After my travels in sketchy places in Latin America (blog www.offtosomewhere.net), I realised I need a small camera that fits in a pocket and draws no attention. I was looking at Sony’s RX100 III for it’s quality, speed, and incredibly small size. And recently Sony introduced the fourth generation RX100 which has some spectacular features. One of the most important additions is – super slow motion videos.
Sony was very kind and gave me RX100 IV to try out for 10 days.
First of all I needed to try out super slow motion function. This function works only for 2 seconds videos. Before you film, you must lock your focus and all the settings, then get ready for action and film it. After you capture few seconds, you must wait for camera to render the video in real time. For example if you film 2 seconds of video in 1000 frames per second, you must wait 80 seconds until your video has been recorded. Does it sound long to you? Just imagine – this video frame rate was only available for very very expensive cameras before! And even though RX100 IV is an expensive for a point and shoot (around 1000 eur/dollar), it’s nothing close to the price of pro slow motion cameras (tens of thousands of dollars). In this case I really can wait 😉
Talking about quality, I would say that 1000fps and 500fps modes are not very fit for normal video production, but you can make awesome videos of very fast motion to share with your Facebook friends. I also find these modes very helpful in learning tricks in action sports. 250fps is very good quality and can easily be integrated in good quality video edit.
Talking about high framerates – I filmed my friends wakeboarding and from the videos you can learn what time to jump, rotate, etc.
Also we took advantage with my friend to film some funny stuff 😉
Sony RX100 IV 500fps from Danas Danulis Macijauskas on Vimeo.
While having RX100 with me, I was invited to meet Tony Hawk in Prague. So I used this opportunity and during the skateboarding event I made a slow motion video:
Tony Hawk agreed to test slow motion in my method 🙂 Cheers mate! (unfortunately was very dark in the room, so video is grainy) #tonyhawk #SonyRX100IV #skateboarding #fun #slowmotion A video posted by Danas Macijauskas (@danulis) on
But enough about filming! RX100 IV is not only about that. Actually as stills camera is just mind blowing! Last time I used a point and shoot was something like 10 years ago… maybe even more. And I am not a fan of taking pictures with mobile phones too. But this camera… It feels like a pro camera stuffed in tiny body. You have all the controls, manual focus, and of course – raw image capturing ability. I hate straight from the camera jpeg files and files from this camera was no exception. I like to work on my files from beginning till the end. It was a bit tricky at first, as my favourite photo editing software Adobe Lightroom did not support RX100 IV files the first days I got the camera. So I had to shoot and hope for Camera Raw update soon. And it happened. When I opened the files I was very surprised – even high ISO files looked good. Of course I can’t compare the files from my A7s, A7rII or former A7r I had. But there are enough of details for everything – social media sharing, digital albums and printing! Enormous shutter speed 1/32000th, wide aperture (f1.8-2.8) lets you capture fast moving object and blur out the backgrounds of the objects which are close to the camera. For this kind of camera I like “run and gun” photography, where I make a photo from the window of running car, or just walking in the street non stop.
I am extremely happy with the camera. I had to give it back to Sony after 10 days and I placed an order to get one for myself right away!
Take a look at some pictures made with this camera:
Thank you, I’ve recently been looking for information about this subject for
a while and yours is the greatest I’ve came upon so far.
However, what about the bottom line? Are you certain in regards to the supply?
Hi, thank you for your comment!
I got the camera myself so that is how certain am I 🙂 Actually I did not compare it to other point and shoot cameras, but no others have slow motion capabilities, at least at this level!