Figure 1-1: 425 focusing points baked right into the sensor provides the best focus-tracking AF experience Sony has ever offered (and rivals some considerably-more-expensive DSLRs).
The E-mount platform has taken off far beyond what Sony’s original designers had envisioned. Once designed especially for cell phone shooters looking for a small, friendly, and high-quality upgrade, this new format has now evolved to provide Sony with their best-selling cameras ever (I’m talking specifically of the A6000 here) and has even garnered the respect in the professional industry with their full-frame A7 series.
So what can Sony do for an encore? Well, the first thing to do is stick with what works, and then add features that would earn the engineering team no shortage of accolades, starting with 4K video, 11+ frames per second still images, and an even more improved autofocusing algorithm that can track moving subjects with the best of them. Congratulations, you’ve purchased one of the most technologically advanced cameras on the planet!
In this book I’ll be covering every single feature and setting in detail, but as always it helps to start with an overview of what’s new.
Sony has had 24 megapixel, APS-C-sized sensors for a few years now. But two major improvements have been made to the sensor which graces your A6300:
Figure 1-1: 425 focusing points baked right into the sensor provides the best focus-tracking AF experience Sony has ever offered (and rivals some considerably-more-expensive DSLRs). |
TIP: People do side-by-side video comparisons between different cameras all the time, but this one impressed me. Tony & Chelsea Northrup created a youtube video comparing a Canon 80D, 70D, A6300, and Lumix GH4 at various ISO settings. They all start looking the same but by the time they get to ISO 25,600 the A6300 is head and shoulders above the others in terms of noise and color (and autofocus). Watch this comparison for yourself: https://youtu.be/trKuhDRkFUs |
Sony has been toying with this capability ever since the A99, but were never able to solve all the technical problems associated with it until now. In all previous models, any on-sensor phase detect array would only kick in after the focus had been confirmed via other means. But now the large array of phase-detect AF points (more than on any other camera) can be used to get focus, and to track moving objects. What’s more, these same phase-detect pixels can now directly drive autofocus lenses from Canon and Nikon using an intelligent adapter, just as quickly as if they were on a native body!
Figure 1-2: The ability to follow-focus has vastly improved, making it the best mirrorless camera in the world to track moving subjects. (And 11 pictures per second is pretty useful too! Now you have more good pictures from which to choose.) |
A Primer – Phase Detect vs. Contrast Detect
A lot of this “Contrast Detect” and “Phase Detect” stuff may sound very confusing. And really, why should you care about the technical details as long as the camera just does what it is supposed to do?
It’s important to understand the differences because not all features involving Phase Detect will work with all lenses, and there are subtle interactions between features that won’t make sense without this knowledge. Plus, from an engineering point of view, you can’t help but be impressed at how Sony has merged these two fundamentally incompatible technologies.
So let’s start with how Contrast Detect works. Contrast Detect requires no special hardware; essentially your camera just does a lot of hunting and guessing until it gets close, then it refines the hunt until it can see high contrast in adjacent pixels (the tell-tale sign that something is in focus!) In computer science terms it’s doing what’s called a binary search, and it works like the flowchart in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: Here's how Contrast Detect AF works. It has no idea how much to turn the lens (or in which direction), so it goes by trial and error, essentially doing a binary search before converging on a sharp subject. |
Contrast detect isn’t bad if you have a wide-ish lens and your subject isn’t moving. Its limitations can really be seen if you’re using a telephoto lens and you’re trying to track an Olympic athlete. That’s why the original E-mount cameras used contrast-detect exclusively – it was easy to implement, and the casual snapshooters the platform was originally aimed at would be happy with the performance using their pancake or kit lenses.
Phase Detect doesn’t rely on guessing. Using special pixel pairs that are baked right into the sensor, the camera can know right away how much to move the lens (and in which direction) in order to achieve proper focus in the first try, providing significantly faster AF without hunting, and superior subject tracking ability. Figure 1-4 shows a flow chart showing how Phase Detect AF works.
Figure 1-4: Phase Detect is MUCH faster, since it's less of an iterative process. |
DSLRs all use phase-detect. But the implementation on the A6300 is superior for two reasons: 1) there are more phase detect AF points on the sensor than on any other DSLR ever, so you’re not limited to keeping your subject in that clump in the center, and 2) unlike with DSLRs or SLT cameras, you will never have frontfocus or backfocus problems because the autofocusing array is on the same plane as the sensor – it’s a closed loop system. (You can see a sample of the focus point distribution in Figure 1-1.)
Now here’s where things get fun. Lenses that were designed with contrast-detect autofocusing in mind are driven very differently than lenses that are designed for phase-detect. Conversely, lenses designed only for phase-detect work pretty poorly when attached to a contrast-detect camera. Last year, when the A7R II camera came out, I made a youtube video showing an A-mount lens (which is phase-detect all the way) attached to an NEX-7 camera body (contrast-detect AF all the way) using an LA-EA1 adapter and you can SEE just how slow and jerky the autofocusing is. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/4wSHBVFG6m4 . (Just keep in mind that I was drugged up on cold medicine when I made it, so don't judge my presentation skills by this video alone. :-) ) Anyway, the point is it’s tough to merge the two technologies.
All of Sony's newer E-mount lenses are designed to work with both systems – you can have all the speed of phase-detect with all the extra features that contrast detect allows (like face detection and Eye AF).
Try This: Turn your exposure mode dial to "A"perture and set your f/stop to the largest number your lens supports. Then set the Fn --> Focus Mode --> AF-C and watch the camera start to "hunt" contrast-detect style as it tries to focus. What you've just done is disabled the phase-detect portion of the hybrid autofocus, allowing you to appreciate what an improvement PD-AF represents. This experiment works because phase detection requires an f/stop of f/13 or larger (lower number); so making the f/stop smaller defaults to CDAF. Why does it have such difficulty focusing with small f/stops? Another video from my blog explains it: https://youtu.be/QlBWL_UVUS8 |
So there may be times when you attach an older lens designed for Contrast-detect only to your camera and certain features will suddenly not be available. For example, if you were to attach the original “kit” lens for the NEX-7 (officially known as the E 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS), you’ll notice that some of the camera’s menu items which rely on phase detect-capable lenses are suddenly greyed out, like MENU --> 
4 --> AF Drive Speed and MENU --> 4 --> AF Track Sense.
And if you were to attach a lens that was Phase-detect only (like the A-mount lens and LA-EA3 adapter mentioned 3 paragraphs ago), you’ll notice that certain features that require a lens to be CD-AF like (again, like the face recognition and Eye AF) suddenly don’t work anymore.
So that’s why this is called a “Hybrid AF” system – you get the benefits of both worlds and none of the drawbacks.
The A6300 is the first camera I've ever used where the out-of-camera .jpgs taken at high ISO are so close to what I would achieve by post-processing the RAW file manually that you may not even find it worth the trouble!
Figure 1-5: The out-of-camera .jpgs taken at high ISO look very similar to how the post-processed RAW file looks. This improvement will save you gobs of time in post-processing! This is with the High ISO NR feature set to "Normal". |
Figure 1-5 shows a before-and-after comparison – the top row shows an ISO 10,000 .jpg from four years ago, with a straight out-of-camera .jpg on the left and processed RAW file on the right. The bottom row shows an A6300 image taken at ISO 12,800 – the .jpg is on the left, the processed RAW file on the right. Sony's new .jpg processing algorithms are such a huge improvement over previous cameras that you may find processing your high-ISO RAW files to get a cleaner output is no longer worth your time. More people should be talking about this.
Figure 1-6: Zebra stripe example. It can either show you what’s going to blow out (in video – stills have a greater dynamic range) or it can be set to show when a Caucasian face is properly exposed (right). The ability to customize this feature has been added to the camera as well; see Section 7.1. |
4K Video is quickly becoming a thing. (Not every video advancement does. Remember the 3D TV craze from a few years back that never got traction?) (Heck, remember quadraphonic stereo from the 1970’s?)
Anyway, word from Japan says young mothers just LOVE all the detail when watching 4K videos of their little babies. Cinematographers seem to be embracing it as well. Here are some other things to know about your camera's video capabilities:
TIP: Worried about the camera’s tiny battery dying in the field? I’ve always kept spare batteries in my pocket, which is still the easiest solution. Since Sony has now seen fit to allow the camera to operate off of power applied to the USB port, another option is now available: External USB battery packs and a long cable. Keep the battery pack in your pocket and go around shooting all day. Here's the battery pack I personally use and like: The Anker Astro E5 1600 mAh battery – available here: http://amzn.to/1JPliUr .
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This isn’t a new feature. But it’s one you should know about. The A6300 takes pictures using 14-bits-per-channel automatically when you’re in single-shot mode and goes back to 12-bit mode in any other drive mode, or when shutter speed is set to BULB, or Long Exposure Noise Reduction is employed.
Is this a big deal? The truth is you may not notice any difference in normal shooting. (And when I say “Normal shooting” I mean “if you have good light and your exposure is right for that light”, which is much more important to good photography than noise performance at high ISOs).
When Nikon first introduced this 14-bit feature back in 2008, many of their customers started looking for visible differences in the 14-bit mode, but visible differences proved elusive. The extra bits only matter if your exposure is off by a lot and you’re trying to recover detail from the shadows. If you want to see some tests showing what little difference there actually is, here are two articles written by a Nikon owner in 2008: http://tinyurl.com/2e4nss and http://tinyurl.com/4enno8.
This is a feature made especially for videographers who are also social media moguls. It is designed to address this very scenario: You’ve just shot some cool high-res video and you want to share it on Facebook while still in the field. So you bump your phone to the Camera (using NFC) and transfer the video footage to the phone so that you may then upload it to Facebook. The problem is that the high-res video footage is LARGE, it takes up a lot of space on your phone and it eats up your data plan in the process. There’s GOT to be a better way!
Leveraging the fact that Facebook just crappifies (that’s a word!) video anyway, Sony has now given you the option of storing video in two different formats each time you shoot a video clip: The high-quality format (XAVC S 4K, XAVC S HD, or AVCHD), along with a [much] lower-quality .MP4 version which is the perfect size for uploading to social media in the field. (This is an even smaller size and lower quality than can be selected manually via the menus.)
You can enable Dual Mode via MENU --> 2 --> Dual Video REC --> On. See Section 6.7 for which Record Settings allow its use.
