Sony NEX-C3 review

It wasn’t quite love at first sight for us and the Sony NEX range. We’re big fans of the concept – an SLR-style sensor and interchangeable lenses crammed into a compact-shaped body – but while image quality was every bit as good as a conventional SLR, its performance and controls were severely lacking.

The NEX-C3 enters a very competitive market

A firmware update went a long way to addressing the control issues of the Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5. This convinced us to give the NEX-5 a Best Buy award when we revisited it in our group test of interchangeable-lens cameras, particularly in view of its excellent 1080p video capture.

Since then, Panasonic has launched the NEX-like DMC-GF3. It couldn’t quite match the NEX-5 for photo quality but surpassed it for performance and controls. At £550, it seemed overpriced at its launch, but as we go to press it’s available at Amazon for £450 with a 14mm pancake lens, £419 with a 3x zoom lens or £550 (from Jessops) with both lenses.

The NEX-C3 enters the fray at similar prices: £430 with a 3x zoom lens (NEX-C3K), £528 with a 16mm pancake (NEX-C3A) or £550 as a twin-lens kit (NEX-C3D). It’s even smaller and lighter than the old NEX models, but build quality remains extremely high. The slim handgrip and front-heavy centre of gravity when the 18-55mm lens is attached means it’s best not to use it one-handed, but grasped in two hands it feels extremely satisfying and luxurious. The 3in, 921,000-pixel screen looks fabulous and tilts up and down for easy shooting from the hip or over your head.

The tilting screen allows for more creative compositions

CONTROLS

As before, this is primarily a point-and-shoot camera. The only labelled buttons are for power, shutter release, video capture, playback, display and exposure compensation – and that short list is reduced further in Auto mode. Pressing exposure compensation brings a message that this control is only available in P/A/S/M modes (Program, Aperture, Shutter and Manual).

Changing settings in Auto mode is via a carousel of results-oriented functions under the heading Photo Creativity. Rather than exposure compensation, this function is presented as Brightness. Aperture control becomes Background Defocus, and there’s a range of creative effects such as Retro Photo and Toy Camera. When changing multiple settings, icons stack up in the bottom-left corner of the screen to remind that they’ve been applied – reminiscent of applying effects in video-editing software. Experienced photographers won’t have much time for it but it’s one of the friendliest results-oriented camera control systems we’ve seen.

Here’s the two lens NEX-C3D kit

There is some respite for those who want quick access to conventional controls. They’ll have to configure them themselves, but in P/A/S/M modes, the left and right navigation buttons can be assigned to various settings (RAW mode is the only notable omission), and pressing the centre button calls up a further five custom controls. The lower function button can also be assigned, although it defaults to moving the autofocus point when in flexible spot focus mode. Overall, it works reasonably well for quickly getting at settings, although the GF3’s labelled buttons and touchscreen spot focus are easier to use.

Shot-to-shot performance is vastly improved. The NEX-3 was quick as long as you were happy to live without shots appearing on the screen directly after capture. With this feature enabled, it could only capture a shot every 2.8 seconds – a terrible result for such an expensive camera. The C3 gets this down to 0.9 seconds. The GF3 is even faster at 0.6 seconds, though, mainly because its autofocus system is much nippier. The C3 performs like a responsive compact camera, whereas the GF3 is as fast as an SLR. The C3 wins for continuous performance, though, capturing 20 JPEGs at 6.3fps before slowing to the 2.5fps in our tests. RAW continuous capture was at 6.3fps for seven frames before slowing to 0.5fps.

There’s a bare minimum of buttons on the NEX-C3

A camera’s performance isn’t just about the time between shots, though. Various operational quirks mean that the C3 isn’t as enjoyable to use as it could be. There was often a half-second lag between pressing a button and the camera responding, and on numerous occasions the camera failed to respond at all. Switching between shooting modes was particularly laborious – this camera is crying out for a mode dial.

Elsewhere, the camera seems to be wilfully pedantic. Insert a blank SD card and it points out that the folder structure for saving photos is missing. Creating them only takes a couple of seconds but the camera requires a button press for acknowledgement both before and afterwards. In what circumstance would users not want these folders to be created? They don’t need a running commentary, or a slapped wrist. The camera’s pedantic nature reappears in that users must choose between browsing photos or videos via the menu. We’re at a loss as to why it needs to save them in separate folders on the card, or why it can’t sort them by date to browse together.

VIDEO

The C3’s video mode is among the best to be found on any camera. As with SLRs’ video modes, it excels for low noise levels when shooting in low light, and the shallow depth of field gives a sumptuous film-like quality, throwing the background out of focus to draw the eye to the subject. However, while the current crop of SLRs struggle to update autofocus while recording, the C3’s autofocus is smooth and entirely silent. The lens’s zoom ring is a step up from the norm, too. It’s superbly weighted and damped to deliver smooth zooming while recording videos.

The bad news is that videos are limited to 720p resolution, which equates to half the pixel count of 1080p video. That’s disappointing, but the NEX-3 was the 720p budget model to the 1080p NEX-5, so presumably there’ll be a 1080p NEX-C5 along shortly to plug that gap.

You can see the dedicated movie button from this top angle

Various DSLRs from Sony and others have suffered serious problems regarding their sensors overheating during video capture, with clips lasting as little as a couple of minutes before the camera switched itself off. The C3 recorded 102 minutes of video (albeit with breaks every 30 minutes to avoid an an import tax hike) before it overheated. That’s probably long enough to not be of any practical concern, but it could prove to be a more pressing issue in hotter climates (we tested at 22 degrees centigrade ambient temperature).

Another disappointment is that the C3’s autofocus settings were ignored when recording video. Accurate focus is critical because of the shallow depth of field, but picking a particular part of the frame to focus on isn’t possible. The Panasonic is much better in this respect, with spot and tracking focus effortlessly controlled via the touchscreen. It also records at 1080p, and to the best of our knowledge, no G-series cameras overheat.

IMAGE QUALITY

Photos are captured at 16 megapixels, up from 14.6 megapixels in the NEX-3. The advantage is somewhat muted by the 18-55mm lens, which displayed a slight softness to details and chromatic aberrations, particularly towards the edges of frames. Our studio test shots were extremely sharp in the centre, but again, focus was a little soft towards the edges. Overall, the 12-megapixel GF3 was better at resolving detail.

Chromatic aberrations (along the edges of the tree) and slightly soft focus towards the edges of frames are our only complaints regarding image quality

However, the C3 shot into the lead as we raised the ISO speed. Photos stood up to close scrutiny at ISO 1600, and even the top ISO 12,800 setting was good enough for posting on the web at small sizes. That’s an incredible achievement for a compact camera and a big improvement over the GF3, which we wouldn’t recommend using beyond ISO 3200. However, only those who are willing to venture beyond these cameras’ Auto modes will see any real difference. The C3’s Auto mode limited ISO speeds to 1600, while the GF3 restricted them to 800.

There’s a fair amount of noise here when viewed up close, but a compact camera producing usable photos at ISO 12,800 is extraordinary

It’s a tough call choosing between the NEX-C3 and GF3. The C3 excels in low light – probably the hardest test for any camera – but the GF3 takes better photos in brighter conditions, it’s much quicker to focus, its controls are more accessible and it’s the clear winner for video capture. Both are fantastic cameras, and neither is obviously better than the other.

Noise levels – and smearing noise-reduction artefacts – are lower than from the C3’s main rival, the Panasonic GF3

If you’re planning to buy before 31 August 2011, Panasonic’s offer to bundle a five-year warranty and a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with the GF3 (details here) might just swing your decision.

For those who aren’t in such a rush, it might be worth waiting for the successor to the NEX-5, which is bound to support 1080p video. The New Olympus PEN models – E-P3, E-PL3 and E-PM1 – are just around the corner, too. Meanwhile, Panasonic has suggested that the next GF-series camera will cater for people who want more hands-on control. If it also inherited the 16-megapixel sensor from the Panasonic G3, which is much closer to the C3 than the GF3 in terms of noise levels, it would jump straight to the top of our wish-list. In the meantime, though, the C3 deserves to be extremely popular.