Just got this and had an hour to use. Man it is a nice product but the opposite of Apple. Literally nothing is in the box. Here is what you need
- Extra battery. The thing charges from the camera itself and with 300 or so shots, it needs an extra battery as the thing isn’t usable while charging. It is nice that it is just micro USB though so funky chargers needed. If you are willing to go with third party batteries, you can get two for $20 plus a charger vs. $40 for a single Sony battery. Bower batteries actualy have 1800 mAh compared with the 1240 of Sony. The charger by the way is just a USB charger, so not really super valuable. The Bower battery is $8.80 each. As an aside I try to buy what I can from Newegg.com, those guys are my heroes (fighting patent trolls!).
- Aegis costs $28 but is an actual piece of glass vs. plastic, so seems like a smarter idea.
- Clear Viewer. It is $58 and probably not really needed, but I find the position of the camera is just so washed out in the bright sunlight.
- Really Right Stuff BPnS-S plate. This is a small Arca-Swiss compatible plate for those times when you need a tripod (for taking videos for instance).
I’ve been trying this thing for a while and wow, it has pretty amazing quality. The dpreview.com benchmarks show that it has about 2600 lph with a maximum of 3600. This is about 70% of the maximum, so it delivers effectively 10 megapixels in a good high light scenario. That is pretty good quality given that a micro-4/3 is giving about 12 megapixels in the average case. I can see why people like it. Also, the jpeg processing isn’t bad although it does do RAW as well.
I did some looks at the raw output with DxO and there is definitely lots of lense distortion at 28mm effective which the jpegs are processing out. All and all a nice point and shoot and it does fit (barely) into my pocket.
