Best Point and Shoot Camera

Sony RX100. That was easy.
A while back i decided I need a smaller camera to take with me on a hikes and other adventures where a full size DSLR with 5 different lenses was not a livable option. So like any other person I looked at the sub $200 price range cameras, thinking i can get something decent.

I bough the Nikon S7000 for a good deal. Costco and Amazon has it on sale for $199 so I figured id try it since i got it for 1/2 price. It lasted about 5 days before i decided to get rid of it. I sold it at what I paid for it just to get rid of it quick.

Pros:

• Small
• Light
• Wi-Fi/ NFC
• Long Range Zoom

Cons:

• No Raw photo ability
• Image Quality Bad
• Focus Bad
• Horrible video

In all honesty my 13MP camera on my Nexus 6 Phone produces better quality photos than this camera and I can even save them as RAW. I still don't know camera manufactures can claim 18mp on a camera yet when you zoom in on the image it looks like a mush. 

I wasn't ready to give up. I was just glad I was able to move on without taking a financial loss on the camera to move to something better.
While the Nikon S7000 was up for sale I was doing some detailed research. I needed something with a 1 inch sensor or better.  I was looking at Sony A6000, the  Canon G7x and Canon EOS M3. I had previously owned a Canon PowerShot G11 which wasn't that bad to be honest. From the Canon PowerShot G11 I had upgraded to a Canon EOS M which was fantastic.(except for slow  save in between photos, maybe my card was really slow.) The  Canon EOS M is a fantastic camera especially with the 22mm STM lens. I did the mistake a purchasing the adapter to be able to attach my canon lenses to the Canon EOS M. Once you do that its no longer portable. I was always thinking i should get this lens with me and this one .. and I was back to having a full bag. I repeated the same mistake when I had my Olympus OMD  E-M10. So this time i was looking for something small where i don't need nor can have accessories or lenses. That's what the big gun is for.

After a good few hours for research I have made my decision. Try the Sony RX100's. There are 4 versions out there and they have different prices. The Sony RX100, Sony RX100 II,  Sony RX100 III and  Sony RX100 IV

Here is my little Excel Comparison.

	RX100 I	RX100 II	RX100 III	RX100 IV
Price	399	499	749	949
Wi-Fi NFC	NO	YES	YES	YES
Hot Shoe	NO	YES	NO	NO
Flip UP Screen	NO	YES	YES	YES
f1.8-4.9 28-100mm	YES	YES	NO	NO
f1.8-2.8 24-70mm	NO	NO	YES	YES
Electronic View Finder	NO	NO	YES	YES
4k Video	NO	NO	NO	YES
1080p	NO	YES	YES	YES
Integrated ND Filter	NO	NO	NO	YES
Slow Motion Video	NO	NO	NO	YES

I decided I'd be happy with any of them on the lowest budget. I don't really shoot a lot of video even though it would be nice to be able to do slow motion video. Anyway I decided to go look local for a used one. Craigslist was my first option. There were 2 on there for sale. One looked a little dinged up Ver 2 and the guy was asking 400 and the other was a Ver 1 and the guy was asking 300 with a case and some cables and a spare battery. I started the negotiations with the both of them. It's not really a good deal unless i get some $$ off the asking price. I managed to get the Ver 1 for $250. Not a bad deal. It looked like it was well taken care of so, $150 less than retail  with a spare battery and a cable to hook it up to the iPad.. .. score.

As soon as i took possession of the camera i immediately took it out for a photo-shoot to see how it holds up to my Nikon D610. I have to say the results were impressive.

This is a long exposure with the RX100  6 seconds, F5.0, ISO 80

Click to see full resolution.

After that I decided to push this little gem. I was covering an event this weekend and I put the camera against my Nikon D7000 and my Nikon D610. Again I was pleasantly surprised.

At 3200 ISO the Sony was performing superior to the Nikon D7000

pixieset.com

As a photographer sometimes you have the need to for the clients to preview and select which images they like and have them edited for them. Before this discovery, i used to put the photos on www.dropbox.com or www.flickr.com and send the link to the customer and i would tell them to email my the file names of the photos they chose.

Now i have found a much easier way of doing this. www.pixieset.com offers you the ability to upload the photos to a collection. Share the collection with your client, and they can select their favorites right that and save them with just their email address. No no need to writhe them down, or copy and paste them to an email. That makes it so much easier for your client.

There is also an advantage for you. It's not big but it helps save time. The website allows you to copy the list of file names and you can just paste it into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 and have all the selected photos right there all selected for you. I know it saves me quite a few minutes of looking thought my LightRoom for that file name and them moving it to a selected folder before editing the photos.

I'm sharing this with you guys because it had been a life saver for me. I'm sure there are quite a few of you out there like me. A hobbit photographer that doesn't make a lot of money off photography and would like to some professional tools without braking a bank.  I only have the free version but it's been great so far. Two thing I wish i could do that would make this more awesome, one is to have private galleries where you can just share via email with a select people and two, is to build my website around this.

If anyone of you are wondering, no I'm not getting paid by pixieset to make this post.
Check out my PixieSet : http://monkifoto.pixieset.com/

Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 14-42mm lens

If you don't know about slickdeals.com you should check it out and add it to your favorites.
On a December sleepless night in Seattle I was killing time watching Netflix and playing on my tablet. When I get a notification form my slickdeals app that the Reconditioned Olympus OM-D E-M10 is on sale for $300 + tax and shipping. Regular price for the camera everywhere i looked . $549. So i figured why not, I can always return it.

I submitted the order at 2am. At 6am i get an email that the camera shipped and it will be delivered in 2 days. I'm excited.
The entire time I was waiting for the camera i was comparing it on the internet with other mirror-less cameras.

It seemed like an OK camera if you just look at specs, until i got it. It turned out to be a fantastic camera. I was thinking i can sell my girlfriends Nikon D7000 and give her this one. I even picked up an Fotasy Nikon to Micro Four Thirds adapter for it to work with Nikon lenses.

The photos with the kit lens were fantastic. They were sharp, vibrant. See the photos below. These were shot a 1/15th of a second ISO 1250

Here is a photo shot with the Fotasy Nikon to Micro Four Thirds adapter and Tokina 100mm Macro lens at ISO 5000. Focus peaking feature of this camera helps out quite a bit when you are using other lenses with the adapter on this camera. The other thing that is a plus, the camera image stabilization is on the sensor itself and not the lens, which means that any lens you use whit this camera will be stabilized which will result in sharper photos altogether.

Here are some photos of my dinner, first day i got the camera. These were shot JPG. Usually I shoot everything in RAW but, I forgot to set the camera to shoot RAW and out of the box it only shoots JPG. These were shot at 1/30th of a second at ISO800.

 

 

The only other camera I have considered besides this one was the Sony A6000. The Sony has a 24 megapixel sensor where this one has only 16 megapixels. Obviously we all want the best that's out there. However given the price that I paid for this camera compared to the Sony, i think this camera is fantastic. There were other things that i loved about this camera compared to the Sony. Most of those things are related to the controls on the camera. The fact that the camera has dials to adjust setting in manual mode for me is a huge plus. Coming from my DSLR I can't just Point an Shoot anymore. It just makes the experience so boring. 

In conclusion I highly recommend this camera if you are on a budget, if you want manual controls or if you want to use other lenses and still keep the IS feature.

MONKIFOTO score: 4/5