Although I don’t say much about it, I’ve never hidden the fact that Sony hasn’t generally been my favorite camera manufacturer (or electronics manufacturer). Their P&S cameras have never greatly appealed to me but I respect their efforts to provide some advanced capabilities in unique form factors (like the DSC-F828). I also appreciate their cost reduction efforts with the A850 (at the expense of the sanity of A900 owners) and most of all I’m glad to see they are keeping the Minolta system going. I certainly wish the Minolta name was still around but at least the flame is kept alive.
Rumors of a new compact Sony interchangeable lens system have been floating around but I haven’t paid much attention for a couple reasons. First: it’s Sony and I still have a wait-and-see policy regarding their new developments (which I am turning around on) and second: all the previous cameras in this segment (EVIL: electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens) have been rather unremarkable and I got bored of seeing copycat cameras. Imagine my surprise when I saw the news when I got up today: the NEX-3 and NEX-5 (and a few lenses to accompany the new cameras) were announced yesterday and I just wasn’t paying attention.
The new cameras still live under the Sony alpha brand but use a new lens system built around the E-mount. Sony also offers a $200 (eek!) adapter which will allow users to mount all alpha mount lenses; however their stabilization and AF features will be disabled for reasons which still seem a bit tough to swallow for me. The new lenses have new AF and iris control motors which are designed to be silent when shooting video which is a design requirement that is impacting a lot of new lenses now that these cameras have such extensive video capabilities
Keep your thumbs outta there!
To allow such a shallow body the sensor is obviously sitting just behind the lens mount with only 18mm of open space. This results in what looks like one of the exposed sensors I’ve seen in a consumer camera, so I wonder what trouble some people might get themselves in to with that.
Speaking of the sensor, it’s an APS-C sized sensor built on Sony’s Exmor R back-illuminated technology which should hopefully lead to respectable low light/high ISO performance from the pixel packed 14.2mp sensor. Back-illuminated sensors are slowly trickling in to more and more cameras now, mostly in P&S cameras but this is probably going to be when we start seeing them wander in to SLRs as well. I’m curious to see how they ultimately stack up since back-illumination trades some of the traditional front-illuminated issues for its own set of complications.
Ultimately the thing I like the most about the camera is what will probably be its most polarizing feature: its design. Ergonomically it’s different. Functionally, they claim they couldn’t fit in sensor based stabilization so optical stabilization is via the lens only. The NEX-3 and NEX-5 eschew the traditional camera designs found in other EVILs and wind up standing out from all the rangefindery or SLRish cameras. I don’t know what that will mean in terms of how they feel in your hand but from the sounds of it they’re well built, especially the NEX-5.
Somewhat like the recent modular Ricoh system, Sony has made the camera body nearly as compact and space efficient as it seems it could be. I’ve been bemoaning the ‘safe’ designs of previous compact interchangeable lens cameras, especially those which want to look like an SLR for no functional reason. I’m glad to see Sony is still willing to buck tradition and go with a slightly different design than the rest of the crowd.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this critter and I am probably going to be paying a bit more attention to what’s potentially going on at the other companies. It’s hard to imagine Canon & Nikon in particular are going to ignore this segment.
The images in this post are sourced from Imaging Resource’s NEX-5 review. If you’d like to find out more about this camera, 1001noisycameras has a post with links to more about it all over the web. You can also check out their collection of links on the new Canon IXUS 300HS/Elph SD4000 which is a back-illuminated 10mp compact that looks somewhat interesting.
