Recently I have started using my Sony Nex-5N a little more and thought I would share some results of what I like about the camera and also what I dislike about it. First off the camera is much smaller than my DSLR which makes it a perfect every day or carry around camera. The kit lens 18-55 mm F3.5-5.6 seems to be pretty good with the limited shooting I have done so far. The added features of the camera are great some of the effects built in to it are great, while others aren’t of much use. The three that I think are very useful are the miniature effect, soft focus, and the selective color (red). I know lots of people who like to see edited black and white photographs of their children on a red bicycle, car, or whatever it may be but have the red bicycle still in color. If they owned this camera it’s as simple as setting the camera to JPG format turning on the selective filter under color and brightness and taking the picture! No software editing needed. The soft focus setting provides a nice soft focus effect to make photographs more dreamy like which sometimes can create and excellent image. The miniature effect works similar to a tilt shift lens, making parts of the image blurred out but retaining a section in focus. This creates the effect of taking a picture of a scale model. I have posted a few photo’s on my flickr photostream using this technique and I will share one with you below. This was taken in front of the Peaks Of Otter Lodge on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the only editing done was a simple crop and vignette was added in Lightroom 4.
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The things I don’t like about the camera is the menu system seems to me like its a little hard to navigate, it’s okay but I think it could be better. The Auto HDR feature isn’t that great and as far as HDR goes I would recommend using other cameras, but it can be done with this one. The auto bracketing settings only allow for a .3 step increment which in HDR is pretty much useless, and I would rather have something with a 1 step increment. Overall I must say the image quality is great and some of the features are awesome. I would recommend it to people as a every day camera, which is super fast mirrorless, good image quality at 16.1 mp, very lightweight which makes it easy to travel and has lots of options to get creative.
Sony NEX-5N 16.1 MP Compact Interchangeable Lens Touchscreen Camera with 18-55mm Lens (Black)
