Sony DSC RX100 Mk 2 is in the house!

Our dog is totally excited to be going on a walk with the new Sony DSC RX100 II. He scratched a huge hole in the skin on his head so we have to make him wear that til it heals. Annoying for all parties.

A couple of years ago I bought a Canon Powershot SX260 (post). I ended up scratching the lens and rendering it useless, so I returned to using my venerable old Canon Powershot S95, which is a fantastic camera that I still love. Perfect in conception, easy to use, that camera is a dream. But unfortunately it is old....


Last year I started reading about the Sony DSC RX100. In Jan I went with FTV up to Wuling Farm and had a chance to put my hands on the cameraman's RX100 Mark 1. It was wonderful. The pictures were scrumptious and the camera had that solid feel of good technology. Immediately I knew: I had to have this camera.

Got one today. First pics from out walking the dog. These are all jpegs straight out of the camera, 160 ISO in most cases, unprocessed except for cropping. I don't know how to use this camera to best advantage yet, it has a million settings which I must practice with.

This review at DPR reviews gives an excellent overview of the strengths and weaknesses of this camera. I totally concur with his complaints about the rings -- the lens ring kept slipping off its setting -- should settle into place with a click. The manual is probably the worst I've ever read and the menus on the camera are completely crazed. One of the reasons I bought the Mk 2 and not the Mk 3 is that I was hoping Sony would fix all the problems with the camera, but they chose not to. So I went with the cheaper version which actually has a bigger lens than the latest model.

My daughter's bread. The bokeh from this camera is damn good for such a small camera.

Many reviews said the reds are highly saturated. Indeed this is richer and redder than the original flower.

A cactus from about a meter away...

center crop of the above photo.

The highway with Taichung beyond. The sun's rays are pretty nifty-looking here.

A walk in the park.

Footprints in the sand. ISO 800.

Oh hell yeah.

Our local mountain KTV.

This shot is a crop of a shot taken from 3 meters away. Came out really nice.

The camera DOES have a macro setting, which I finally found buried in the scene menu. Unfortunately Sony's menus are nowhere near as good as Ricoh's or Canon's. Here are some longans...

Center crop of above photo.

Same image, bottom image is center crop.

Weeeeeeeeeee! Gonna have fun!
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