Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Sony a65 user review after the first six months


It was with high hopes that I switched from Canon to Sony last December and after six months of intense Sony usage, here's my personal impressions.
I miss my Canons for shooting weddings. Consistently accurate (and more importantly, precise) AWB and the best flash implementation I've ever had (I've also used pro Nikons and pro Olympus). Canon IQ is excellent overall, everytime. Canon bodies are solid, if uninspired.
The Sony, on the other hand, has AWB that is literally all over the place on the yellow (and red) side: too yellow, very yellow, and super yellow red. Setting WB to 5400K works until you use flash... then it's too blue!
Sony flash implementation is awful and it's just not me; do a search on dpreview and you'll find a lot of disgruntled users.
Sony IQ can be very good, after post-processing, of course. 

For everything else (and you may ask: what else is there besides the pursuit of the best IQ?), I love my Sony a65 (and it's cousin, the Sony NEX 5N... but more on this for another blog entry). The Sony makes photography fun again; and I find that I will be happy with my images when it is "fun" to take them. 
Sony has the great but under-appreciated Minolta line of lenses, phase detect video, real time EVF that I can't live without, really useful shooting modes and picture effects (panorama, twilight mode, rich tone B&W, etc).
For me, previsualization is very important. Imagine, or see, the "scene" before it's taken as a picture. I previsualize everything, even a 2,400-shot wedding. Heck, I previsualize what my day is going to be, what the rest of my life is going to be. It's not an exact science but it's what parapsychologists term "putting it out there". Self-fulfilling? Perhaps. But it works for me. And the 2.4M dot OLED EVF, with it's real-time "what -you-see-is-what-the-sensor-gets" is the key that gets my creative juices flowing.

Of course, if money was not an issue, I would have 2 parallel systems for work and play. But where's the fun in that?

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