I have to admit, I am not a big fan of Sony cameras. I understand that the NEX-7 and RX100 are top performers in their categories, but for some reason they never “clicked” for me. My mirrorless/compact solution of choice for the past two years has been from Fuji (X100 first, then X-Pro1). I also rarely see a new camera that impresses me right from the announcement, since most of the companies recently just copy what the competition is doing (I guess Fuji and Leica are exceptions here). Since Sony is the new kid on the block, they have to play aggressive and they have delivered several innovations in the past few years, but they still had to convince me that they have something for me. I have been lusting for a compact full frame camera for a while – maybe since Leica released the M9 over three years ago. When the first RX1 rumors started floating around, I was immediately intrigued. Few days ago I received my RX1 and here are my first impressions and few sample images. Since there is still no RAW support for the RX1 (with the exception of the RAW converter provided by Sony, which I have not tried yet), all images in this post are taken directly from the camera (standard JPG mode; no post-processing; NR, lens distortion, shading and chromatic aberration all set to ON/AUTO. I will have a follow-up post with more details on the Zeiss Sonnar 2/35 lens and some ISO performance tests. Update: today Adobe released Lightroom 4.3 with RX1 support. Download links: Win | Mac.
Click on images for larger view, or just check the full resolution JPG files on flickr.
f/2, ISO 100:
f:/4, ISO 100:
The RAW file from the above image can be downloaded here.
f/5.6, ISO 100:
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