the
market (analog or digital) has dedicated dials for exposure,
aperture, etc. Clicking through the menus is annoying when all you
want is to take a picture. Of course, I should say "almost every
other camera"; DC4800Z has a dedicated wheel for aperture but
exposure is set in the menu.
- For this reason, shooting in P mode is not as convenient as it
is with DC4800Z. The Kodak camera has a dedicated control on top
which can adjust the exposure compensation; with the Sony camera,
you have to click through menus. Same thing goes for the A mode;
the S mode is a lot better than Kodak, since it does not involve
going through the main menu.
- Sony chose to include lots of presets for different kinds of
shots on their main control wheel -- such as portrait and
landscape -- and not one but two auto modes: one where
you can adjust the exposure compensation, and one where you
can't. These extra modes are useless. All you really need is P, A,
S, and M. The other presets just waste valuable control space,
which could have been spent instead to adjust burst shooting modes
or movie settings.
- On the other hand, Sony's HUD is superb. It shows you all the
information that you need to know, including the focusing brackets
(that turn green when auto-focus is achieved), the zoom level, and
the real-time histogram of the image. The histogram is very
useful; I kept wishing I had it all the time when I was using
Kodak.
- The monitor itself is also very good. It's bright -- so bright,
in fact, that I instinctively dialed down the exposure
compensation when I first tried the camera. The viewing angle is
not as good as Kodak's, but the swiveling camera body compensates
for this as well. All in all, being able to see the monitor in
daylight is a big plus.
- The EVF is really good too. It has a nice diopter adjustment, a
rubber eye cup, and a high-resolution screen devoid of any
external interference. Of course, I still can't really use it
because I wear glasses, and thus pressing my eye against the EVF
is impossible... But, nonetheless, I'm impressed.
- The color response of the camera in low-light conditions is
comparable to Kodak's. I.e., it sucks. Only Kodak leans toward
red, whereas Sony leans toward yellow. I guess this is unavoidable
unless you use Fuji's new HDR
camera.
- Inexplicably, the Sony camera does not have a saturation
control. Without a saturation control, I can't adjust the
saturation. I wish someone would clue Sony in to that fact. Oh,
sure, there is a white balance control, but it's a) too granular,
and b) not the same thing.
- dpreview was right
about the saturation thing, and about other things as well, such
as the uber-aggressive sharpening (which you can turn down,
thankfully). They were especially right about the limited
storage capacity. 128 Mb is simply not enough to do anything, and
Memory Stick Pro is too expensive for an average user such as
myself. The Memory Stick has got to be one of the dumbest
inventions in the world.
- When I read on the Sony's page that their macro focus went all
the way down to 2 cm, I was assuming it was just hype. Not so. It
really does go down to 2 cm... amazing. You can stick the
camera right there into the scene, and it will focus
automatically. However, there's a catch... there always is. For
some reason, zooming in even a little bit completely destroys the
camera's ability to focus, automatically as well as
manually, at any distance. I am not sure why it does that... maybe
I'm doing something wrong ?
- Another thing that really worries me about macro performance is
the total lack of macro lenses for F717. As far as I can tell,
they just don't exist. Kodak, on the other hand, sells a 7x and a
10x macro lens... I guess I was just taking them for granted. This
makes me sad, because macro photography is practically all I ever
do.
- The non-macro performance of the camera is very good,
though. It's much faster than DC4800Z, it focuses better in low
light, and the huge lens really makes a difference. The camera is
also very quiet, practically noiseless -- once you turn off the
annoying beeps in the setup menu. The Kodak camera sounds like a
jet taking off in comparison.
- When Sony says "Hologram Laser AF Assist", they aren't
kidding. I used the camera for about half an hour, and I have
already zapped two humans and a cat with the holographic laser
burst. Sony says it's perfectly safe, but it's kinda scary. I am
not actually sure if the hologram makes the low-light focus any
better, but it sure is neat.
- You can adjust the flash levels on the Sony camera ! W00t ! This
is another feature that I kept wishing I had on DC4800Z. As an
added bonus, the Sony flash is mounted on some sort of an
electromagnetic railgun. There's no reason for this setup, but
it's quite cool.
Well, I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. So far, I am not
actually sure which camera I prefer. F717 has a few more features and
a vastly superior lens, but, in the classic Sony fashion, it's harder
to use than it needs to be because of some stupid design goal of
simplifying/prettifying everything. I will post another chapter of the
review when I've had a chance to give the camera a real workout.
Posted by metabug at 2003/07/28 22:55
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