Welcome to a Battery Grip specialist of the Sony Battery Grip
The Sony NEX-F3 is the replacement for the NEX-C3, bringing a host of new features like a built-in flash and flip-up 3-inch LCD screen. It has every feature that you’d expect to find on a high-end compact or entry-level digital SLR camera — it’s simple to use, reasonably compact, and can produce detailed photos.
The NEX-F3 follows Sony’s design cues for other NEX mirrorless ‘interchangeable lens cameras’ like the NEX-7. It’s very visually similar to the original NEX-5, down to the rounded-rectangle grip such as Nikon D90 Battery Grip, Nikon MB-B10 Battery Grip, Nikon D700 Battery Grip, Nikon D7000 Battery Grip, Nikon D3100 Battery Grip, Nikon D5100 Battery Grip, Pentax D-BG4 Battery Grip, Pentax D-BG2 Battery Grip, Sony Alpha A550 Battery Grip, Sony A350 Battery Grip, Sony A900 Battery Grip and thin, flat body and offset Sony E lens mount.
You’re able to buy the NEX-F3 in single- and twin-lens kits with the 18-55mm and 55-210mm variable-aperture zoom lenses — given the camera’s compact size, we were surprised not to see it offered with the 16mm prime lens. The kit lenses do rob the camera of some of its compactness, although they are more versatile.
The top and back of the NEX-F3 are where all the action happens; all you’ll find on the front is the solitary shutter button, an autofocus assist light and a pin to unlock the lens mount. USB (including battery charging) and HDMI outputs are on the camera’s left flank.
The back of the camera is dominated by a 3-inch, 921k-pixel, 16:9 ratio non-touchscreen display. If you’re shooting photos in the 3:2 format of the camera’s sensor, about a sixth of the screen goes unused and only displays on-screen prompts for menu and controls descriptions. The screen itself can flip up 180 degrees, facing forward above the lens — making self-portraits simple.
The controls of the NEX-F3 are basic — there’s a multifunction control dial, two contextual buttons, playback, movie recording, power toggle and the aforementioned shutter button, spread across the rear and top panels. For anything beyond basic controls, the NEX-F3 relies on a menu-and-submenu system that can seem labyrinthine, but is simple enough once you’ve found the settings that you’ll regularly access. The menu system is definitely inferior to having dedicated buttons (changing ISO takes three clicks and some scrolling, as opposed to a single dedicated button-press, for example), but it suits the NEX-F3’s simple, beginner-friendly raison d’etre.
The NEX-F3 has a pop-up flash and accessory port on its top panel, with an add-on electronic viewfinder, stereo microphone and external high-powered flash available for purchase. This makes the F3 more appealing for photographers that prefer to shoot through a viewfinder and amateur videographers.
Despite its image quality quirk of consistent slightly-underexposed photos — which is easily remedied with a boost to the exposure setting in P mode — the Sony NEX-F3 takes excellent quality photos in anything but the most dim lighting conditions, thanks to excellent detail at almost all ISO settings.
If you don’t need too much manual control, the NEX-F3 is a good example of a high-quality camera sensor in a small body.