is the sony rx100 worth it?

[Billy Ray]

VERY nice pics Jen… nice to have you back.

The night pics were with your RX 100iii too?
Tripod?

Billy

[d k]

Wow – great pictures, Jennifer! This really points out to me that I am not making the best use of my RX 100 i…

If you don't mind, what mode(s) did you use for most of the daytime shots? I still have not learned enough about photography (I have a "basic photography" DVD waiting for me to sit down with it), so I have been mostly using the "intelligent auto" setting on my RX 100 i camera – and I get a few good shots, but the exposure is not consistently correct, and images are not always as sharp as I'd like. I had a little better luck using a polarizing filter, but I suspect that if I were to use either the manual setting or aperture/shutter priority modes (knowledgeably) I would be able to come up with more consistently good images. Maybe if I know what modes you shot with, it will give me something to focus on, learning how to use those correctly.

[Jennifer Mitol]

Yep, even the night shots were with the RX100iii. And yes, I painfully carried my 1.5 pound meFOTO tripod with me. It was a great little tripod and I really, really liked it. I hated carrying it tho….

As for settings, I did everything in RAW, primarily in aperture priority. For wide landscape shots I closed it all the way to f/11 to allow for the greatest depth of field, but in light challenged settings then I went ahead and opened it up as far as I needed to in order to keep the ISO below 400. I found the Sony to really be conservative in terms of ISO – it really, really wants to use big ISOs even if I think it should do otherwise.

Obviously for the waterfall shots I did speed priority so I could slow the shutter down, and for the night shots I went all manual (generally ISO 2500, 20 seconds to avoid trails, and f/1.8 for a wide open aperture, focus just shy of infinity. But I played around a lot with this, as you can see with all the different results).

There's great reading about the triangle that is aperture/shutter speed/ISO for getting the exposure right. And nothing at all beats just getting out and playing around with your camera.

[d k]

Thanks, that is very helpful for me.

[Brendan Swihart]

Jennifer,
There's no need to stop down to f11 on a small sensor like the rx100 and you'll lose quite a bit of sharpness due to diffraction at that aperture. On the wide end, at 5.6 everything from about 2ft to infinity is in focus when focused on the hyperfocal distance of about 4 ft. Play around with http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html for more info.

[Jennifer Mitol]

Brendan, that's great insight – thanks! I wondered about that, so thanks for the heads up.

[Chris Chandler]

Hey Jen–

Wondering about the battery life that you got out of your RX100m3? I'm prepping for a month-long Iceland trip, and the RX100 is looking more and more like the camera I'll be buying for that trip/backpacking in general. Your gallery really helped sell it, especially being able to check the metadata info for shots.

I'm curious if you took extra batteries, or a battery pack to recharge, and how many days/photos approximately you were getting out of each battery? I don't know how much control Sony gives you, but I imagine turning off wifi, pre-auto focus (or whatever it's called), and other wizardry like that could extend the life. Oddly, it looks like using the LCD consumes LESS battery than the EVF (according to the Sony specs)

What's been your experience?

thanks
chris

[Aubrey W. Bogard]

Jennifer,

Many thanks for sharing your photos and your methods. Outstanding!

V/R,
Aubrey

[Franco Darioli]

Great photos Jennifer !
Proves that the RX III can do the job.

[Stuart R]

Not to me anyway. This is something I have been looking at recently and I concluded that the Canon G7X was better with the 24-100mm zoom.

Edit: sorry, old thread.

[Brad Rogers]

On my Sony RX100 v1 I have been getting ~310-330 shots on one battery. Most of those are with the flash off .

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