Sony NEX-7 review

Sony NEX-7 review pictures

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The NEX-7 isn't quite as sleek as the 5N and C3, but it's still a seriously svelte camera. 1.7 inches thick at its largest point, it could fit inside most DSLRs with room to spare. This still isn't a pocket camera by any stretch, but it's thin and light enough (about a pound with the kit lens on) that you won't really notice it in your bag, and you can comfortably use it with one hand. The matte black, magnesium alloy body is smooth all over, save for the synthetic leather covering the right side that makes the camera much easier to grip.

There’s a hotshoe on top of the camera, next to a well-hidden pop-up flash that I wish more companies would adopt. You hardly even notice the flash until you need it, but when it pops up you can move it forward and backward and point the flash up or down, so you can bounce the light a bit instead of just blasting it at your subjects. It’s a small improvement, and the hotshoe is still your friend if you really need more light, but this built-in flash is much more usable than most. There are also two unmarked dials that offer most of the NEX-7’s manual control (more on those in a minute), along with the power toggle and shutter button. On the bottom are the battery and SD card slots, hidden underneath a door — normally I don’t like when the two are combined, but in this case the camera doesn’t turn off when you open the door, so I don’t mind. Another door, on the left side, hides Micro HDMI, Mini USB, and microphone jacks.

Jutting out the back of the camera’s left side is an electronic viewfinder, one of the hallmark features of the NEX-7. It’s a half-inch OLED, filled with an insane 2.4 million dots, that shows both your subject and plenty of useful information as you shoot, but it has plenty of problems too. For one, the rubbery eyepiece covering is rigid and uncomfortable, and I found myself constantly moving around and trying to find a more comfortable position (fortunately you can remove it altogether). Second, the display may be incredibly sharp, but it doesn’t do a good job accurately representing the picture you’re framing — colors are too saturated and too contrasted, making everything look very dramatic but not exactly accurate. Higher contrast can be a good thing on an OLED display — since the display isn’t backlit, darks can be much darker and everything can have a realistic, natural glow — but the effect goes too far here. There’s also a considerable moiré effect through the OLED display (though it doesn’t show up as much in photos).

I wound up rarely using the viewfinder at all, but I hardly missed it because the NEX-7's LCD is so good. The 3-inch display is made up of a sharp 922,000 dots, and it recreates colors incredibly accurately. It's a 16:9 screen, which I like, though it inexplicably doesn't take advantage — you'll still see bars around your video as you shoot (you can change this in the camera's settings, and you should). It's also not a touchscreen, which is particularly odd given that the NEX-5N's display is touch-friendly. Normally I'm not a fan of touchscreens, but in this case it could help make more controls a little more accessible. Otherwise, it's the same excellent display as on the 5N — the screen also tilts like the 5N's, so you can angle the screen and always see what you're framing, even when you're holding the camera above or below your face.

There are a handful of E-mount lenses available for NEX cameras (and an adaptor for using Sony's A-mount lenses as well), but the NEX-7 kit comes with an 18-55mm, f/3/5-5.6 lens. Made of metal, it weighs about six ounces, and has a minimum focusing distance of 9.8 inches. (That number is distance from the sensor, which means you can get pretty close up to your subjects.) It's a nice, well-made lens, and my only real issue with it is that there's a very noticeable noise whenever you're zooming. I got to test a number of other lenses as well, and generally liked them all — particularly the $999.99 Carl Zeiss 24mm f/1.8, which churns out some remarkably soft backgrounds. The lenses cost between $249 and $999, and it's certainly not a bad selection, though if you've already bought Nikon or Canon glass it might be a hard sell to dive into Sony, too. At that price, it's an even harder sell.

Here's where the NEX-7 gets divisive. NEX models have typically had few manual controls, so changing even your shooting mode requires digging into the camera's menu. The NEX-7 offers the most control of the lineup, mostly thanks to the addition of two unmarked scroll wheels — they're located right by your right thumb, spin smoothly and comfortably, and make changing settings incredibly easy, but you have to tinker with them to figure out what they do. Sony does a decent job of showing you on the LCD which dial does what, but it's not a perfect system — in Auto, for instance, neither dial does anything at all. (Why can't one wheel act as a mode dial?) But what they do do is let you quickly change exposure, shutter speed, aperture, and more when you're shooting in a manual or priority mode. The NEX-7 is among the easiest cameras I've ever seen for shooting in manual mode, since you can change shutter speed and aperture with the two dials and ISO with the scroll wheel on the back; tweaking settings is incredibly simple.

There’s also a dedicated button for recording video located right by your right thumb, which immediately starts recording when pressed. Next to the shutter button is a navigation control that also locks and unlocks the scroll wheels (they still spin when locked, but nothing happens), and standard menu and playback controls. There’s also a clever toggle that lets you set the exposure or manually focus for a single shot, by holding down a button while you frame and focus — release it, and everything goes back to how it was. It’s a really smart feature, giving you manual control when you want it on a camera that’s designed to be automatic in most of its functions, even though having to hold a button and turn the focus can be a little kludgy. Of course, exposure and focus can also be locked permanently through the camera’s menu. All the controls are easily accessible with your right thumb, and they’re easy to feel out with your finger since most are different sizes and shapes, so you can control the camera without looking at the controls. Those are interspersed with a couple of unmarked function buttons, which like the dials do different things in different modes, but can also be customized to your liking.

If you're content to pick a mode and live in it, the handling is great once you figure out which dial and menu controls what. But it's a new learning curve every time you change your shooting mode, and to change any more complex setting requires some on-screen menu time. I'm more willing to excuse that on the NEX-C3 and 5N, which are mid-range cameras meant for people not used to manual controls, but the NEX-7 is in a high-end competition, and in a race for the perfect shot it's going to lose to a DSLR with more easily accessible controls.

The on-screen menus are better than most camera interfaces, though that's not exactly a high bar, and it's still not a great system. Most basic things are easily accessible through the Camera menu, but things like changing the LCD brightness, customizing function buttons, or changing metering modes are all pretty buried. Sony's good at explaining what various options mean and do, but there are a lot of them to navigate through. Some of this can be negated if you take the time to set the dials to do what you want, but there's a lot of configuration involved if you want to avoid the menus.

Sony NEX-7 sample pictures

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Normally in reviews of smaller cameras, I have to constantly caveat. "It takes great pictures — for a compact camera. It's really fast — for a camera this size." I don't have to do that here, because I'd put the NEX-7's image quality up against any mid-range DSLR out there. Its 24.3-megapixel APS-C sensor is the same size as the one inside most DSLRs, and big sensors almost always mean better pictures. You get 6,000 x 4,000-resolution pictures by default, and though they average a huge 8MB per picture (considerably larger if you shoot in RAW), they look fantastic. Photos are sharp throughout the image, which excellent color reproduction and accuracy. Of course, quality is somewhat dependent on the lens you use, but the sensor and processor seem to be more important here — even with the 18-55mm kit lens I was thrilled with the pictures I took.

The NEX-7 keeps firing great pictures even when lighting is terrible — even at its highest ISO setting (16,000), pictures are still usable. Noise is virtually invisible until ISO 3200, and even at 6400 pictures still look relatively sharp — 12,800 is noisy no matter how you look at them, but not so bad that you should avoid using it. 16,000 should be used only in serious lighting emergencies.

Sony NEX-7 high ISO comparison

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I had but one minor complaint as I was shooting: in Auto, shutter speed is abused in order to get more light into the camera. In low-light situations the camera would still occasionally shoot at f/4.0, but would drop the speed to 1/10 or something close. Most cameras push shutter speed last, and the NEX's way of doing things means you might get blurry photos in poor lighting. Even though its ISO performance is so good, Auto ISO only goes up to 1600 — I'd love to have the option to keep shutter speed a little faster, and push ISO and aperture a little harder. Fortunately this is a minor problem, and there's a simple solution: shoot in a manual mode.