Sony NEX Launch – detailed transcription

Sweep Panorama
So we’ve covered quality. We’ve covered compactness and style and now we’ve covered functionality – they way you interact with the camera and make the settings. Now I’m going to tell you about what makes this camera different to everybody else’s in which features that you’ve got  like sweep panorama. Sweep panorama has been with us in Cybershot for some time now. We introduced it in the HX1.
It’s a case of being able easily to take panoramic pictures. In the past it’s been a case of get a tripod, get a cable release, line up the camera, swing it round… then you’ve got to combine it in software, three days later you might have a picture. Doesn’t make for an easy life. Sweep panorama is now in Alpha for the first time. You’ve got two settings, wide and standard. In wide, you shoot 226° on the horizontal, in standard 149°. In wide that is 12,416 pixels wide.
Vertical? You can also use sweep panorama this way. You can shoot 106° in standard or 151° in extra wide with a maximum resolution on the vertical of 5536 pixels. Sweep panorama in Alpha is different to sweep panorama in Cybershot. NEX actually takes photographs. When you are doing a sweep panorama, it is assembling a series of exposures. When the shutter actually fires for each one. With Cybershot, it records video and buffers film frames out of to assemble the sweep panorama. The resolution is a lot lower.
This is where you see the difference. This is SLR quality with DSC functionality. (Paul showed panoramic prints from pictures by Duncan McEwan, taken in Germany on a trip – he said that Sony would be offering a print service, but many high street outlets now offered panorama printing as well).
Vertical panorama – sweeping down from the sky, the camera shows its dynamic range, blending the exposures as the light changes. Standard pan 15 megapixels, extra wide 23 megapixels (Paul showed the end results of NEX versus Cybershot HX-5 panoramas) –10 million more pixels in the Alpha NEX panorama.
This is the first camera in the market to be able to record 3D with panorama. They way that it does it is to take two pictures, one as if mimicking the left eye, one as if mimicking the right eyes, so you’ve got the separation. As you are sweeping across, it’s recording two sections on each exposure. The playback of those images on the Bravia TV with the glasses is fantastic, experiencing the depth of the final result. What it actually saves is a movie file. You do need to have either the camera to play back the image, or a PlayStation 3. There will be a firmware upgrade for both the camera and PlayStation 3 (scheduled for July, hopefully mid rather than late). This technology is not actually ready yet, so we will not be launching these cameras with this feature enabled. 3D will be on the box, but it’s something which comes later.
You will need a Bravia 3D TV.
Multi shot modes
Building on existing technology, in Alpha 500 and 550 we launched Auto HDR. High Dynamic Range is about expanding the latitude in the final photograph by using two different exposures. It takes the underexposed picture and produces the highlight areas from that, and takes the overexposed picture and uses the more shadowy areas from it, to merge to one finally saved result.
In NEX, it now takes takes three pictures – under, average and over exposed – merged into one final result. The improvement is in the mid-tones, because it has actually captured them in the average exposure. It actually saves you two pictures; it saves the auto HDR, and the average exposure. Even if your HDR does not work, you still have a normally exposed picture.
You also have manual over-ride, so you’ve got HDR Manual and can go up to 6EV difference, a massive difference (Paul shows examples).
Anti Motion Blur is built into Cybershot. It takes six photographs, and it uses the best bits of all of them. Camera shake is random, so is noise; it detects the noise, and extracts it, so it only uses the best bits of the exposure and the sharpest bits of the exposure, merges them all into one and you end up with one final, great, saved result.
(Paul did not cover the similar Night Scene multishot mode, which takes six images and improves noise and detail).
Seven frames per continuous shooting puts the NEX on par with a DSLR in speed priority mode. When you have a subject entering a zone where you have pre-focused, you are guaranteed the capture the best moment. If you need it with AF and AE update between shots, it is reduced to 2.3 frames per second. Speed priority is for fixed conditions, where the subject is passing into the zone of focus.