44 5 October 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
your camera is safely stowed
in your pocket or bag.Build and handling
While the RX100 VII gains new
innards and features compared to
its predecessor, in other respects
Sony has recycled the same old
design. Unfortunately, this isn’t
entirely a good thing. On the
positive side, the metal-shelled
body feels reassuringly robust, and
the clean lines make it easy to slip
into a pocket. But Sony still hasn’t
fixed most of the RX100 design’s
many and varied handling flaws.
As a result, the super-smooth
body will try to slip through your
fingers like a bar of soap at any
inopportune moment, so you’ll
need to use a wrist strap at the
minimum. In fact the first thing
buyers should do is add the
stick-on Sony AG-R2 grip, which
adds nothing to the camera’s size
while vastly improving its handling.
It should really be included in the
box, or even better built-in from
the start, but instead you need to
pay £15 extra just to keep hold of
the camera properly.
As with the previous six RX100
generations, the latest model is
also pretty horrible to use if you
want to treat it as anything more
than a basic point-and-shoot. A
good camera should get out of
your way and make it easy for you
to change all the key settings, but
the RX100 VII prefers to fight you
every step of the way. The control
dial on the back is awkwardly
positioned, while the smoothly
rotating one around the lens
is awful, as it gives no tactile
feedback at all. By default, both do
the same thing most of the time,
which completely misses the point
of a two-dial camera.
The buttons are all tiny and
difficult to locate by touch with the
camera to your eye, with the most
important exposure settings (ISO
and exposure compensation)
placed on buttons as far away
from your thumb’s resting position
as Sony could possibly have put
them. Luckily, it’s possible to set
the front dial to control exposure
compensation directly. As on the
RX100 VI, the zoom lever works
just a bit too quickly, making it
difficult to set precise composition.
This speed is customisable, but
only to an even-faster setting. You
can get more precise control by
assigning zoom to the lens dial,
but this feels like a waste of the
camera’s limited control set.
Secondary functions are
accessed from the well-
implemented onscreen Fn Menu.
Usefully, this can be customised
separately for stills and video
shooting, which will let you
minimise trips into the huge,
poorly organised and often
cryptically labelled menu system,
that’s now ballooned to include
over 170 settings spread across35 sections. Thankfully you can
build a list of your most-used
settings in the My Menu section,
and save multiple shooting
configurations for recall from the
MR position on the mode dial.
Both are well worth taking the
time to set up.
One new interface update that
should be valuable is the My Dial
function. Inherited from the
Alpha 6400, this allows you to
temporarily reassign the two
control dials by pressing a function
button. But unfortunately it suffers
from the same flaw of not telling
you what it’s doing during
viewfinder shooting, which makes
it surprisingly awkward to use.
With other brands’ small
cameras we find the touchscreen
usually goes a long way to
offsetting any handling flaws, but
unfortunately Sony still hasn’t
bothered programming it with
many functions. You can select the
focus point when you’re shooting
with either the screen or the
viewfinder, and double-tap to
zoom into images during playback,
then scroll around them to check
focus and detail. But you can’t
change any shooting settings or
make menu selections by touch.
Given that Canon and Panasonic
both have excellent, fully
integrated touch interfaces, this
is a poor showing from Sony.
Overall it’s now impossible to
ignore that the RX100 VII’stechnological prowess has
completely outgrown its body
design and control set. You have
to question the logic of adding all
its clever features, if they take so
long to find and set up that you’ve
missed the moment anyway.Viewfinder and screen
One area in which the RX100
VII excels is when it comes to
composing your images, thanks to
its pop-up EVF and tilting screen.The camera’s JPEG processing usually gives attractive images, with well-judged exposure and white balance 200mm equiv, 1/400sec at f/4.5, ISO 100