I am getting into a real love/hate relationship with the camera thus far....
For stills it seems to be working great outdoors but gets a bit iffy indoors. Custom focus, manual controls, time shot all seem great. HDR is okay but its utility is very limited, many times it over-flattens contrast or simply blurs the image a bit. Flash is okay, but seems much more useful as an actual flashlight than for improving indoor shots. It will definitely be able to replace my compact camera for most casual use, but no way am I counting on it at parties.
Video camera, my initial impression is UHD IS THE ONLY WAY. Sure go with 60fps if you want to do slow mo sports clips. Regular 1080p suffers too much when zooming in at all and the shake reducer is AWFUL. 100x better to record at UHD then rescale and reduce jitter (if needed) later. With the UHD I took a short clip of my neighbors dog chasing a ball, and on most frames you could zoom in and start counting hairs on that dog.
The autofocus gets easily messed up and confused in video mode but this was almost perfectly confined to "when zooming in at 1080p", so again if you plan to use the digital zoom at all your only choice is the 4K mode if you don't want the digital autofocus to have a stroke.
Mic seems alright, more wind noise than expected but acceptable compared to what I've usually got with me. And I assume that I can probably shield the mic a little better with practice.
Well we'll see if anyone thinks the kitkat update changed the camera at all, but for now it should serve quite well. No OIS no problem for now.
For stills it seems to be working great outdoors but gets a bit iffy indoors. Custom focus, manual controls, time shot all seem great. HDR is okay but its utility is very limited, many times it over-flattens contrast or simply blurs the image a bit. Flash is okay, but seems much more useful as an actual flashlight than for improving indoor shots. It will definitely be able to replace my compact camera for most casual use, but no way am I counting on it at parties.
Video camera, my initial impression is UHD IS THE ONLY WAY. Sure go with 60fps if you want to do slow mo sports clips. Regular 1080p suffers too much when zooming in at all and the shake reducer is AWFUL. 100x better to record at UHD then rescale and reduce jitter (if needed) later. With the UHD I took a short clip of my neighbors dog chasing a ball, and on most frames you could zoom in and start counting hairs on that dog.
The autofocus gets easily messed up and confused in video mode but this was almost perfectly confined to "when zooming in at 1080p", so again if you plan to use the digital zoom at all your only choice is the 4K mode if you don't want the digital autofocus to have a stroke.
Mic seems alright, more wind noise than expected but acceptable compared to what I've usually got with me. And I assume that I can probably shield the mic a little better with practice.
Well we'll see if anyone thinks the kitkat update changed the camera at all, but for now it should serve quite well. No OIS no problem for now.
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