Sony NEX-7 review - The Verge

The NEX-7 isn't quite as sleek as the 5N and C3, but it's still a seriously svelte camera. 1.7 inches thick at its largest point, it could fit inside most DSLRs with room to spare. This still isn't a pocket camera by any stretch, but it's thin and light enough (about a pound with the

The NEX-7 isn't quite as sleek as the 5N and C3, but it's still a seriously svelte camera. 1.7 inches thick at its largest point, it could fit inside most DSLRs with room to spare. This still isn't a pocket camera by any stretch, but it's thin and light enough (about a pound with the kit lens on) that you won't really notice it in your bag, and you can comfortably use it with one hand. The matte black, magnesium alloy body is smooth all over, save for the synthetic leather covering the right side that makes the camera much easier to grip.

The build quality is stellar

There’s a hotshoe on top of the camera, next to a well-hidden pop-up flash that I wish more companies would adopt. You hardly even notice the flash until you need it, but when it pops up you can move it forward and backward and point the flash up or down, so you can bounce the light a bit instead of just blasting it at your subjects. It’s a small improvement, and the hotshoe is still your friend if you really need more light, but this built-in flash is much more usable than most. There are also two unmarked dials that offer most of the NEX-7’s manual control (more on those in a minute), along with the power toggle and shutter button. On the bottom are the battery and SD card slots, hidden underneath a door — normally I don’t like when the two are combined, but in this case the camera doesn’t turn off when you open the door, so I don’t mind. Another door, on the left side, hides Micro HDMI, Mini USB, and microphone jacks.

Jutting out the back of the camera’s left side is an electronic viewfinder, one of the hallmark features of the NEX-7. It’s a half-inch OLED, filled with an insane 2.4 million dots, that shows both your subject and plenty of useful information as you shoot, but it has plenty of problems too. For one, the rubbery eyepiece covering is rigid and uncomfortable, and I found myself constantly moving around and trying to find a more comfortable position (fortunately you can remove it altogether). Second, the display may be incredibly sharp, but it doesn’t do a good job accurately representing the picture you’re framing — colors are too saturated and too contrasted, making everything look very dramatic but not exactly accurate. Higher contrast can be a good thing on an OLED display — since the display isn’t backlit, darks can be much darker and everything can have a realistic, natural glow — but the effect goes too far here. There’s also a considerable moiré effect through the OLED display (though it doesn’t show up as much in photos).

I wound up rarely using the viewfinder at all, but I hardly missed it because the NEX-7's LCD is so good. The 3-inch display is made up of a sharp 922,000 dots, and it recreates colors incredibly accurately. It's a 16:9 screen, which I like, though it inexplicably doesn't take advantage — you'll still see bars around your video as you shoot (you can change this in the camera's settings, and you should). It's also not a touchscreen, which is particularly odd given that the NEX-5N's display is touch-friendly. Normally I'm not a fan of touchscreens, but in this case it could help make more controls a little more accessible. Otherwise, it's the same excellent display as on the 5N — the screen also tilts like the 5N's, so you can angle the screen and always see what you're framing, even when you're holding the camera above or below your face.

There are a handful of E-mount lenses available for NEX cameras (and an adaptor for using Sony's A-mount lenses as well), but the NEX-7 kit comes with an 18-55mm, f/3/5-5.6 lens. Made of metal, it weighs about six ounces, and has a minimum focusing distance of 9.8 inches. (That number is distance from the sensor, which means you can get pretty close up to your subjects.) It's a nice, well-made lens, and my only real issue with it is that there's a very noticeable noise whenever you're zooming. I got to test a number of other lenses as well, and generally liked them all — particularly the $999.99 Carl Zeiss 24mm f/1.8, which churns out some remarkably soft backgrounds. The lenses cost between $249 and $999, and it's certainly not a bad selection, though if you've already bought Nikon or Canon glass it might be a hard sell to dive into Sony, too. At that price, it's an even harder sell.

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