**Bridge Camera Impressions: A Review of Sony's RX10 IV**

I recently had the opportunity to play with the Sony RX10 IV, a bridge-style camera that has been impressing me with its impressive feature set and outstanding performance. With how much functionality Sony has been able to fit into this compact camera body is truly remarkable. However, there are a few minor details that I wish were included that didn't detract from my overall experience.

One of the things that I feel is missing in this camera is a fully articulating screen. In fact, I think every camera that comes out today should have one by now. While the screen on the RX10 IV does offer some articulation, it only allows for 180-degree movement in both directions, which limits its usefulness when used as a viewfinder or for filming videos. As someone who frequently shoots videos with this camera, I find it frustrating that I can't use it to my full potential without having to rely on external solutions.

Another feature that is curiously missing from the RX10 IV is built-in neutral density filters. This isn't a huge deal, but when shooting video outdoors in bright daylight, you often need a faster shutter speed than what's available with an f/1.4 lens. Having a neutral density filter would allow for more flexibility and control over your shots. Additionally, when shooting in S-Log 2 mode outdoors, the camera requires a very high ISO start, which can be difficult to work with in outdoor situations.

On the other hand, I was pleased to find that the RX10 IV has many features that are typically found in DSLRs or larger cameras. The lens is an impressive 24-600mm f/2.4-4 zoom, which offers a wide range of creative possibilities and makes this camera ideal for portrait, landscape, and wildlife photographers. Additionally, the camera's sensor and autofocus system deliver outstanding performance, making it easy to capture sharp images in a variety of lighting conditions.

One minor detail that did frustrate me was the way the mode selection switch is set up on the RX10 IV. While it does allow you to assign custom settings to memory locations, there are some quirks with how this works. For example, I found that if I quickly switched between shooting stills and video modes while the camera was in manual mode, the switch would sometimes lock in a different setting than what I had intended. This wasn't a deal-breaker, but it did require some careful attention to avoid.

Despite these minor issues, I was extremely impressed with the RX10 IV. The combination of its features, performance, and portability make it an excellent choice for anyone looking for a versatile camera that can handle a wide range of shooting situations. When considering the cost of a DSLR or larger camera system, the price point of the RX10 IV is incredibly reasonable, especially at around $1600 US as of fall 2016.

In conclusion, I highly recommend the Sony RX10 IV to anyone looking for a camera that offers a unique blend of portability and functionality. While it may not have all the features you want, its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. If you're in the market for a new camera system or just want a versatile tool for your next photography adventure, I would definitely suggest giving the RX10 IV a try.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back to the art of photography in this video we're going to take a look at the sony rx10 mark 3 which is the latest bridge camera offering from sony if you're not familiar with the concept of a bridge camera it is a camera that's designed to be somewhere between a point-and-shoot and a DSLR so you have the size and the form factor in the feel of shooting with the DSLR however it does have a fixed zoom lens and a one-inch sensor which puts it more in line with a point-and-shoot camera and I think the best way to think of it is the big brother to this little guy which is the Sony rx100 Mark 4 which I've been shooting on a lot over the last year I got this a little over a year ago and it's starting to get beat up even and I absolutely love this camera for its size if you don't want to haul a bunch of gear around I can just bring this with me and the image quality and the video quality are absolutely outstanding I can even shoot 4k video and short bursts on here however due to its size there are some limitations that you have to learn to work around mainly the speed of shooting so it's really not an optimal camera for something like sports or wildlife and then the 4k has limitations as well and because the size of this it does overheat very easily in fact Sony have imposed a 5 minute limit on recording length so you don't overheat it accidentally in fact at the end of 5 minutes if you try to record another video you do get the little thermometer so it does have some limitations so in this whole bridge camera type design that they've done with the rx 10 series and this is the third iteration of that it's the same sensor that you have in the rx100 but they've put it in a much larger body so it opens it up to a lot of possibilities and I think quite frankly a lot of variation and a lot of flexibility that you get out of this camera the main thing for me is the lens that they've included on the rx 10 3 it is a Zeiss Vario sonar and this is a 24 to 600 you heard me right 24 600 this is an extreme focal range and it's incredible lens if you look at this little diagram here you can see that the design of this actually has lens elements that kind of are situated throughout the entire body of the camera is what it uses and you can see that you have 8 extra low dispersion elements as well as 6 aspherical elements this lens is absolutely beautiful in fact when you start to think about the price you would pay for something like this it's oftentimes less than what you would pay for a that's that kind of variation in it and has that wider focal range and I think that's really outstanding when I first started playing with this camera I wanted to do something where I could take advantage of that really long focal range and so I started doing a series of shots and time lapses and videos of the moon and I shot these over the period of a few weeks did several moon cycles and I was really impressed with how this camera behaved and how it responded the images are extra sharp especially all the way out at 600 and it really did an outstanding job the lens really is the highlight for me on here and it is very impressive I think Sony have done an outstanding job with the design and layout on this camera and a lot of the main camera functions are actually assigned to physical dials or buttons that you're going to use so things aren't hidden in the menu system which I really like so for instance on the lens collar you have your aperture control rings that's how you dial in your aperture on the top of the camera you have your mode selection dial over on the left hand side and on the right hand side you have your exposure compensation dial on the front of the camera you actually have your focus mode selection switch so you can select physically between single continuous direct manual focus or manual focus and the other really nice thing about this and you're going to notice on the back of the camera is that and this is kind of a typical Sony layout but they've moved things around so they're less easy to hit accidentally for instance the movie start and stop button is been relocated it's actually easy to press and you're not going to hit it by accident the other cool thing that Sony has done you're going to see on the top of the camera there's c1c2 and on the back of the camera you're going to see c3 and these are custom function buttons that you can assign and actually when you get into the menu system they're actually 10 custom function buttons that you can assign on this camera which is really nice including this button that is on the side of the lens now by default this is set up is a focus lock button and so if you're in continuous focus mode and you want to recompose but you want to hold the focus you just simply press that button and hold it that is reassign Abell as well you can make that something else and you can actually move the focus hold to something else if you want so everything is fully customizable and you can set this up exactly how you want it another major advantage of the sony rx10 mark 3 over something like a point shoot camera is speed is greatly improved so if you need burst performance when you're shooting stills so for instance if you're shooting sports or wildlife there is a dedicated D RAM chip inside of here so it actually allows you to do up to 14 frames second and the buffer is actually really good to shooting raw you get about 30 frames before it has to buffer the only disadvantage of that and that is very impressive for a digital camera but the only disadvantage is the buffer does take a while to clear and write to the card and so you kind of have to time your burst performance in the right way so you don't miss something because it will take a while to clear out video performance on the rx 10 mark 3 is exceptional you get full 4k video and there are no overheating issues and a lot of this has to do with having a larger body but it doesn't have a lot of the overheating issues that are typically associated with some Sony cameras and it's really nice to be able to do this with the other thing is they give you an S log2 profile and this is really nice if you're trying to control your dynamic range or you're shooting in a really high contrast situation they do give you a full log profile to work with and you also have external mic and headphone jacks as I mentioned earlier which make the sony rx10 actually very usable as a video camera another thing that's really nice for shooting video is if you want to do super high frame rates there is an h FR mode or high frame rate mode and this is used for getting over cranked footage so if you want super slow-motion shots and the way this works is it allows you to shoot at super high frame rates and kind of this burst performance and it allows you to select between 240 frames a second 480 frames a second or 960 frames a second all at 1080p now unfortunately 960 sounds really good on paper but it looks really bad in real life in fact really 240 is the most usable of these options but still that allows you to do a lot of super slow motion and the fact that this camera is capable of doing that at all is very impressive I'm very impressed with how much functionality Sony has been able to fit into a bridge style camera it is really impressive however there are a few little minor details that are missing that I wish were here none of these are deal-breakers but I think they're worth mentioning just the same the first and I feel like I say this with every camera that I talk about it needs a fully articulating screen in fact I think every camera that comes out right now has to have a fully articulating screen now the screen down here is nice and you do get some articulation if you want to use use it for really low shots or really high shots but it does not turn 180 degrees so for instance I can't use this with a monitor for filming these videos which is a little bit frustrating I just think it's a little detail but it's something that everybody ought to include another thing that's curiously missing on this camera and I say that because it was there on the previous version which was the rx 10 mark 2 is there is a lack of built in neutral density filters and this isn't a huge deal but if you are shooting video it is nice to have for instance if you're shooting outdoors in bright daylight your shutter speed is probably going to be around 50 or so if you're looking for a 180 degree shutter and so that really limits you in terms of performance because you're going to have to stop way down if you don't have neutral density filter ation on here the other thing is if you're shooting in s log2 outdoors if you've ever shot an SLR - you know that it requires a really high I associate start at 800 so that makes it really difficult to use in an outdoor situation it's not a deal breaker because you do have lens thread or you do hit the lens is threaded so you can use an external filter in fact all of the b-roll that I shot on this camera for this video I did use a filter on a neutral density filter but it would be nice to have that built in so I don't have to carry an extra filter around or screw it on or off you just simply turn on the neutral density filter the last thing and this is super duper nitpicky and it's not the end of the world but the way the mode selection switch is set up is you do have memory locations that you can assign so you can set up the camera a certain way to shoot one thing and you can assign that to a memory location this includes the focal length of the lens and for instance I ran into this problem when I was doing my moon shots and I was fully extended to 600 millimeters if you're going back and forth between shooting Stills and video which I do quite a bit for instance I'll be in manual mode here and I have to flip this switch over to get into video mode if you don't do it fast enough you hit the custom memory location which it remembers at 600 the custom memory default was at 24 so it actually pulled the lens back in and so I found that if you actually move the switch fast enough it won't lock in but that's just a minor detail and it could be fixed really easily by just moving the video over one switch on the dial there but anyway other than that I'm extremely impressed with this camera I think the performance has absolutely been outstanding and I have not been really interested in bridge cameras I just don't see what need they would fulfill but after getting to play with this for a month I can get it because when you consider the features that you get on here when you consider how nice the lens is and then you consider the price point yes you do get a lot more flexibility if you go with a DSLR and you do get a lot of more portability if you go with a point-and-shoot but just a lens that extends from twenty four to six hundred alone for any size sensor is going to cost you a lot of money probably more so than the cameras and when you consider the street price on this camera as of the fall of 2016 when I'm recording this is about $1600 u.s. I think you're getting an enormous bang for your buck out of here and I'm really excited about this it makes me really interested in a bridge camera plus if you're out and about in your shooting or if you're traveling and you don't want to carry a bag of lenses and all this heavy stuff around but you want to have a little more functionality than you get out of a point-and-shoot this is easily the camera to go with anyway if you guys enjoyed this video please remember to like it to share it and subscribe to the art of photography so you'll always be up-to-date on all the future videos that I do and until the next one I'll see you guys then laterwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back to the art of photography in this video we're going to take a look at the sony rx10 mark 3 which is the latest bridge camera offering from sony if you're not familiar with the concept of a bridge camera it is a camera that's designed to be somewhere between a point-and-shoot and a DSLR so you have the size and the form factor in the feel of shooting with the DSLR however it does have a fixed zoom lens and a one-inch sensor which puts it more in line with a point-and-shoot camera and I think the best way to think of it is the big brother to this little guy which is the Sony rx100 Mark 4 which I've been shooting on a lot over the last year I got this a little over a year ago and it's starting to get beat up even and I absolutely love this camera for its size if you don't want to haul a bunch of gear around I can just bring this with me and the image quality and the video quality are absolutely outstanding I can even shoot 4k video and short bursts on here however due to its size there are some limitations that you have to learn to work around mainly the speed of shooting so it's really not an optimal camera for something like sports or wildlife and then the 4k has limitations as well and because the size of this it does overheat very easily in fact Sony have imposed a 5 minute limit on recording length so you don't overheat it accidentally in fact at the end of 5 minutes if you try to record another video you do get the little thermometer so it does have some limitations so in this whole bridge camera type design that they've done with the rx 10 series and this is the third iteration of that it's the same sensor that you have in the rx100 but they've put it in a much larger body so it opens it up to a lot of possibilities and I think quite frankly a lot of variation and a lot of flexibility that you get out of this camera the main thing for me is the lens that they've included on the rx 10 3 it is a Zeiss Vario sonar and this is a 24 to 600 you heard me right 24 600 this is an extreme focal range and it's incredible lens if you look at this little diagram here you can see that the design of this actually has lens elements that kind of are situated throughout the entire body of the camera is what it uses and you can see that you have 8 extra low dispersion elements as well as 6 aspherical elements this lens is absolutely beautiful in fact when you start to think about the price you would pay for something like this it's oftentimes less than what you would pay for a that's that kind of variation in it and has that wider focal range and I think that's really outstanding when I first started playing with this camera I wanted to do something where I could take advantage of that really long focal range and so I started doing a series of shots and time lapses and videos of the moon and I shot these over the period of a few weeks did several moon cycles and I was really impressed with how this camera behaved and how it responded the images are extra sharp especially all the way out at 600 and it really did an outstanding job the lens really is the highlight for me on here and it is very impressive I think Sony have done an outstanding job with the design and layout on this camera and a lot of the main camera functions are actually assigned to physical dials or buttons that you're going to use so things aren't hidden in the menu system which I really like so for instance on the lens collar you have your aperture control rings that's how you dial in your aperture on the top of the camera you have your mode selection dial over on the left hand side and on the right hand side you have your exposure compensation dial on the front of the camera you actually have your focus mode selection switch so you can select physically between single continuous direct manual focus or manual focus and the other really nice thing about this and you're going to notice on the back of the camera is that and this is kind of a typical Sony layout but they've moved things around so they're less easy to hit accidentally for instance the movie start and stop button is been relocated it's actually easy to press and you're not going to hit it by accident the other cool thing that Sony has done you're going to see on the top of the camera there's c1c2 and on the back of the camera you're going to see c3 and these are custom function buttons that you can assign and actually when you get into the menu system they're actually 10 custom function buttons that you can assign on this camera which is really nice including this button that is on the side of the lens now by default this is set up is a focus lock button and so if you're in continuous focus mode and you want to recompose but you want to hold the focus you just simply press that button and hold it that is reassign Abell as well you can make that something else and you can actually move the focus hold to something else if you want so everything is fully customizable and you can set this up exactly how you want it another major advantage of the sony rx10 mark 3 over something like a point shoot camera is speed is greatly improved so if you need burst performance when you're shooting stills so for instance if you're shooting sports or wildlife there is a dedicated D RAM chip inside of here so it actually allows you to do up to 14 frames second and the buffer is actually really good to shooting raw you get about 30 frames before it has to buffer the only disadvantage of that and that is very impressive for a digital camera but the only disadvantage is the buffer does take a while to clear and write to the card and so you kind of have to time your burst performance in the right way so you don't miss something because it will take a while to clear out video performance on the rx 10 mark 3 is exceptional you get full 4k video and there are no overheating issues and a lot of this has to do with having a larger body but it doesn't have a lot of the overheating issues that are typically associated with some Sony cameras and it's really nice to be able to do this with the other thing is they give you an S log2 profile and this is really nice if you're trying to control your dynamic range or you're shooting in a really high contrast situation they do give you a full log profile to work with and you also have external mic and headphone jacks as I mentioned earlier which make the sony rx10 actually very usable as a video camera another thing that's really nice for shooting video is if you want to do super high frame rates there is an h FR mode or high frame rate mode and this is used for getting over cranked footage so if you want super slow-motion shots and the way this works is it allows you to shoot at super high frame rates and kind of this burst performance and it allows you to select between 240 frames a second 480 frames a second or 960 frames a second all at 1080p now unfortunately 960 sounds really good on paper but it looks really bad in real life in fact really 240 is the most usable of these options but still that allows you to do a lot of super slow motion and the fact that this camera is capable of doing that at all is very impressive I'm very impressed with how much functionality Sony has been able to fit into a bridge style camera it is really impressive however there are a few little minor details that are missing that I wish were here none of these are deal-breakers but I think they're worth mentioning just the same the first and I feel like I say this with every camera that I talk about it needs a fully articulating screen in fact I think every camera that comes out right now has to have a fully articulating screen now the screen down here is nice and you do get some articulation if you want to use use it for really low shots or really high shots but it does not turn 180 degrees so for instance I can't use this with a monitor for filming these videos which is a little bit frustrating I just think it's a little detail but it's something that everybody ought to include another thing that's curiously missing on this camera and I say that because it was there on the previous version which was the rx 10 mark 2 is there is a lack of built in neutral density filters and this isn't a huge deal but if you are shooting video it is nice to have for instance if you're shooting outdoors in bright daylight your shutter speed is probably going to be around 50 or so if you're looking for a 180 degree shutter and so that really limits you in terms of performance because you're going to have to stop way down if you don't have neutral density filter ation on here the other thing is if you're shooting in s log2 outdoors if you've ever shot an SLR - you know that it requires a really high I associate start at 800 so that makes it really difficult to use in an outdoor situation it's not a deal breaker because you do have lens thread or you do hit the lens is threaded so you can use an external filter in fact all of the b-roll that I shot on this camera for this video I did use a filter on a neutral density filter but it would be nice to have that built in so I don't have to carry an extra filter around or screw it on or off you just simply turn on the neutral density filter the last thing and this is super duper nitpicky and it's not the end of the world but the way the mode selection switch is set up is you do have memory locations that you can assign so you can set up the camera a certain way to shoot one thing and you can assign that to a memory location this includes the focal length of the lens and for instance I ran into this problem when I was doing my moon shots and I was fully extended to 600 millimeters if you're going back and forth between shooting Stills and video which I do quite a bit for instance I'll be in manual mode here and I have to flip this switch over to get into video mode if you don't do it fast enough you hit the custom memory location which it remembers at 600 the custom memory default was at 24 so it actually pulled the lens back in and so I found that if you actually move the switch fast enough it won't lock in but that's just a minor detail and it could be fixed really easily by just moving the video over one switch on the dial there but anyway other than that I'm extremely impressed with this camera I think the performance has absolutely been outstanding and I have not been really interested in bridge cameras I just don't see what need they would fulfill but after getting to play with this for a month I can get it because when you consider the features that you get on here when you consider how nice the lens is and then you consider the price point yes you do get a lot more flexibility if you go with a DSLR and you do get a lot of more portability if you go with a point-and-shoot but just a lens that extends from twenty four to six hundred alone for any size sensor is going to cost you a lot of money probably more so than the cameras and when you consider the street price on this camera as of the fall of 2016 when I'm recording this is about $1600 u.s. I think you're getting an enormous bang for your buck out of here and I'm really excited about this it makes me really interested in a bridge camera plus if you're out and about in your shooting or if you're traveling and you don't want to carry a bag of lenses and all this heavy stuff around but you want to have a little more functionality than you get out of a point-and-shoot this is easily the camera to go with anyway if you guys enjoyed this video please remember to like it to share it and subscribe to the art of photography so you'll always be up-to-date on all the future videos that I do and until the next one I'll see you guys then later\n"