Welcome to a Digital Camera Battery specialist of the Sony Digital Camera Battery
The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 ($649.99 direct) is the point-and-shoot camera that many an enthusiast has dreamed of. It's got an image sensor that's the same size as the mirrorless Nikon J1 and a 3.6x zoom lens that opens up to f/1.8 on the wide end, all packed into a camera that can slide into your back pocket. The only thing large about the 20-megapixel RX100 is its price tag, but the image quality it delivers justifies the cost, even if it doesn't pack bells and whistles like GPS or Wi-Fi. The camera is not without flaws, but its photo quality is so far beyond any other pocket camera that it easily earns our Editors' Choice award for high-end compacts.
When powered down, the RX100 looks a lot like a black version of the Canon PowerShot S100 . It's got the same lines, a similar button layout and control ring around its lens. It measures 2.4 by 4 by 1.4 inches and weighs 8.5 ounces, slightly larger on all sides than the 7-ounce, 2.3-by-3.9-by-1.1-inch S100. That the RX100 is only slightlier bulkier than the Canon is more impressive when you consider that the S100's like sony NP-F550 battery , sony NP-FR1 battery , sony NP-FM50 battery , sony NP-FM51 battery , sony NP-F10 battery , sony NP-FE1 battery , Sharp VL-Z900W battery , Canon BP-512 battery , Canon BP-508 battery , sony DSC-T7 battery , Sony NP-68 battery , Sony NP-98 battery image sensor is a mere 1/1.7 inches in size—the RX100's 1-inch sensor boasts more than 2.5 times the surface area. It's nowhere near the size of a sensor in a Micro Four Thirds or APS-C interchangeable lens camera, but those models don't fit into your shirt pocket with a zoom lens attached. The RX100 fits into the back pocket of your jeans.
This isn't the first attempt to put a large sensor into a compact digital camera. The Sigma DP1, released in 2008, squeezes an APS-C sensor into a pocketable camera, but doesn't feature a zoom lens. More recently, Canon put a 1.5-inch sensor into its PowerShot G1 X , but that camera can only fit into the largest of pockets and was held back by slow autofocus, very limited macro shooting functionality, and a sky-high $800 sticker price.
Even though the lens is very fast and the sensor is large enough to create a smooth, creamy, out-of-focus blur behind subjects, you shouldn't expect the RX100 to produce images that are quite as good as those from a D-SLR. Sensors in those cameras are nearly three times the size of the RX100 in terms of surface area, and do a much better job at capturing fine detail and rendering gradations in color and tone. Close examination of photos captured by the RX100 show them to be much better than you'd expect from a point-and-shoot. You won't be disappointed, but you are still sacrificing some image quality for portability.
The lens is a 3.6x zoom, covering a 28-100mm (35mm equivalent) field of view. It opens up to f/1.8 at its widest, narrows to f/3.2 by 50mm, and closes down at f/4.9 at its extreme. All in all, this is pretty impressive. It captures more light than the S100's lens, but doesn't quite match the 28-112mm f/2-2.8 lens that is packed into the Fujifilm X10 . The X10 is a larger camera with a nice, bright optical viewfinder—one of the weak points of the RX100 is its lack of any sort of eye-level viewfinder. There's no accessory port to add one like there is on the Olympus XZ-1 , nor is there a hot shoe.
What you'll use to frame and review images is the rear LCD, just like on any other point-and-shoot camera. At 3 inches, it features a staggering 1,229k-dot resolution, about a third more than on competing 921k-dot displays. Sony has added white pixels in addition to the standard red, green, and blue dots. The result is an LCD that is brilliant, even when viewed in bright sunlight.