The Sony RX 100 VI: A Camera of Tiny Proportions with Big Implications

My impression is that Sony is really proud of this size, and I think they're champions of the small size. They've managed to cram all this amazing technology into a tiny camera, which is impressive. The fact that the Arts 106 is like a millimeter larger and they had to make some adjustments just goes to show how innovative they are in terms of design. However, their focus on compactness means that the RX 100 VI may not change much in the near future.

One of the limitations of the camera is its 4K recording capability. The five-minute limit can be frustrating for photographers who need more time to capture their footage. If you start pushing it and recording new files after the five-minute mark, you risk overheating the camera, which will shut itself down to protect itself. This is a significant drawback, especially for those who plan to use the camera for extended periods or in situations that require continuous recording.

However, when used as a vlogging camera, the RX 100 VI can produce great results without overheating issues. The reason for this lies in its usage pattern – short takes and frequent shutdowns allow it to avoid excessive heat buildup. I personally found that using the camera for vlogging resulted in high-quality footage without any overheating problems.

I would not recommend the RX 100 VI as a primary camera for shooting children's school plays or other long-form content, however. It is best suited for tasks like capturing short takes and events where quick turnaround times are necessary. The camera excels in HD mode but struggles with 4K recording due to its compact design.

The log profiles that can be used on the RX 100 VI are impressive, offering incredible low-light performance with minimal noise. Once you're comfortable using them, the color grading capabilities become truly exceptional. However, I would like to see a redesigned battery in future models. The current battery is underpowered and tends to die quickly when exposed to cold temperatures.

In fact, I experienced this issue firsthand during a shoot at the Grand Canyon last year. Despite keeping the battery in insulated pockets to maintain body warmth, it still died prematurely. This limitation highlights the need for a stronger, more efficient power source that can handle extreme conditions.

Despite these limitations, the RX 100 VI is an incredible camera that has made a significant impact on vlogging and video content creation. Its autofocus capabilities are particularly noteworthy, with a hybrid system offering 315 face detection points and 25 contrast detection points. This results in exceptional accuracy and speed when it comes to tracking subjects.

In conclusion, the Sony RX 100 VI is an impressive camera that has redefined the compact point-and-shoot format. While it may not change much in terms of design, its capabilities make it a top choice for vloggers, photographers, and videographers who need high-quality results without sacrificing portability.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday Sony announced the newest addition to the rx100 lineup of cameras the arcs 106 now I am a big fan of the rx100 lineup and have been using them for many years I've talked a lot about them on this show I started with the arcs 103 I guess about four years ago I have the arcs 104 I upgraded to the 5 which is this one which I absolutely love and the reason I use these so much is their portability they are compact but they also deliver really amazing stills and 4k video and I've done a lot of videos for this show on this camera and even for stills I think it ends up being a camera that I use a lot because it's with me and so today with the announcement of the RX 106 I'm super excited and I want to talk about some of the new features and what we can expect to see out of this thing the first big feature that I'm really amped about is a brand new lens now the new lens is a 24 to 200 millimeter equivalent it is a Zeiss various own arty lens it is also a variable aperture like the previous model but this one is an f28 f4 5 it has 15 elements in 12 groups includes for advanced aspherical elements and to IDI elements now in the live stream this morning they show the MTF charts for this lens now I know that MTF charts are not going to tell you everything but they do give you an idea of what you can expect to see from the contrast and also edge to edge sharpness of the lens this one does look really legit now the previous model guess the last three of them have had a equivalent 24 to 70 millimeter lens which is cool but there have been times where because it's just a point shoot that you carry around sometimes you want to be able to capture something a little further away and to have a little bit of extra focal length on the lens is something that I think is really going to be welcome now what I'm curious about is the previous addition of this lens had a 1.8 maximum aperture and that has been sacrificed the new lens is a 2.8 maximum aperture now there are ways to compensate for it's still pretty wide but it's going to depend on what the sensor in the processing in this new model are capable of and I imagine that's a trade-off that something you're really good about this but I imagine that's a trade-off that they have found a workaround for so I don't know that it's going to mean worse low-light performance necessarily but it is interesting that that is one of the sacrifices they did in the redesign but another thing that I think is particularly interesting I'm gonna talk auto focus in a second is even the rx100 five shares a lot of the same technology in the sensor that you see in the a9 which is their really expensive top-of-the-line alpha series model and what's really cool about that is you can end up doing basically 24 frames a second of continuous shooting you can do it on the RX 105 you can also do it on the rx 10 4 and that's a really cool feature to have but with a short lens a lot of times when you're doing action it might be a sporting event or might be something where you really do need a longer lens so I think it was something that was due on this camera the other big new feature is faster autofocus now this is a stack - CMOS sensor which as I mentioned earlier is the same technology that you see in the a 9 you see it in the RX 105 also in the RX 10 4 it's in several of their cameras and it's kind of way beyond the scope of this video to get into but it might be worth doing a separate video to talk about the fact that Sony have multiple sensors that are in their production cameras right now the reason that is is they all do different things extremely well so for instance the a7 S series of cameras it has it's a 12 megapixel sensor but it's optimized for low-light performance and whereas on the other hand on something like the a7 R series you're going to have a full-frame sensor that gives you 45 megapixels so incredibly high resolution something like the RX 10 the urx 105 and then also now the a9 which does it on a really high level it's got this stack CMOS sensor in it and this enables you to do a number of things which is really cool and one of which is a really high burst rate but also an improved tracking of autofocus performance now what it's doing is the autofocus is actually reading off of the sensor so all 24 megapixels in the case of the a9 in this case it's about 20 but it's reading all of those megapixels in real time and this allows you to get more accurate face detection and it also allows Sony to use their eye AF technology so once a face is recognized in the scene it's going to actually be able to detect the eye keep the focus there in real time so 24 frames a second and not only you shooting at this high burst rate but the autofocus is keeping up even if the person turns around or moves out of the frame slightly and comes back it's able to lock in on that and recognize like really small details and this is a big deal it's one of the things that really put Sonne over the top now whether or not you need to shoot at 24 frames a second or not depends and I think as I mentioned earlier that's the other reason you want a longer focal length lens if you're doing something that's a little more sports oriented 200 millimetres is a little better the other thing that's interesting about this is it does it with no blackout so when you're shooting 24 frames a second of raw stills the screen never blacks out so you're able to just keep up with the action I think that's something that's really important now the downside to all this and this is the deal on the rx100 5 is that once you fill up the buffer it's gonna have to write all those raw images to the card so it's collecting them faster than it can write and it does take a second while you wait for all those images to transfer over to the card so one of the things I will be really interested in then I won't know until I'm able to use the cameras is if the rx100 6 is actually improved on that and that's one thing that could be really cool now the next thing I want to talk about is the electronic viewfinder redesign now these are really cool because they're compact cameras and they feature a pop-up viewfinder and the way it's worked on previous rx100 models is it's kind of a two-step process you pop the viewfinder up then you pull out the little eyepiece and then you can use it and they basically redesign that so it's just one touch now you and you'd push the release the whole thing comes up and pops open much like what you see on the RX 1 series and the other thing is there have been some improvements to this electronic viewfinder as well it now features a 2.35 million dot oled viewfinder so one of the complaints that i've had on these cameras is that when I'm using the viewfinder it's just not a real high resolution and I end up just using the back screen most of the time and it just seems a little bit of a gimmick because in practical use it's not that practical and I think it probably will be improved on when you improve that resolution because of the size of this is small so if you're able to see it and you're able to use it then it is something that's worth having so that's one of the things that I'm really excited about on the RX 106 let's talk for a minute about video because I think this is one of Sony's strong suits in fact it's one of the things that drew me to the system back when the NEX 5 came out and in the NEX 7 is these cameras were capable of doing amazing quality stills but you could also capture really high quality video as well and when you fast forward to the present day we've got 4k video and you can pretty much do it on any of Sony's cameras including their compacts and we're going to come back to 4k the compact later but anyway one of the things that I really love that Sony do or they give you tools that you really only see on professional-grade cameras and they give them to you across the lineup for the most part and one of these is picture profiles and they introduce picture profiles on the rx100 for in the arts 100 lineup a few years ago and essentially when you are shooting a high-contrast scene you have a limitation of dynamic range within this rec.709 color space that you're going to be outputting with video so being able to set up a picture profile to compress that a little bit so I can select like a cine 2 profile or a cine 4 profile I'll shoot with those a lot and what they do is they change the color space so you don't necessarily lose shadow detail or you don't necessarily blow highlights you do have to do some color grading with these but they allow you enormous amount of flexibility in the end and a better looking image and we've also had on the extreme end log profiles so s log two we now have s log three that it's going to be coming out on the rx100 six I'm really excited about that and then the one that I'm really stoked about is the inclusion of an HL G profile now HL G stands for hybrid log gamma and if you are not familiar this is basically like HDR video it allows you to shoot in a color space that has an enormous dynamic range to it now this is designed to pair up with an HDR TV display or an HDR monitor and that doesn't interest me that much because the video that I make I'm doing for the web so really needs to be viewable on a computer or a mobile device but what's really cool about HL G is that you can shoot in that color space and then you can bring it in in via a lot and some curves adjustments you've got all that information there so if you have a scene where you need to bring your highlights back all that information is retained it's a little bit easier to work with than a log profile once you get set up doing it and I think it's a really incredible inclusion so I'm really excited about the h LG profile that we'll be able to use when shooting video on the rx100 6 now with the rx100 6 there are some things that are still missing and this is going to frustrate a lot of people for instance there is still no microphone jack and 4 is good as this camera is as a vlog camera and a lot of people buy it for that usage you're gonna have to use an external audio with it because it just does not have a mic jack the mics that are in here are okay and you can see that I have these little furry things over there to keep wind noise out and they will work really would be nice to see that I don't think that you're ever gonna see this at least not for the foreseeable future my impression is that Sony are really proud of this size in fact the arts 106 is like a millimeter larger and they had to make some adjustments but it's really I think they're just they're champions of the small size and the fact that they're like cramming all this amazing technology into a small camera so I just don't think that's going to change in the near future 4k still has a five-minute limit and that's can be frustrating depending on how you're using it and if you start pushing it and recording new files once you're past that five minute limit then you're risking overheating the camera in fact the camera will shut itself down to protect itself so that's something that is a little bit frustrating to a lot of photographers and unfortunately we're not going to see a change on that anytime soon now let me say this about 4k though is that when I'm using this camera I'm usually using it for vlogging in fact I did several videos last June's one I did in New York and I got great results with this I never overheated it and the reason why is if I'm using as a vlogging camera I'm doing a lot of little takes and I don't just leave it running and so my takes will be like 30 seconds a minute long and then I shut it down and when there's something else to film a film that so I've really never had overheating issues with the 4k when I used this as a vlogging camera having said that I would not recommend this as somebody to somebody who wants to shoot like their kids school play in 4k that runs but anyway that would this is not the right tool for that job it's just not gonna do it HD is fine but 4k has limitations and again you have to consider what they're cramming into a tiny camera at this price point the fact that it's able to do it all is pretty amazing but I did a lot of footage last year and I used log profiles actually these were all shot with cine and it has incredible low-light performance very little noise the color grading was once you're into a groove with it I mean you can get some really amazing quality stuff out of these cameras the one thing that is missing that I would like to see is a redesigned battery on these I don't care for the battery that's here because it's just kind of underpowered you're gonna have to have a lot of batteries in fact that day I was in New York and we did all that vlogging I went through probably four or five batteries move shot all day but a lot of powering the camera on and off and and just in the course of a day and using it they just don't have a lot of power to them the other thing is if you're in extreme cold temperatures is they tend to die you when I was at the Grand Canyon last year I was doing a lot of footage there and I was really limited on the footage I was able to get because you would put that battery in and I had these in interior pockets trying to keep body warmth on them and it just didn't work I mean you put him in the Cameron you'd get 20 seconds of video then it would say battery's low or battery exhausted and rip our off so I would really like to see Sony at some point rethink the battery that's in here it's the same battery they use on several other cameras too but I really would like to see something that's stronger and more powerful but all in all I'm really excited about the RX 106 I will be pre-ordering one when they go up Thursday and I will do a review once I get it the 5 is incredible and the 5 had a lot of additions that really change this over and the the difference between the 4 and the 5 was pretty amazing mainly because you could shoot at 24 frames a second continuous speed on here now which is carried over and even more improved on the 6 but also the autofocus was a big deal for me even in video is the fact that you have a hybrid autofocus system and the autofocus system that's in here now it has 315 face detection autofocus points and 25 contrast detection points and this means you're gonna get really good accuracy with it and the introduction of phase detection the rx100 4 was contrast only made this camera just a completely different machine particularly for video and vlog style stuff and things where you need facial recognition and and speed and accuracy in that autofocus so anyway I would love to hear what you guys have to think about this camera so please leave your comments below there are more videos coming up this week I will see you guys in the next one until then latertoday Sony announced the newest addition to the rx100 lineup of cameras the arcs 106 now I am a big fan of the rx100 lineup and have been using them for many years I've talked a lot about them on this show I started with the arcs 103 I guess about four years ago I have the arcs 104 I upgraded to the 5 which is this one which I absolutely love and the reason I use these so much is their portability they are compact but they also deliver really amazing stills and 4k video and I've done a lot of videos for this show on this camera and even for stills I think it ends up being a camera that I use a lot because it's with me and so today with the announcement of the RX 106 I'm super excited and I want to talk about some of the new features and what we can expect to see out of this thing the first big feature that I'm really amped about is a brand new lens now the new lens is a 24 to 200 millimeter equivalent it is a Zeiss various own arty lens it is also a variable aperture like the previous model but this one is an f28 f4 5 it has 15 elements in 12 groups includes for advanced aspherical elements and to IDI elements now in the live stream this morning they show the MTF charts for this lens now I know that MTF charts are not going to tell you everything but they do give you an idea of what you can expect to see from the contrast and also edge to edge sharpness of the lens this one does look really legit now the previous model guess the last three of them have had a equivalent 24 to 70 millimeter lens which is cool but there have been times where because it's just a point shoot that you carry around sometimes you want to be able to capture something a little further away and to have a little bit of extra focal length on the lens is something that I think is really going to be welcome now what I'm curious about is the previous addition of this lens had a 1.8 maximum aperture and that has been sacrificed the new lens is a 2.8 maximum aperture now there are ways to compensate for it's still pretty wide but it's going to depend on what the sensor in the processing in this new model are capable of and I imagine that's a trade-off that something you're really good about this but I imagine that's a trade-off that they have found a workaround for so I don't know that it's going to mean worse low-light performance necessarily but it is interesting that that is one of the sacrifices they did in the redesign but another thing that I think is particularly interesting I'm gonna talk auto focus in a second is even the rx100 five shares a lot of the same technology in the sensor that you see in the a9 which is their really expensive top-of-the-line alpha series model and what's really cool about that is you can end up doing basically 24 frames a second of continuous shooting you can do it on the RX 105 you can also do it on the rx 10 4 and that's a really cool feature to have but with a short lens a lot of times when you're doing action it might be a sporting event or might be something where you really do need a longer lens so I think it was something that was due on this camera the other big new feature is faster autofocus now this is a stack - CMOS sensor which as I mentioned earlier is the same technology that you see in the a 9 you see it in the RX 105 also in the RX 10 4 it's in several of their cameras and it's kind of way beyond the scope of this video to get into but it might be worth doing a separate video to talk about the fact that Sony have multiple sensors that are in their production cameras right now the reason that is is they all do different things extremely well so for instance the a7 S series of cameras it has it's a 12 megapixel sensor but it's optimized for low-light performance and whereas on the other hand on something like the a7 R series you're going to have a full-frame sensor that gives you 45 megapixels so incredibly high resolution something like the RX 10 the urx 105 and then also now the a9 which does it on a really high level it's got this stack CMOS sensor in it and this enables you to do a number of things which is really cool and one of which is a really high burst rate but also an improved tracking of autofocus performance now what it's doing is the autofocus is actually reading off of the sensor so all 24 megapixels in the case of the a9 in this case it's about 20 but it's reading all of those megapixels in real time and this allows you to get more accurate face detection and it also allows Sony to use their eye AF technology so once a face is recognized in the scene it's going to actually be able to detect the eye keep the focus there in real time so 24 frames a second and not only you shooting at this high burst rate but the autofocus is keeping up even if the person turns around or moves out of the frame slightly and comes back it's able to lock in on that and recognize like really small details and this is a big deal it's one of the things that really put Sonne over the top now whether or not you need to shoot at 24 frames a second or not depends and I think as I mentioned earlier that's the other reason you want a longer focal length lens if you're doing something that's a little more sports oriented 200 millimetres is a little better the other thing that's interesting about this is it does it with no blackout so when you're shooting 24 frames a second of raw stills the screen never blacks out so you're able to just keep up with the action I think that's something that's really important now the downside to all this and this is the deal on the rx100 5 is that once you fill up the buffer it's gonna have to write all those raw images to the card so it's collecting them faster than it can write and it does take a second while you wait for all those images to transfer over to the card so one of the things I will be really interested in then I won't know until I'm able to use the cameras is if the rx100 6 is actually improved on that and that's one thing that could be really cool now the next thing I want to talk about is the electronic viewfinder redesign now these are really cool because they're compact cameras and they feature a pop-up viewfinder and the way it's worked on previous rx100 models is it's kind of a two-step process you pop the viewfinder up then you pull out the little eyepiece and then you can use it and they basically redesign that so it's just one touch now you and you'd push the release the whole thing comes up and pops open much like what you see on the RX 1 series and the other thing is there have been some improvements to this electronic viewfinder as well it now features a 2.35 million dot oled viewfinder so one of the complaints that i've had on these cameras is that when I'm using the viewfinder it's just not a real high resolution and I end up just using the back screen most of the time and it just seems a little bit of a gimmick because in practical use it's not that practical and I think it probably will be improved on when you improve that resolution because of the size of this is small so if you're able to see it and you're able to use it then it is something that's worth having so that's one of the things that I'm really excited about on the RX 106 let's talk for a minute about video because I think this is one of Sony's strong suits in fact it's one of the things that drew me to the system back when the NEX 5 came out and in the NEX 7 is these cameras were capable of doing amazing quality stills but you could also capture really high quality video as well and when you fast forward to the present day we've got 4k video and you can pretty much do it on any of Sony's cameras including their compacts and we're going to come back to 4k the compact later but anyway one of the things that I really love that Sony do or they give you tools that you really only see on professional-grade cameras and they give them to you across the lineup for the most part and one of these is picture profiles and they introduce picture profiles on the rx100 for in the arts 100 lineup a few years ago and essentially when you are shooting a high-contrast scene you have a limitation of dynamic range within this rec.709 color space that you're going to be outputting with video so being able to set up a picture profile to compress that a little bit so I can select like a cine 2 profile or a cine 4 profile I'll shoot with those a lot and what they do is they change the color space so you don't necessarily lose shadow detail or you don't necessarily blow highlights you do have to do some color grading with these but they allow you enormous amount of flexibility in the end and a better looking image and we've also had on the extreme end log profiles so s log two we now have s log three that it's going to be coming out on the rx100 six I'm really excited about that and then the one that I'm really stoked about is the inclusion of an HL G profile now HL G stands for hybrid log gamma and if you are not familiar this is basically like HDR video it allows you to shoot in a color space that has an enormous dynamic range to it now this is designed to pair up with an HDR TV display or an HDR monitor and that doesn't interest me that much because the video that I make I'm doing for the web so really needs to be viewable on a computer or a mobile device but what's really cool about HL G is that you can shoot in that color space and then you can bring it in in via a lot and some curves adjustments you've got all that information there so if you have a scene where you need to bring your highlights back all that information is retained it's a little bit easier to work with than a log profile once you get set up doing it and I think it's a really incredible inclusion so I'm really excited about the h LG profile that we'll be able to use when shooting video on the rx100 6 now with the rx100 6 there are some things that are still missing and this is going to frustrate a lot of people for instance there is still no microphone jack and 4 is good as this camera is as a vlog camera and a lot of people buy it for that usage you're gonna have to use an external audio with it because it just does not have a mic jack the mics that are in here are okay and you can see that I have these little furry things over there to keep wind noise out and they will work really would be nice to see that I don't think that you're ever gonna see this at least not for the foreseeable future my impression is that Sony are really proud of this size in fact the arts 106 is like a millimeter larger and they had to make some adjustments but it's really I think they're just they're champions of the small size and the fact that they're like cramming all this amazing technology into a small camera so I just don't think that's going to change in the near future 4k still has a five-minute limit and that's can be frustrating depending on how you're using it and if you start pushing it and recording new files once you're past that five minute limit then you're risking overheating the camera in fact the camera will shut itself down to protect itself so that's something that is a little bit frustrating to a lot of photographers and unfortunately we're not going to see a change on that anytime soon now let me say this about 4k though is that when I'm using this camera I'm usually using it for vlogging in fact I did several videos last June's one I did in New York and I got great results with this I never overheated it and the reason why is if I'm using as a vlogging camera I'm doing a lot of little takes and I don't just leave it running and so my takes will be like 30 seconds a minute long and then I shut it down and when there's something else to film a film that so I've really never had overheating issues with the 4k when I used this as a vlogging camera having said that I would not recommend this as somebody to somebody who wants to shoot like their kids school play in 4k that runs but anyway that would this is not the right tool for that job it's just not gonna do it HD is fine but 4k has limitations and again you have to consider what they're cramming into a tiny camera at this price point the fact that it's able to do it all is pretty amazing but I did a lot of footage last year and I used log profiles actually these were all shot with cine and it has incredible low-light performance very little noise the color grading was once you're into a groove with it I mean you can get some really amazing quality stuff out of these cameras the one thing that is missing that I would like to see is a redesigned battery on these I don't care for the battery that's here because it's just kind of underpowered you're gonna have to have a lot of batteries in fact that day I was in New York and we did all that vlogging I went through probably four or five batteries move shot all day but a lot of powering the camera on and off and and just in the course of a day and using it they just don't have a lot of power to them the other thing is if you're in extreme cold temperatures is they tend to die you when I was at the Grand Canyon last year I was doing a lot of footage there and I was really limited on the footage I was able to get because you would put that battery in and I had these in interior pockets trying to keep body warmth on them and it just didn't work I mean you put him in the Cameron you'd get 20 seconds of video then it would say battery's low or battery exhausted and rip our off so I would really like to see Sony at some point rethink the battery that's in here it's the same battery they use on several other cameras too but I really would like to see something that's stronger and more powerful but all in all I'm really excited about the RX 106 I will be pre-ordering one when they go up Thursday and I will do a review once I get it the 5 is incredible and the 5 had a lot of additions that really change this over and the the difference between the 4 and the 5 was pretty amazing mainly because you could shoot at 24 frames a second continuous speed on here now which is carried over and even more improved on the 6 but also the autofocus was a big deal for me even in video is the fact that you have a hybrid autofocus system and the autofocus system that's in here now it has 315 face detection autofocus points and 25 contrast detection points and this means you're gonna get really good accuracy with it and the introduction of phase detection the rx100 4 was contrast only made this camera just a completely different machine particularly for video and vlog style stuff and things where you need facial recognition and and speed and accuracy in that autofocus so anyway I would love to hear what you guys have to think about this camera so please leave your comments below there are more videos coming up this week I will see you guys in the next one until then later\n"