MC Reza and his gig – Moonshine: A Homemade Music Show, at Laundry Bar, a certain 11th of March 2010!
As always, the full bands come after the acoustic performers.
Ash (who I haven’t gotten to see in his other band!)
No this is not Car Crash Hearts – this is the rocking Rashdan Harith!
Yes he solos on an acoustic guitar.
This guitar lick is hot! No, literally, it is hot ouch!
Then came Benchmarx, rock and roll!
He looks like a member of The Scorpions. They’re a bunch of teachers from an international school somewhere in KL.
This guy also looks like a member of The Scorpions.
Jimmy North, also a standup comic, brings an energetic frontman persona!
Ah, how lovely them videotapin’ ladies are.
I don’t even remember what this effect was but I think it was a siren. Pretty darn cool!
This guy has killer chops and sings a bang on rendition of Bon Scott. Or was it more like Brian Johnson? I don’t remember. Heck I didn’t even realize there were two (major) vocalists in AC/DC until I looked it up today!
This video can help you can identify the difference (Brian is the grouchier sounding guy with cap; Bon has a slightly more classic rock voice.)
Jimmy raps too, in one of those old school Aerosmith crossover ways!
To keep up the high voltage rock, Pitbull Inc. was next!
Man you gotta hear Steven. One powerhouse vocalist he is!
Gotta love that weathered sunburst top look.
“I don’t know why I looked, but I did.” Thank you!
Steven dude you gotta do that Queen cover you’re fantastic at! Next round yo.
A long-haired me, a long-haired Clara and a short-haired grrrlrocker Rina Omar.
I’m-not-your-videotapin’-mama Mahani, me and Rina!
I could never remember her name but I recognize her by her tattoo. (Obviously, the upsized wings need some coloring to hide the tiny wings.) Oh and Avril Chan!
Rudy with a cool shirt, Bo with a cool Spongebob, and Nick with a cool shirt.
Ozzy Osbourne and dD!
Here goes, pictures, almost exactly half a year after.
22 pictures, all from random times, cached somewhere, to be posted someday, only to find themselves being released as large blister packs like they were tiny die-cast cars.
Once upon a time, I used to ask these questions.
Where did you come from?
Where do you end up?
Do you end up in a field somewhere?
Small parts, part of a bigger universe?
And who, really, can figure you out?
We are the largest sentient being we know of. Who could be bigger, looking at us as ants…
…and our structures as annoying bristle?
Certainly not this guy. Who was a hard mother to light without annoying reflections.
Ever seen a green screen of death?
Oh how I miss my old hair. This was 2.5 years long then. Thanks Janice for the knotting! (It was your birthday.)
Oh how I miss the Cosina 70-210mm F2.8-4.0 Macro, now relegated to the drybox for getting a bit foggy. Shot at 135mm F4.0, not perfect, but quite characteristic.
The first month of having the A100, long exposures were all the rage.
18mm, F3.5, because I had no choice. I don’t remember where my Minolta 50mm F1.4 was at that time.
This was a recent shot, but not such a recent way to pass time.
Trapped in a box, Gwen Stefani sang a long time ago.
KL Sentroid.
This is a 100% crop from the A900 and Peleng 8mm F3.5 circular fisheye. What magnification!
And this is one of the few ways you can use a circular fisheye.
This is another.
I’m getting better at the 7x7x7 – I’ve been beating my 10 minute record more often now.
And so I say, goodnight if it is time to go to bed… although this really was a morning moon with some contrast added.
All pictures here were shot in 2007 or 2008 with the Sony Alpha 700.
Monochromatic parrot against the blur of colors.
Birdbath.
Gossip and the crows that spread it.
Takeoff.
Layover.
Dropped nuts?
And now, for some street birding with the Sony 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 DT kit lens at the widest 18mm setting! This picture is not cropped and EXIF is in the picture.
This was at 50mm.
Ah, the thrill of the chase!
30mm for a more natural field of view.
Another 18mm shot, uncropped…
…and another.
This is a crop to the right.
Who says birding has to be done with a long lens? You could very well set up a feeding place and camouflage your camera and kit lens in a tent!
Over a year ago, 10th July 2009 to be exact, I built my own ring flash light modifier! One can either stick a lens of 77mm diameter through the hole, or turn the modifier upside-down to become a directional light, looking very much like a beauty dish.
This is how it looks, straight on, through the ring.
Enche Ted the lighting guru with the directional light.
Muzzammil against the wall.
Muzzammil not against the wall. I have to say I really like the directional light mode!
This was a far more difficult shot (thanks Kevin Wong for taking this!) Two flashes with wide-panel diffusers pulled out, and one flash with ring flash light modifier from above.
My inspiration to build this came from another lighting modifier master, Templar! His far more refined version is on the right. Trust an engineer to make precision look easy!
There was, also, this O-Flash RF175 light modifier – it was significantly heavier, but gives one stop better light transmission. Did I mention that the light modifier sucks power and decreases range significantly?
The bottom left picture with with the O-Flash; the bottom right, with my version, which had a warm cast.
Version 2, built on the 1st of August 2009, transforms and holds a Sony HVL-F58AM flash. However I’d rather lug around the Version 1 because the collapsed Version 2 doesn’t fit in much smaller bags.
Someday when I am freer, I shall revise this into an even smaller design, I hope. It would be too easy to make a collapsible beauty dish – but ring flash?
Left is Version 2 next to a Metz Mecablitz 15 MS-1 Digital. Powered by 2 AAA batteries, that ring flash amazingly packs a punch – it can even be triggered by your camera’s pop-up flash! Now, if only it would fit lenses having a filter thread size bigger than 72mm… (though, you’d want to stick a medium telephoto through this, so you’d probably zoom your lens through it.)
More pictures from the same setup: (and some are the same but in lower resolution…) Lucky 8
On the 16th of June 2010, I got myself a Gakkenflex DIY twin-lens reflex camera! (Hand model is Lydia Kwan.)
It comes with a Japanese magazine, Otona no Kagaku, which includes a DIY kit in each issue. Very cool idea, and this particular issue number #25 is a hit, with many reprints!
Ironically, this is the back of the magazine.
This is what it looks like, unassembled.
The shutter mechanism. Fixed at F11, 1/150th of a second, unfortunately, limiting it to bright light even with ASA400 film. In theory, I could remove the aperture plastic, but it also holds the lens in place – so even if I did take it out, I’d have to find something else to hold it in alignment, or else my pictures would be out of focus.
Here it is with some other buddies who didn’t last the SLR revolution. Top left is the Blackbird Fly, a TLR where the top viewfinder does not show focus, but shows everything in focus – so it does not give you that amazing TLR experience, focusing on a viewfinder from above and having a most 3D viewfinder.
Technically, the Hasselblad 501CM here is a Single Lens Reflex since it does have a medium format-sized mirror…
There is also the Polaroid Land Camera to the left, with a very cool rangefinder mechanism, and a Leica M6 and M3 somewhere in the picture. At the bottom is the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, which I will blog about sometime later.
Thanks to Azrul of 807studio for your hospitality and having a few cameras to pose with!
This is what it looks like from above. You can’t really see much focusing going on unless it’s at close range. The viewing lens is brighter than the image-taking lens, though, and it thus does not represent depth of field exactly.
There is a sports finder, which I have not managed to teach anyone how to use.
And now, on to my first roll, with Kodak Gold ASA 400!
My first shot. Metered with my A900, I had to do a little trick where I flip the shutter down, pull it slowly up, and it goes into Bulb mode. The exposure here was 20 seconds, I think.
Azrul and I then went to the demolition of the Pudu Jail wall. With streetlights, I could get 5 second exposures.
The machines eat into the wall.
Here’s a hotlamp going as close as it can go through a softbox. F11 1/150s at ASA 400 is hard to satisfy! That would be almost three stops below Sunny F16.
The lens has decent central clarity, and rapidly diffuses into softness, and some sort of shakiness I can’t put my finger on.
The last shot I took with it, 14 frames into the roll of 36. The remaining 22 were black blanks! I had no idea why this was so, unless the shutter had malfunctioned.
Sadly, I would only know when I finish the roll of Fujifilm Superia ASA 400 currently in the camera – then I could open it up to inspect it again.
Sony has launched 3 new prime lenses for the Alpha mount, two cheap primes and a premium optic.
From left to right: Sony Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 24mm F2.0 ZA SSM, Sony 35mm F1.8 DT SAM, Sony 85mm F2.8 SAM.
The 35mm is what every APS-C shooter should have gotten – a normal prime with a bright aperture.
The 24mm is an architecture, indoor and street shooter’s dream.
And of course, the very tiny 85mm F2.8 SAM – it has an unsuspecting 55mm filter thread and is no bigger than your usual 50mm prime. It’s the perfect focal length for concerts especially paired to a Sony Alpha NEX-3 or NEX-5, when you can’t sneak telephoto lenses past guards!
Prices for the US have not been announced yet, though it is usually expected to match the European price dollar for dollar. Now the Zeiss 24mm F2.0 by this logic would be USD 1100, or RM3850 retail price, or around RM3500 street price. AMAZING if that does happen!
Wishful thinking here, but if the 85mm F2.8 was a refactored Minolta 135mm F2.8, one of the best Minolta deals with creamy glowy bokeh, that would be amazing!
The plus side of the 35mm F1.8 DT SAM is, is that it is F1.8 which is a good deal for the NEX and LA-EA1 adapter. However Bryan LYT complains that even in MF, the 50mm F1.8 DT SAM makes too much of a grinding noise to be usable in video. This might be a major downer for those of you wanting to use these lenses with video (however, they could have changed it a bit.)
So how do these new lenses fare against the competition? All three Sony primes beat their Canon and Nikon counterparts for weight, minimum focus distance and maximum magnification.
The 85mm F2.8 SAM is particularly notable here – no full-frame 85mm lens has ever focused this close before! It’s now a do-all lens, quite like the Zeiss 135mm F1.8 (which does an even better 1:4x maximum magnification.) And to think, the 35mm does even better, and the 24mm even more so!
In other news, Gary Fong, famous inventor of many different light modifiers, has a Sony Alpha 230! Yes you read that right.
As a frequent enthusiast for fast food chains in Malaysia, I have pretty much tried every new introduction from McDonalds and KFC in Malaysia. The McDonalds introduction would always be good, and the KFC product would be disappointing. (Usually, KFC’s new servings would be tiny!)
However, this time, I heard that KFC’s new Toasted Pocketful was actually alright… and that McDonalds’ new GourmetGreat-tasting Grilled Chicken Burger was small. I was surprised, given that I usually am far more enthusiastic about McDonalds’ offerings, but seeing that the McDonalds Prosperity Burger of 2010 was tiny compared to say 2008’s version (with a clever chance to upsell by making you buy the Mega Prosperity Burger, which was probably 2008 sized!
And so, Fazri and I set out to debunk the question – did McDonalds shrink their Grilled Chicken Burger as small as KFC would usually do? And so, we met at KL Sentral, where both McDonalds and KFC co-exist.
To do this, Fazri went to McDonalds and got the set (burger, fries, drink) for RM11.90. I went to KFC and got the X Meal (Toasted Pocketful, fries, one piece of chicken, Mountain Dew drink) for RM11.90. Interestingly, KFC sells a standard Toasted Pocketful meal for RM9.90 without the extra piece of chicken.
We then met at KFC, where there were seats outside.
Upper part of picture: KFC Toasted Pocketful. Lower part of picture: McDonalds Grilled Chicken Burger.
I took these comparison pictures from directly above to avoid any misrepresentations in scale caused by perspective. When wrapped, they appear to be the same size!
Opened. Note that the Grilled Chicken Burger had its top bun moved to the side so it looks wider.
The piece of chicken that came in the KFC X Meal. It was tiny, even by KFC standards!
And here is the chicken next to Fazri’s small Nokia 5130. KFC, will you at least feed your chickens healthily? I mean, if I was a chicken and I knew my purpose of life was to provide carnivorous satisfaction, at least let me satisfy!
The inside of the Toasted Pocketful. There were nachos and corn.
I took a bite into my Toasted Pocketful, and Fazri took a bite into his Grilled Chicken Burger. We then swapped meals and had a bite. This continued until the meals were finished.
The result?
The Toasted Pocketful was a lot more fulfilling and filling. Despite being the same size, the Toasted Pocketful was thicker – the chicken inside was what you would get in a Spicy Chicken McDeluxe! Add the nachos, corn and pita bread wrap, and there was a lot more flavor.
That is not to say that the Grilled Chicken Burger is bad – it has good sauce, but it only has salad and buns to accompany it. The salad did not do much to add to the volume of the burger. To me, it was just an oblongated McDonalds McChicken burger with different sauce!
Don’t forget that KFC throws in a piece of chicken for the same price (though, the size depends on outlet) For once, KFC wins the value-for-money battle!
That is not to say I would never have a Grilled Chicken Burger – if I was with friends at McDonalds, I might give it a second chance. Or maybe I’d just go back to the fulfilling Big Mac or Spicy Chicken McDeluxe!
Of course, if I was having Cravings, this would be the burger to consume… (This was the 12″ Cravings Monster Burger, at RM25.90.)
Right after I got my Sony Alpha NEX-5 with Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens, Azrul brought me to this fantastic Yong Tau Fu restaurant in Pudu!
I was loving the wide angle, able to capture more at close range. It also helped that the camera was so small and, surprisingly, quiet (or at least nobody seemed to care that they were being shot), even though I could hear the shutter.
16mm on the NEX-5’s APS-C-sized sensor meant 24mm on full-frame 35mm format, which was pretty darn wide! All I had to do to accentuate this was to tilt upwards to make use of perspective distortion (which is never a fault of the lens, but the camera operator…)
A thing to note though with wide-angle lenses – if you don’t frame properly, you are going to get unwanted perspective distortion and converging lines. Here, I wasn’t pointing straight on, so the lines on top were slanted.
I could just swing it and take a quick grab, knowing it will have the subject somewhere in the frame!
This is Auto HDR mode, set to the maximum – 6 EV. It takes one shot at -3 EV, one shot at 0 EV, and one shot at +3 EV, and merges them intelligently. Obviously though, it doesn’t work so well for moving subjects!
The Sony Alpha 450/500/550 had this too, but with only two frames – and one saving grace of how it’s done on the NEX-3/5 is that it also saves the 0 EV exposure so you can use it as a regular picture. Unfortunately though, you cannot activate this when the camera is set to shoot RAW or RAW+JPEG.
It is a very convenient focal length for architecture and interiors.
At F2.8 it wasn’t the brightest but it would do.
Though, one should not fear the dark with Hand-held Twilight or Anti-Motion Blur mode.
I got myself a black Sony Alpha NEX-5 with Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens sometime 1st of July 2010!
Why the 16mm? Because it is pocketable as heck!
I also got myself the very sweet Sony LA-EA1 lens adapter for using A-mount lenses on my E-mount NEX-5. It has a separate firmware from the body, which is a good thing should Sony decide to release firmware that allows the LA-EA1 to focus SSM and SAM lenses (as it was meant to, before, in Firmware ver. 00…)
This is a pre-production NEX-3 with the 16mm F2.8 pancake – even without the LA-EA1 adapter mounted, it still wants to report the lens adapter firmware.
Firmware Update
Firmware 1.02 adds 3D Sweep Panorama, improves the performance of Sweep Panorama, improves the startup time and improves battery life when the camera is off.
For v1.02, starting up is faster, about half a second, with lens cap on. Surprisingly though, starting up is also faster about half a second without lens cap.
I tested this with TWO NEX-5 bodies with the 16mm on. One was mine; the other was my colleague’s. I patched mine but not his, to do this test.
3D Sweep Panorama seems more sensitive to speed (coming up with “too slow”/”too fast” errors more often.) Then again it could be that mine was set to Vivid while his was normal. Creative Styles affect Sweep Panorama as well (set it to Black And White and you’ll see.)
And now, for a 3D Sweep Panorama crop! StereoPhoto Maker 4.30 was used to open the MPO file.
Find a large envelope or cardboard. Use it to separate the left and right images when viewing, like so:
Click on this image to open it in a new window (it is big!)
The effect is subtle but you will notice how it looks like in 2D if you close one eye or the other. If you turn the envelope the other way you can get closer to the screen and the effect will be stronger.
Interestingly – Shooting Tips helps here by saying that the optimal distance for the subject is 3 meters. I’ll go out and hunt for more suitable subjects.
And now, we rewind to the 4th of June 2010, where the Sony Alpha NEX-3 and Sony Alpha NEX-5 were launched at Teeq, Lot 10!
Screens and prints were displaying pictures taken with the NEX cameras.
One of the models who would hold the camera later when it was launched.
There were two events – the media-only launch and the blogger launch – here, bloggers were playing to win.
For the media-only launch, Toru Katsumoto and Masashi “Tiger” Imamura launched the NEX-3/NEX-5 (they did Singapore and Thailand the days before this before returning to Japan.)
As suspicions confirmed, the NEX is just one circuitboard (there were some other circuits in the grip and one around the sensor; this is from the back.) The multi-purpose flash connector is indeed on the main board.
During the short question-and-answer session, somebody asked if there would be more lenses – Toru said they were still doing market research and some wanted G and Zeiss, some wanted 55-200mm and 75-300mm lenses, some wanted primes and macro lenses.
He also said the reason why the NEX-5 came in silver and black was because they did a survey and found that these were the two most popular colors. So we may just see lenses based on popularity (unfortunately, that resulted in our 50mm F1.8 DT SAM!)
I then asked him if they’d have more NEX bodies with more dials and buttons and he said yes (but then again, the yet-to-be-launched-or-named Sony Handycam NEX-VG10 also counts as one.) And that was it, after those 2 questions (I guess the press didn’t have much questions at that time.)
So yes, there is expansion intended for both lenses and bodies, but what that will be, isn’t certain yet.
While you could say the target market for the NEX-3 and NEX-5 may not be interested in a Zeiss lens, I am sure there will be some videographers picking up the NEX-VG10, seen here in mock form (and what a mock it is, missing the very cool Quad Capsule Spatial Array microphone!) It would most certainly drive demand for brighter telephoto primes and zooms. Zeiss primes are popular with the video crowd.
Sony needed to push out cheaper bodies first or risk doing a Panasonic L1! The L1 had absolutely no impact on the market as to pushing out the then new Four Thirds system.
Anyway, back to present-day geeking.
Yes, the NEX-3/NEX-5 do not support wireless flash to trigger off-camera Sony flashes, but you can easily trigger any off-camera flash that can skip the pre-flash signal. Like my Sunpak PF20XD.
This is a screenshot from the NEX-3/NEX-5 user manual. There is also a flash extender, which apparently comes with the Sony E 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 Active OSS (it does not come with the NEX-3/NEX-5 packages, for sure!)
This is the Sony Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 135mm F1.8 ZA mounted on the Sony LA-EA1 lens adapter and Sony Alpha NEX-5.
About the same thing, but with my gear-stripped Tamron 200-400mm F5.6 and 1.5x and 2x teleconverters.
A modern version of this would be the Sony 70-400mm F4-5.6G SSM. Now this is where the silver NEX-5 would match perfectly…
While at Sony Style, I also had the chance to check out the Sony Alpha 290 and Sony Alpha 390. The A390 can flip to waist-level position much easier than my NEX-5 can flip to overhead position, and the A390 can flip to overhead position just as easily as my NEX-5 does waist-level position.
It becomes obvious that the NEX-5 is designed to be easy to get to waist-level position hence the different articulation.
Sadly, the A290 and A390 were launched without much fanfare or enthusiasm – even Sony didn’t seem to put much into marketing it! They just needed to make a 2010 budget dSLR model which didn’t have that lousy handgrip of the A230/A330/A380 series of 2009.
The A290/A390 still has no quick way of changing AF point in Local Area AF. Wireless flash and screw-drive AF support is still there though. There was “Shutter release without lens” option sadly, even though it was released after the NEX-3/NEX-5 which had that option.
However, there was one massive, massive improvement – the hand grip! The grip is very solid and very deep – I tried it with the Sony 70-400mm F4-5.6G SSM and did not find any handling issues with it. Even the A550 can feel a bit creaky with that chunky lens, but not the A290 or A390!
The other thing I like that they kept, was the separate SD and Memory Stick Pro Duo slots – this means you can have both SD and MSPD at the same time, though you can only access one at a time and needed to flick a switch to choose between them. My NEX-5 is a pain in that sense because it has only one slot which means I can’t have a SD stored inside as backup. Also, the slot is bigger to allow SD, so inserting a MSPD can be fiddly.
The implications of the A290/A390 having the 14 megapixel CCD sensor are, that Sony has dumped the 10 megapixel CCD sensor. The Sony A350 has never been as popular as the A300 (and neither did the A350’s successor, the A380) so I can see why Sony decided to use the 14 megapixel CCD sensor stock to build the A290/A390. That leaves the current Sony Alpha lineup as:
Sony Alpha 290 (14.2 megapixel CCD)
Sony Alpha 390 (14.2 megapixel CCD with Quick AF Live View)
Sony Alpha 450 (14.2 megapixel CMOS with MF Check Live View)
Sony Alpha 500 (12.3 megapixel CMOS with Quick AF Live View and MF Check Live View)
Sony Alpha 550 (14.2 megapixel CMOS with Quick AF Live View and MF Check Live View)
Sony Alpha 850 (24.6 megapixel CMOS with Intelligent Preview)
Sony Alpha NEX-3 (14.6 megapixel CMOS with Live View and 720p with 25fps or 30fps MP4 video)
Sony Alpha NEX-5 (14.6 megapixel CMOS with Live View and 1080i with 50fps or 60fps AVCHD video)
Oh and how could we forget:
Sony Handycam NEX-VG10 (14.6 megapixel CMOS with Live View and 1080i/60fps AVCHD video)
Sometimes I think the Sony NEX series could’ve been called a Cybershot and it would not be a big deal. However, just as we thought the Cybershots were killed by the NEX series – Sony shows us that they planned it out and sequenced it so one product will not overshadow another. And so they introduced the Sony Cybershot DSC-WX5 and DSC-TX9 cameras. They have Superior Auto mode (shooting a burst of 2-6 images and deciding to reduce noise or increase dynamic range) and 3D Sweep Panorama (like on my NEX-5!) and the very cool Sweep Multi Angle which is not in any NEX or Cybershot! Check out the video on how it’s done!
They also have Background Defocus. Now if you’re wondering where they’d get the bokeh from given that it is using a small sensor (even my Cybershot WX-1 with F2.4 sensor doesn’t get much bokeh when not in macro) the answer is probably focus stacking. Usually macro shooters will focus stack to increase depth of field but I can see them doing the reverse to get shallow depth of field!
And so, the WX-5 finally supercedes my WX-1 with the backlit Exmor-R sensor and 24-120mm F2.4-5.9 lens. It’s the new low-light king of the Cybershots!
Oh and of course, the third guy being the Cybershot DSC-T99, a standard Super HAD CCD from Sony.
About the Sony FDA-SV1 optical viewfinder which I find in my view isn’t worth it:
The viewfinder, I find, is of limited use as it goes with the pancake only – the 16mm is so wide you get perspective distortion if you’re pointing at say a bicycle lying on a street.
This is perspective distortion – I was standing up and holding the camera at eye level. To reduce perspective distortion, you must adjust the location of the camera so the lines align with the frame.
Sony NEX-5, 16mm F2.8 at F4.5, 1/40th of a second.
So in order to straighten the lines, I need to lower the camera. With the optical viewfinder, I need to squat or assume some kung fu stance! People will know if I’m taking a picture of their stuff!
With the flip-out screen, I can just keep standing and look down. Less obvious that I’m taking a picture, especially if I’m walking on the go. Only if you’re some traditional old-school fella you might prefer the optical viewfinder – otherwise, Live View is great!
(On a side note – notice the different shades of greens that the NEX-5 is capable of expressing. It has a pretty darn good color response!
About the infamous NEX menu system
The interface is indeed slow but if you really care for high ISO performance you wouldn’t be relying on ISO3200 JPGs but shooting RAW instead – I’d just do -1 EV on ISO1600 and get the same thing (because it is, really, the same thing!)
I shot for a gig where flash was not used and it shines there – in a spot where you don’t need to use flash, and can shoot RAW. Now if only DxO and Adobe could get their RAW support for the NEX out!
I quite enjoyed using it as a backup camera – when the A900’s buffer was full I just kept going with the NEX-5. Plus it being lighter was easier on my neck compared to having 2 dSLRs.
Oddly, it now feels like it has too many features and too few buttons. Such that they had to categorize each option under one of the six main menu options.
I didn’t understand initially why Shoot Mode needed a menu entry but it explains itself when you find the center button does not always invoke Shoot Mode.
It’s rather odd that with 9 buttons it has less than my WX-1 with 11 buttons. They so could’ve added just one, to the right, but it would not present well on the user interface (as it is, going out of Image Enlarge mode recommends you to press the Play button – and you’re left wondering which soft key was supposed to do that.)
Really – the top, center and bottom keys all change function depending where you are. It would be hard to have another soft key without cramming up the screen (not the body.)
Going from Video Playback to Image Playback is quicker once you figure you press Play – Down – Left – and then Down or Up and then Center.
One thing I didn’t like – Precision Digital Zoom enlarges the image, meaning the zoomed in image is still full resolution instead of being cropped, as it should be!
Sure, the Micro Four-Thirds mount has loads of adapters, but the 2x crop sensor is a turn off and this explains why NEX is quickly overtaking it. Samsung’s 1.5x sensor in the NX10 isn’t up there yet. A full-frame EVIL will make it big – a 45mm F2.0 will feel better there than on an APS-C sensor.
Somebody used a Canon Extension Tube to make a EF-to-E-mount adapter!
The Sony VCL-ECF1 fisheye converter, for use on the Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens. It mounts via a bayonet mount on the front of the lens (which is the same as the Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS… whose front bayonet mount is used for the lens hood.) I love the lens cap, and how it clasps on!
It was meant to be paired with the Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens – but what happens when you put it on the Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS?
Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS with Sony VCL-ECF1 fisheye converter on Sony NEX-5. Note the unique coma effects!
Using the NEX-3/NEX-5 for video:
I find that an ideal focal length for portraiture video is the 50mm – the 85mm is a bit too long unless you’re talking about a full-body shot from far away. If you want to record conversations, confessions etc. the 50mm is perfect, and the un-intimidating size of the NEX-3/5 makes it better. The NEX-VG10 would be a bit too big for the 50mm!
Longer focal lengths are a bit too hard to pan or track with (not so much the focusing, but tracking…)
If you find that manual focusing on a lens with a small focus ring to be too smooth or too slippery – put your fingers on the lens itself, like on the right – it helps to add friction and dampen your focusing.
The LA-EA1 lens adapter and 50mm fit in my pocket; I can also pocket the NEX-3/5 with 16mm in another pocket!
Aperture in video on the NEX-3/5 cannot be changed unless we use a lens with an aperture ring e.g. the Samyang 85mm F1.4.
You can only change EV while recording video. However Creative Styles, EV and WB take effect on the recorded video. DRO does not seem to have any effect on video. It auto-gains when going from a bright to dark place.
While I would not agree on perfect distortion-free sound (the videos I shot at gigs do have some distortion, but it could be Laundry Bar’s sound system) I would say Sony is very capable of recording audio with large dynamics. No Black Tie is such a place – the volume can go really loud with some singers without the sound breaking, but you know your mobile phones will have audio peaking and clipping. However even my Sony Cybershot WX-1 can handle it, with excellent audio quality and 720p! THe volume can get uncomfortably loud and still be distortion-free.
About Progressive And Interlaced
If you’ve read up on this you’d know progressive is preferred, and that the NEX-5 is weak in the aspect that it is 1080i at 50/60fps – however it is really a 1080p feed at 25/30fps, in an interlaced container. I could convert my 1080i/50fps video into a 1080p/25fps video with no problems. In theory, one could even make it a 540p video with 50/60fps!
The NEX-5 sold in Malaysia is 50fps. You get either 50fps or 60fps.
