Sony A6100 Test | Trusted opinion

The Sony A6000 is the best-selling mirrorless camera to date. The expectations of his successor, the Sony A6100, are therefore at the height of Burj Khalifa Heights.

Why is the A6000 so popular? In many ways, it looked like a Moto G7 in the camera world – a versatile machine that's striking in size, price and performance, making it the "other" choice for those who can not afford it. Stretch to the bottom. frame the camera, but want something more than a point-and-shoot.

The Sony A6100 continues this trend, but adds a particularly exciting new feature to its more advanced cameras: real-time autofocus tracking.

This feature, introduced on cameras such as Sony A9 and Sony A6400, allows the camera to continuously scan your live scene to search for faces, eyes, or moving objects that you have chosen, and keep them perfectly in focus while switching to the best AF mode. It works very well and is perfect for a camera aimed at beginners who are embarking on the appearance of an interchangeable lens camera.

The Sony A6100 is naturally lacking some features of more expensive models like the Sony A6600, including a weather resistant construction, built-in image stabilization and high ISO performance. But if you want to record still images and basic 4K video, you're about to become one of the best, if not the best, under £ 850 options available …

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Design: the Sony A6100 has the usual low design, for better and for worse

Sony played safely with the design of the A6100, which has hardly changed compared to the flat telemetry aspect of five years ago.

Although it is a little tight for those who use a DSLR, it is significantly more spacious than dialing on a smartphone, which is probably the background of the Sony A6100 suiter. It lacks the retro charm and the AF mini joystick of something like the Fujifilm X-T30, but it does the work.

It's a little disappointing that Sony has not updated either the viewfinder, which remains an old-school affair at 1.44m, or the 3-inch tilting touchscreen. OK, it's an entry-level Alpha camera, but at £ 830 it's not cheap either. The lack of resolution does not really interfere with taking pictures, and the viewfinder does not show any real delay – it feels a little outdated for a new camera.

All Sony A6100 controls are easy to find and use. Like the A6000, you have a mode switch at the top to switch from one exposure mode to another, as well as a blank, corner-less, sub-selector that changes depending on the selected mode (Aperture Priority).
In mode, it controls the opening.

Do you miss any significant physical features compared to the high-end Alphas of Sony? Not much compared to the mid-range of the range, the Sony A6400, which really only benefits from a high resolution viewfinder. The Sony A6600, however, offers a better grip, a larger battery, built-in image stabilization and a headphone jack to control the quality of video sound, for an additional cost of £ 620.

These are good people to have, but anyone upgrading from their smartphone or older camera will find that the Sony A6100 is perfectly capable without them. Although its design is described as "functional" and certainly feels cheaper on hand than the Sony A6600, the true brilliance comes from the autofocus performance recorded inside …

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Specifications and Features: The A6100's superb autofocus is one of the best in the market and increases your success rate.

The A6100 has an amazing commonality with its more expensive brothers and sisters in the Sony Alpha range, both in terms of technical features and autofocus features.

It has the same 24.2-megapixel APS-C sensor and the same Bionz X processor as the A6400 and A6600 models. Although this does not necessarily mean identical still image performance in low light, its ISO range is more limited.

Other similarities include 11 fps continuous shooting with autofocus, silent shooting up to 8 fps, and a 425-point hybrid autofocus system with 84% coverage over the entire view. This means that if you want the main focus of your photo to be shifted, for example, the autofocus will be able to cover it instead of requiring you to use the focus and re-compose technique.

This feature set is not necessarily state-of-the-art for this price, and the cheaper Fujifilm X-T30 surpasses it on paper in some areas – including this sensor, which is a shame that Sony has stuck with an older chip instead of matching it. the newer 26.1 megapixel sensor of the X-T30.

But in practice, the Sony A6100 does not have a big advantage, it's autofocus real-time tracking. This is the next step in eye tracking and Eye Eye autofocus that has been around for a few years. The cheapest camera you could get before was the Sony A6400 – so far.

In short, this feature lets you think less about the focus and more about your framing. Autofocus systems on other devices combine data such as depth, color, and patterns to allow you to track objects, but they do not switch seamlessly between, for example, objects, faces and the eyepieces, as do the latest Sony AF systems. This means that once you have locked a person to a person, that person keeps that lock even when their eyes or face are turning away from you.

During my brief stay in Copenhagen, the Sony A6100 was an excellent street camera. This allowed me to spot cyclists and bystanders with continuous autofocus, press the shutter button halfway down to lock, and then shoot multiple shots in burst mode. get a pretty high success rate. It also promises to make the Sony A6100 ideal for family photos (including pets, thanks to Animal Eye AF) and sports shooting, although I was less likely to try it in these settings.

What about filming videos? The Sony A6100 is now much better than its predecessor. Although Real Time Eye AF is not available for movies (this one is only available on the Sony A6600), it now records 4K video at 30p and has a new microphone jack for connecting a video. external microphone.

This makes it a promising option for YouTubers and vloggers, although for a little more, you can also get the Panasonic G90, which also comes with a headphone jack to monitor your audio.

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Image and video quality: improved JPEG colors and promising early signs

Clearly, there should be no noticeable difference in image quality between the Sony A6100 and the flagship A6600 product, once again underscoring the potential value of the previous one.

I could not do comparisons side by side, but there is no clear difference between the photos I took with the two new cameras – and that's what we're would expect, since they both use the same sensor, the same processor and the same color processing software. algorithms.

Sony says that these have been improved and that off-camera JPEG quality, which has captured some of Copenhagen's late afternoon atmosphere and natural skin tones, certainly has me impressed.

One of the areas in which the Sony A6600 might have a marginal advantage is being poorly lit, since the ISO range of the A6100 stops at 51,200 and Sony indicates that discernible differences may occur at sensitivities. that you could actually use, such as ISO. 6400. However, I could not film a lot in low light conditions, so it's something we'll look at more closely in our next full report.

The video quality is also promising – compared to its siblings, the Sony A6100 is rather a compact video camera, without profiles S-Log2 or S-Log3 for those who like to color their clips later, not to mention in the integrated image stabilization or HDR of the A6600. But it pulls 4K at 30fps, and the new microphone plug makes it a potential new option for vloggers.

We will present our complete verdict on the photo and video quality of the Sony A6100 in our full report before its release in October 2019 very soon.