Sony NEX-3

[Insp Gadget]

My wife and I are both wedding photographers with a ton of Nikon gear. We are soon going on vacation and I was looking for a smaller, lighter camera that would give me good results. I settled on the Sony NEX-3 and love it. I took pics side by side with the D700 and my wife chose the Sony pics saying they actually looked better, even under magnification.

Anyone using this camera as a backup? Any thoughts on the performance? Qualty?

 

[PASM]

I'm intending to buy a NEX-5 with the 16mm 2.8 in a few weeks time. It's the same camera as the NEX-3 but has magnesium-alloy body and GPS.

 

[Insp Gadget]

I'm intending to buy a NEX-5 with the 16mm 2.8 in a few weeks time. It's the same camera as the NEX-3 but has magnesium-alloy body and GPS.

Sorry to say but there isn't a GPS in the NEX-5. The differences are that the 5 can shoot video ni 1080 vs 720 in the 3 and the aluminium body vs the plastic on the 3. I think those are the only differences.

 

[Drake]

The 14 MP CMOS sensors used in the NEX series are good, but telling it's comparable to a D700 is pushing it a little bit too far. In terms of high ISO performance I'd say it's pretty close to a D5000 or the T2i. I was thinking about one, but the controls are just horrible. You access everything through a loooong menu, almost no dedicated buttons. It's really awkward. You know you can set everything the way you want, but you feel so helpless, with just a couple of small buttons none of which is actually assigned to something important. The one thing I liked in the NEX is the manual focus override - the moment you touch the manual focusing ring, you get a nice magnification on the LCD.

As for the lens, the 18-55mm kit lens is pretty good. It has outstanding center resolution, which comes at the price of corners - they are very blurred, more so than in most small sensor P&S cameras. Then there's also the 16mm pancake, but it's not that great. People love the pancakes from Olympus, Pentax etc, but this one is very different, mostly because of its focal length, which isn't really what you'd like in a walkaround lens. You won't find many good opinions on the 16mm 2.8.

On top of that, a NEX with the kit lens isn't exactly small. Yeah, it may be smaller than a D700, but it's definitely far from pocketable. Have you considered an Olympus Pen? The high ISO performance may not be as good, but paired with the pancake it's a really small camera with much more comfortable controls.

I'm intending to buy a NEX-5 with the 16mm 2.8 in a few weeks time. It's the same camera as the NEX-3 but has magnesium-alloy body and GPS.

I am no NEX specialist, but I'm pretty sure neither of the current NEX models features a built in GPS unit.

 

[Luv]

My wife and I are both wedding photographers with a ton of Nikon gear. We are soon going on vacation and I was looking for a smaller, lighter camera that would give me good results. I settled on the Sony NEX-3 and love it. I took pics side by side with the D700 and my wife chose the Sony pics saying they actually looked better, even under magnification.

Anyone using this camera as a backup? Any thoughts on the performance? Qualty?

Hi, NEX-3 is a good choice as are comfortable to use lens being having using Nikon gears I guess you can use the NEX-3 to its full potential. You may get some reviews on Sony and Testfreaks aswell. I hope this helps.

Go for it.

 

[DxAxN]

The NEX-3 is what I have but with the 18-200mm lens. I'm having fun shooting with it, but if I had to do it again I probably would have went a different route as a primary camera. One of the things I dont like is the attachment bracket for the strap. When in portrait orientation the strap falls right down the center of the screen and since there is no view finder it is kind of annoying and it interferes with the controls while you are trying to make adjustments.

The V3 firmware update improved the menu and now allows programming some of the soft keys so that was a help.