Cameras

Field Review: Sony NEX 5 (Day 4)

Chris Gampat
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08/26/2010
3 Mins read

Last Updated on 08/26/2010 by

After some exploring and digging around on the CD provided with the Sony NEX 5, installation on my Macbook was finally successful. At the time of writing this posting, the camera still does not work with Lightroom 3. Editor’s note: it works in 3.2. Once again, this posting was written before 3.2 and is being kept this way to show what I went through to try to edit the photos. Because of this, I am able to show off loads of photos taken and provide commentary on top of talking about the workflow.

Workflow

If you’re going to purchase the NEX 5, be prepared for a bit of an interesting and longer workflow until Adobe updates the Camera RAW plug-in. First off, load the images onto your computer into a folder. Afterward, open up Image Data Lightbox SR, one of the programs offered with the Sony software. If you’re happy with the way the images came out, highlight all the images by clicking and dragging (shift + A and control/command + A don’t work) the mouse cursor around all of them. Then click the output button and set the according folder that you’d like to output the images to.

Now that the images are output, you can choose to either import them into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3and output them all as DNG files to edit as a RAW or in the cases for this posting, resize them all down and slap a watermark on them including embedding copyright data into the EXIF data.

Images

Warning: A lot of these are very casual snapshots. Massive image dump is commencing…now.

Sony has changed their image processing algorithms since last year. I say this because at last year’s Photo Plus, I did a hands-on posting with the Sony Alpha A850and the camera had a tendency to always expose closer to incandescent light with a more purple look to the images. It was light purple, actually. This time around, it exposed more towards the oranges in the light. In fact, the photos are very orange. The light in Vincent’s house isn’t extremely orange and being outside, my 7Dwould have produced bluer tones and the D300smore life-like blues.

Outside, the coloring was a lot more accurate although somewhat muted despite being in the Vivid color mode. The blues and reds are really quite lovely and accurate though and the dynamic range of them is better than I expected. The output results will be more than adequate for the intended target audience. To be fair, these results were all at lower ISOs—800 and below to be exact. As the NEX system is not meant to be a professional system, nothing that a professional would perhaps shoot was tested so far.

The 16mm F2.8 lens does deliver some beautiful and gorgeous detail though. It needs to be tested to see where it reaches its optimum sharpness.

More color testing and high ISO testing will be done.

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.