Sony Alpha NEX-5

Buttons & Dials

The NEX-5 takes a minimalist approach to buttons and dials, relying more heavily on the menu system than most SLRs. This keeps down clutter, and allows for a smaller camera design. It also slows you down dramatically when you want to access several basic shooting controls, a continuing annoyance even after you’ve learned how the control scheme works.

On top of the camera, there’s the shutter button, a separate rotating power switch, and a button to access playback mode.

On the angled plane between the back and the top is the dedicated movie recording button. We like the option to start recording video on the spur of the moment, without having to meddle with mode dials or menu choices. And the button is well placed, easy to find in an instant but not in a spot where you’re likely to press it accidentally.

On the back, there’s a combination control wheel / four-way controller. The wheel is used to adjust settings, browse images during playback and navigate through the menu system. The four-way controller is also used for navigation, but while shooting the top, bottom, left and right clicks are mapped to access display adjustment, exposure compensation, drive mode/self-timer and flash mode respectively.

For everything else, you have to open the main menu and hunt for your options. Want to change the ISO setting, autofocus mode, white balance, or metering pattern? You’ll need to bring up the menu, navigate to the relevant sub-menu, find the setting within the submenu, bring up the list of available settings, navigate to the one you wanted…. ooops, missed the shot. Say you have the camera set to the standard Creative Style and want to switch to vivid. We count thirteen clicks along the way… and that’s if you know where you’re going.

The other key element in the control scheme are three ‘soft’ buttons, meaning their function varies depending on where you are in the system. The current action on offer is explained with on-screen labels.

One soft button is located in the center of the control wheel, the others to the top left and bottom left of the wheel. When you’re shooting, the top button takes you to the menu system, the middle one accesses your shooting mode options, and the bottom one brings up an on-screen display of shooting tips. We have nothing against providing consumers with info about taking better photos. At the very least, though, we would have made that last button customizable, so you could access key shooting controls more easily. We would gladly have traded quick access to ISO settings or metering patterns for easy navigation to a 100-word essay on freezing subject motion.

Creative Styles

There are no special filters or effects here, but you do get six Creative Styles (same as the Sony A550), each of which can be fine-tuned manually. The following samples were shot with indirect sunlight in program mode, after taking a manual white balance reading. The descriptions are verbatim from Sony.

These Creative Styles can be adjusted on several parameters, namely contrast, saturation, and sharpness. This would be more useful, though, if you could save your tweaked result as a custom user setting.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Vivid Portrait Landscape Sunset B/W More...

In-Camera Editing

As with the Sony A550, in-camera editing tools are entirely Missing In Action (unless you consider rotating an image ‘editing’). For a camera that’s clearly aimed at a consumer market, this lack of interest in letting users handle even basic tasks, like creating a smaller copy of an image to be emailed, is both surprising and disappointing.

Menu

The Sony NEX-5 menu system is certainly one of the best looking we’ve seen, taking full advantage of a beautiful 921,000-dot screen by using photographic icons and page backdrops, along with nice clear text. Unfortunately, pretty took precendence over practical when designing this newly minted scheme.

There are two basic problems: convenience and organization.

There are six submenus in all, as listed below. And when looking for a setting, you need an abstract mental leap or a very good memory to figure out which setting is tucked away where. There’s a Brightness/Color submenu with settings for exposure (exposure and flash comp, ISO, dynamic range adjustment) and color (white balance, creative style). The high dynamic range option is tucked away here, rather than included as a shooting mode, like other multi-shot features.

The Camera submenu is a catch-all for focus settings, drive mode, smile shutter, panorama and a few others. Noise reduction, image stabilization and movie audio controls, which we figure are shooting settings, are wedged into the lengthy Setup menu, along with date, time and location, display customization and whether or not you want the camera to beep.

And as the final coup de grace, the menus are several screens long, so you have to scroll down to the bottom to find out whether or not you’re in the right submenu. The relatively stodgy Sony SLR menu system will never win a beauty pageant, but at least they let us get from from here to there efficiently.

The main menu	The Shoot Mode is fairly straightforward. You have your basic PASM choices (program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, manual) plus intelligent auto, scene modes, anti-motion blur and sweep panorama.

Instruction Manual

The NEX-5 comes with two forms of documentation, a printed Instruction Manual and a disc-based Handbook. For most users, the manual will deliver all the information they need, and does it in a clearly written, logically organized way. Unlike some manuals, which require you to jump from here to there to find related information, this manual follows along in the way you’re likely to use the camera: set it up, take pictures, play back pictures, transfer them to a computer and use the provided software. The table of contents works well, the index less so (no entry for ‘sound’ or ‘audio,’ for example, and nothing for ‘image stabilization’); overall, a solid effort.