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Sony RX10 III Ergonomics
Initial impressions. A best effort was made to verify and cross check everything stated here—please advise if something is in error or missed.
- The first day, the camera erased most (but not all) of my settings to factory defaults, including customized menus and buttons. This is oddly similar to the Fujifilm X settings-reset glitch. This is/was a royal pain, since it takes 10 minutes or so to go over all the settings again.
- The RX10 III is just as big and heavy as a DSLR at 1118 grams with battery—that’s well over a kilogram. Given its 24-600mm zoom range, that is a small price to pay given the range, but it still feels like a heavy APS-C DSLR with, say, a 35mm f/1.4 on it.
- The grip is excellent, nice and deep and easy to grab/hold the camera with one hand.
- As with other Sony models, that idiotic blinking light with the hand and exclamation point icons (indicating slow shutter speed) cannot be disabled. So you’re on a tripod or otherwise steadying the camera, and this idiotic light keeps blinking once a second or so, even in display mode with nothing else. This is just stupid after 10, then 100, then 1000 blinks. The only solution: manual exposure mode.
- Focus in dim light is slow and sometimes fails, particularly at the long end of the zoom range.
- The too-narrow aperture ring is is a constant risk to changing the zoom setting while changing the aperture. With my relatively broad fingers, even while looking at the ring it is tricky to change the aperture without catching part of the zoom ring with my thumb. This is a very poor design. There is no dial to control aperture instead of using the aperture ring, which is quite a sin of omission. Swapping the focus ring for aperture ring in is a big improvement, since the ring then becomes focusing, and is ignored in AF mode.
- Because of the poor zoom ring placement, it is wise to zoom using the control near the shutter. This itself is ‘confusing’ because my hands are used to that kind of switch being the on/off switch on all other Sony cameras. So it becomes a sort of “habit confusion”.
- Haptics suck in another way: there is no tactile feedback for zooming versus manual focusing; no gap between the two rings, no textural difference—poorly conceived in physical terms. It is actually possible to rotate both rings simultaneously if not careful!
- At wider angle settings the lens shade produces a dark shadow at from bottom—remove the lens shade when using the flash at wider zoom settings.
- There does not seem to be any way to disable autofocus when pressing the shutter release. There is an AEL feature, but this is hardly the same thing as disconnecting shutter from AF all the time. This is a headache for focusing only when one wishes to.
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