Last November (2018), I bought the Sony Alpha a6300 mirrorless camera with 18–135mm f/3.5–5.6 OSS Lens. My previous camera was a Canon EOS XSi DSLR with 18–50mm and 75–300mm lenses, but it had begun to show its age. It didn’t have any video capabilities, only shot 12 megapixels and a maximum ISO of 1600, which is woefully inadequate in low-light situations. In addition, since the EOS XSi is a DSLR, it was quite bulky, especially if I wanted both my lenses for both wide/standard and telephoto scenes. It got to the point where my iPhone basically became a better camera in nearly all situations, and even when I went travelling, the extra bulk and weight of the Canon wouldn’t be worth the photos I could take with it.
Enter the Sony Alpha a6300. The compactness of a mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera was very appealing to me. I was looking at either the Sony Alpha a6000, a6300, or a6500 (the new a6400 had not come out yet). The a6000 looked like amazing value at $600 CAD including an 16–50mm kit lens, but I had known from my previous experience with the EOS XSi that I didn’t like carrying extra lenses with me and very rarely changed them in the field. A 16–50mm lens just wouldn’t do, so if I went with the a6000, I’d have to buy another lens which would raise the total price of the camera and lens. The a6300 and a6500 had the option to come with an 18–135mm lens, which is much more versatile and would give me a lot more freedom with the types of shots I could compose. I could have purchased that lens separately, of course, but that would have added $700 to the total price, putting the a6000 + lens pretty close to the $1500 CAD price (at the time) of the a6300 and 18–135mm kit. Another strike against the a6000 was that it was only capable of 1080p video, as opposed to the a6300 and a6500’s 4k-capable video. My iPhone was capable of 4k video and it just seemed strange to buy a single-purpose camera with lower specs, at least on paper, than my iPhone.
The a6500 has a few more bells and whistles on top of the a6300, the most important of which is in-body image stabilization, or IBIS. However, the price of the a6500 and 18–135mm lens was $2150 CAD, a full $650 over the a6300 and same kit lens. At that price point, you could almost get some of Sony’s full-frame mirrorless cameras and are beginning to seriously get into the “pro” side of the prosumer market. Overall, I decided that the extra stabilization wasn’t worth the extra price premium and went with the a6300.
Six months and 10,000+ photos later, I have some opinions on the camera. First of all, the images are extremely good and I’m very happy that I purchased it instead of either continuing to use my Canon EOS XSi or just shooting with my phone. Having the camera gave me the extra versatility of the zoom lens and also just forced me to think harder about how to compose my shots. The 24 megapixel sensor gave a lot of post-shot composition options for when the original shot was too wide. Obviously it is better to compose the shot before you shoot, but sometimes with fast-moving subjects it’s better to shoot a safe wide shot and then crop afterwards. And the compactness of the camera made more of a difference than I had expected: when travelling in Japan and Korea, I could comfortably sling the camera around my neck and shoulder while travelling the whole day and could quickly get to it for photos within a second. I no longer had to keep it in a bag like I had to with my Canon.
However, I have a few gripes with the Sony that I wish I had known before buying the camera.
First, the minor issues. Sony cameras’ menus are famously difficult to navigate, with three levels of menu hierarchy where all your settings are spread across. Fortunately, the camera also has a lot of customizeability in this respect, so once you know what settings you change frequently, you can usually bind them to a custom button and forget about having to navigate through the entire menu system, as long as you don’t change too many things too frequently. (You only have two dedicated custom function keys, though you can also rebind the directional keys from their defaults if you wish).
The weatherproofing on the camera is also not clear or confidence-inspiring. I haven’t had my camera fail due to water ingress (yet) but the fact that Sony doesn’t provide an IP rating for any of their mirrorless cameras (even the full-frame ones!) doesn’t inspire confidence in shooting in wet conditions. They claim that the camera is moisture and dust-resistant but also make it clear that it is not waterproof or splashproof, and I get the feeling they won’t be honouring any warrantees if they see any water damage inside the camera. For comparison, my iPhone is IP67 certified, meaning that it can survive being submerged in 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes. There is no such certification for the Sony. However, this seems to be par for the course in the camera world. Most DSLRs aren’t weatherproof until you get to the very expensive top-end weather-sealed DSLRs and weather-sealed lenses.
There were also some bigger issues too.
First, the size of the body is quite small, which as I mentioned above, was an advantage of the system. However, what this meant was that with the 18–135mm kit lens, the balance of the entire body and lens was heavily skewed forward and that single-handed steady operation was a little difficult. I found myself having to support the lens with my left hand while my right hand held the camera, which is not great when you’re holding something else like an umbrella. However, this is relatively easy to fix. I’ve been meaning to get a prime 35mm lens for a while and that should be better balanced with the body than the 18–135mm lens I currently have.
Second, the 4k video function on the Sony is disappointing for a few reasons. First, it is only capable of 24 fps full-sensor-readout or 30 fps crop sensor readout. On the other hand, my iPhone is capable of 4k at 60fps. Now this isn’t a completely fair comparison since the a6300 is actually performing a full 6k readout and then downsampling the frames, but it still results in relatively low-frame-rate 4k footage. This is fine if all you are doing is shooting cinematic video, but for casual travel videos where I’d be moving or the subject would be moving, I had to drop it down to 1080p (where it can do 60fps) to get smooth motion.
Exacerbating this problem is the horrendous rolling shutter on the a6300. This is something I had read about on reviews, but I had thought that it would just be a small problem that only people who were looking for it would notice. That is 100% not the case. The rolling shutter problem makes nearly every video with panning shot in 4k nearly unusuable. Straight lines become slanted and everything turns to jello. Combined with the unbalanced weight of the camera and the lack of in-body stabilization, I found that most of the 4k videos I took were unusable unusable. Of course, you can go and buy an external stabilizer like a DJI Ronin or Zhiyun Crane, but that defeats some of the purpose of having such a compact camera.
I mean come on. Even if you know what rolling shutter is, the effect is so strong that when I watch this video I still have to remind myself that shelves are, in fact, rigid.
Finally, the fact that there was no in-body image stabilization meant that even when I tried panning smoothly, there would be unavoidable amounts of jitter in the video. My lens has built-in optical stabilization but that was not nearly enough for my shaky hands. These factors (low frame rates, horrible rolling shutter, unbalanced camera weight and lack of in-body stabilization) combined for a pretty terrible video experience. For comparison, my iPhone performed much better when shooting video. It could shoot at 60 fps at 4k, did not have nearly as much of a rolling shutter problem, had very good stabilization and it was light enough that I would not shake it as much when filming things.
Just compare these videos. The first video is from my iPhone and the second is from my a6300. In both cases I am holding the device at mid-arms-length and looking at the live view, and am trying to keep it steady while walking at a steady pace. Notice the extra shakiness in the second video and the way the trees look like jello when the camera moves around. The third video I’ve included just to highlight the effect of the rolling shutter on jello-ing videos with any significant movement in the real world.
Of course, the optics and sensor clarity on the iPhone aren’t comparable to the Sony’s, but having a sharper 4k video when you pixel-peep is useless if the video is too nausea-inducing to begin with.
So should I have just bit the bullet and spent the extra premium for the a6500 which has in-body stabilization, or gone for another brand of cameras altogether? I’m not sure. At the price of the a6500 and 18–135mm, I’d be close to the price of an a7iii and 24–70mm. The photos I get out of the Sony are very clear and while Sony’s first-party RAW processing software (PlayMemories, as well as their Remote/Viewer/Edit applications) leave a lot to be desired, Capture One Express for Sony offers a great free Lightroom-level RAW processor which is a lot quicker than the first-party applications and can help keep your photo library organized. (I’m even thinking of purchasing the full pro license for the extra library organization features).
In the end, I think it was a good purchase, even if the videos I took were not as good as I had hoped. However, for a three-year-old camera, it’s amazing that it’s still competitive in the increasingly-crowded mirrorless field. Hopefully Sony releases an update or upgrade sometime soon which solves these problems.
Below are some photos I took with the a6300 in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong. Enjoy!
What do you think? Have you used the a6x00 series? Do you use a different brand of mirrorless cameras and what are your experiences with them? Leave your comments below.
