Did Vloggers Buy Sony's a5000 and a5100?

[VidThreeNorth]

[2020-01-03 16:44 Changed the title for clarity.]

Back when I bought my a5000 I did not bother to look at the people who bought these cameras. I don't care what other people buy. I make up my own mind. But a few months ago, I think around the Fall, I started to wonder about it. I knew these were supposed to be aimed at "vloggers", but for the most part, I find "vloggers" uninteresting, so I never had much contact with that market. But over the last few months, I did search out "new life and new civilizations" on YouTube and came to some conclusions:

I think the a5100 was a successful camera. I did find a number of vloggers who used them, and those who had experience with the a5100 often had experience with other cameras and recommended the a5100 as a good "starter" camera. The big surprise though, was that very few people used the a5000, despite there being a significantly higher price for the a5100. I don't understand that. Yes, the a5100 is a clearly better camera, but as far as really significant shortcomings -- ie "deal breakers", the a5000 does not have significant deficiencies that the a5100 does not have. For example, the a5100 has a better focussing system, but really, the a5000 is only a bit slower, and it has a funny process where it gets close to the focus and then over-runs it a bit and then refocuses. Yes, it is something you notice in videos, but it only causes about 1 sec delay, which is still a lot faster than the Canon G7x which it was often compared to. As mentioned elsewhere, the a5000 has no hot shoe, but then neither does the a5100. The same for a mic jack or a headphone jack. Those are the most common deficiencies pointed out, and they are common to both. The real a5000 specific differences, like the better auto-focus, and better display screen and 24MP still image capability, and XAVC-S codec, are not deficiencies I would have thought a "beginner" would find important enough to get them to pay more. Yet, it looks like people noticed something. The result is "lots" of a5100 cameras in use and very view a5000's. Odd. . . .

 

[Lonnie1212]

Hi Vidthree,

I am not an owner of Sony Cameras. But it sounds like you are doing some serious comparing of two Sony models. I would recommend a website that compares the two cameras and then breaks down the information for you. Sony a5000 vs Sony a5100 Detailed Comparison

I like cameradecision.com. It would be interesting to see what you find.

Lonnie

 

[VidThreeNorth]

You missed my point, but that's largely because what I posted was a bit convoluted. The two cameras are both old. The a5000 was discontinued a couple of years ago and the a5100 will probably be discontinued "shortly" -- probably within the next year. While they can cover the "beginner" market more generally, they were Sony's attempt to cover the "vlogger" market. My recent interest was to see if these cameras were successful in that market. As I wrote above, the a5100 seems to have succeeded in that market whereas the a5000 did not seem so successful, which surprised me because of the price difference.

As for Camera Decision, well, I don't find them very helpful because I don't see any reason to believe that they actually test cameras. They seem to be limited to "spec sheet" copying and looking up DXOmark numbers. I can do that on my own. I prefer checking DPreview.com or ImagingResource.com, or others who actually do testing. But to each his or her own. . . .