![]() The popup flash is released mechanically with a small flash button just to its right, and it's very strongly sprint-loaded indeed, popping up quickly and with a loud "thunk". The Sony RX10 includes both a built-in, popup flash strobe, and a hot shoe for external strobes. If you enable manual focus, however, the ring around the lens becomes a focus control, leaving zoom control to the rocker.įlash. Ordinarily, you can use either control for zoom adjustment, but the ring around the lens is both more accurate and faster. The zoom ring, like that for aperture control, is fly-by-wire rather than a mechanical linkage. There's also a dedicated zoom ring around the lens barrel, as well as a zoom rocker around the shutter button. ![]() (A particularly rare touch is the ability to switch between a stepped and a smooth, click-free rotation on the dial, courtesy of a switch on the bottom of the lens.) Don't be fooled, though: It's still a fly-by-wire design, even if it's a very nice one. Instead, the front dial is replaced by an aperture ring around the lens barrel as it did in the days of mechanical aperture linkages. It's not the traditional front-and-rear dial arrangement you'd find on most SLR bodies these days, though. It's not quite as versatile as side-mounted tilt/swivel displays, though, offering no help with self-portraits or shooting high / low shots in portrait orientation.ĭials and rings and levers (oh my!) The Sony RX10 sports a triple-dial design, if you count the combined multi-function controller / dial on the rear of the camera. It's great for shooting from the hip, low to the ground, or over your head, and makes the RX10 significantly more versatile than cameras with a fixed screen. The RX10's LCD is articulated in just the same way as that of the RX100 II, and allows tilting upwards by 84 degrees, or downward by 45 degrees. And this was also borne out in our real-world shooting with the camera, too: It focused quickly and confidently, and nailed focus right where we wanted it most of the time. Our lab testing found autofocus on the Sony RX10 to be as fast as most consumer DSLRs using phase detection. Regardless of the cycle rate, though, this new system clearly works. It's likely that contrast measurement is very fast, though, given how fast we know the array can be read (from the video processing mentioned elsewhere), and that we know the new BIONZ X processor has an enormous amount of processing horsepower to bring to bear. ![]() The NDA briefing was a little sparse on deep technical details for this, but if we understood correctly, Sony says that this hybrid system can complete 50,000 start-move-stop cycles per second(!) That's apparently how many cycles the focus-actuator system can perform per second, but it's not clear how many cycles the camera actually performs in practice, as clocking the image data off the array and performing the contrast measurement will add at least some time to the process, and we don't know whether the 50K/sec spec included the contrast measurement process or not. Apparently, the ultrasonic-wave motor is good at getting things moving, but not so good at stopping them, hence the need for a brake or "friction clamp", in the form of the piezo element. As it was explained to us, the piezo actuator in this case isn't so much operating as a driver, but rather as a brake. The RX10 uses a standard ultrasonic-wave motor to get the lens moving, but then uses a special piezoelectric actuator (borrowed from Sony's sensor-shift image stabilization technology) to stop the motion quickly and precisely. Sony developed a special hybrid actuator for the RX10, making dramatically faster AF cycles possible. It's a contrast-detect AF system, but the company has made major strides in AF speed, thanks to the combination of a CMOS sensor with very fast readout, a greatly-enhanced image processor, and an all new hybrid-drive AF actuator. When they briefed us on the RX10, Sony called particular attention to the new autofocus drive system it contains. For video capture, the system provides a greater corrective range Active Mode, in Sony parlance.įocusing. As you'd expect, Sony has included its Optical SteadyShot lens-based image stabilization in the RX10. There's also a built-in 3-stop neutral density filter, which can be deployed automatically or manually as needed to attain a slower shutter speed, or disabled if you prefer not to use it for a given shot. There's also a seven-bladed, rounded aperture, and a T* coating which reduces ghosting and flare. The lens' optical formula is not surprisingly quite complex, including 14 elements in 11 groups, of which seven elements are aspherics.
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