Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sony RX100 IV Review: Pocket 4K!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the sequel to the best pocket camera ever made two years running. This is the sony rx100 mark iv. Now i’ve already reviewed the rx100 mark iii in detail last year, so i’ll link that video right below the like button and if you guys have already seen it you know i like that camera a lot. So the rx100 mark iv will be basically a very familiar camera to people who have used any previous rx100 right, so the mark ii here, as you can see it, had a hot shoe on the top. Then the mark 3, the next year, ditched that hot shoe for an optical viewfinder, and now we have the mark iv, which feature wise is like an enhanced version of the mark iii.
So the new camera is rocking a stacked one-inch 21 megapixel sensor as its biggest new feature behind the same 24 to 70 millimeter glass, and this sensor allows for things that make this camera a lot faster than previous generations. That’S the big difference. Autofocus for photos is blindingly crazy fast. You can now take photos with a 32 000 of a second electronic shutter. That’S really fast, and you can now record video in full 4k and there’s also now a high frame rate mode that allows you to record video at up to 960 frames per second.
It also has a much improved electronic viewfinder, so if you flip it out and if you actually use this evf you’ll notice, it’s right away a lot sharper than the last one. It’S actually kind of trippy when looking at, like a shallow depth of field shot through the viewfinder kind of looks like a vr headset, and it can actually now be disconnected from the power setting. So you can close the evf without turning the camera off.
If you want, and that famous ring around the zeiss lens on the front of the camera, is improved too, it’s a little bit thicker a little bit smoother and overall, better built, and it can still be used to control things like aperture or zoom or even manual Focus if you wanted to and then you can’t forget the articulating lcd screen, the pop-up flash that can be used to bounce light off the wall or the ceiling and the nfc and wi-fi chips inside to let you instantly transfer full resolution photos from the sd card To whatever smartphone you have so all this inside a metal body that can take a beating it’s built like an absolute tank, i mean this is a seriously well-rounded pocket camera. Speaking of sd cards, though you got to mention, you have to make sure you get the right one. Only certain sd cards will work with the 4k video other photos and stuff will still work, but you need specifically a uhs iu3 compatible memory card to shoot in 4k i’ll link, the one i use below to avoid confusion, the slow motion stuff was actually really cool.
I think at 240 frames per second, you can pull off some really cool stuff and even at 480 frames per second, you can really start to slow stuff down a lot and yet keep a lot of the quality sony says you’re getting 720p video out of it, Though i think at this point we all kind of know that it’s not quite 720p video, but it looks pretty good anyway, since it’s so slow and then uh 960 frames per second gets to the point where it really doesn’t. Look that good anymore i’d actually stay away from this, even though you can get it super super slow uh when slowing back down to 30 frames per second, it doesn’t look anywhere near 720p and it’s very noisy and grainy. So it’s kind of a neat trick up its sleeve that you can record a few seconds at 960 frames per second, but i wouldn’t use it all too much and i’d stick with the lower frame rates for the higher quality.
But the one feature that i and a lot of other youtubers were really interested in when this camera was first announced was its 4k video and it looks really good. I love the 4k video that comes from the rx100 mark iv. It can be seriously beautiful. None of that upscaled 1080p or over sharpened over process looking smartphone video. This is a huge step up from that, and it looks really good. It has optical image.
Stabilization color is on point. Dynamic range is great and has a big enough sensor to get some shallow depth of field going. If you can give it a second to focus.
This camera can give you like the best looking videos, the best looking vlogs, even in the business. I don’t know how many vloggers care about quality like this, but the camera takes some seriously crispy video case in point. My entire last video about the moto x style was shot.
You guessed it on the rx100 mark iv and it was actually kind of the perfect application for it. It was all indoors where the light wasn’t that great, but i shot an s-log. So i could really push the images in grading without losing much quality and i don’t need much of a zoom range either inside. Since my subject is right in front of me, so if you enjoyed the quality of that video boom right, there is your 6 minute. 4K low light video sample, but it is definitely not perfect. First of all, the autofocus during video is definitely slow.
This is actually usually the typical experience here with shooting video with the rx100 and also sort of a bigger complaint of the previous ones, and it remains if you’re shooting, with a shallow depth of field, with a lot of subject, isolation and a blurred background. The camera can take a while to focus on objects that aren’t faces also in this shot, thanks to michael fisher of pocket. Now for being the model here, uh, it basically refused to focus on the subject i wanted it to.
It was in auto focus mode. If i did go to manual focus, i would have been able to nail it, but it wasn’t so. I had to scrap that shot and you’re also limited to five minutes at a time of 4k video recording, but not for processing reasons or anything. It’S actually just because of heat. This thing makes a lot of heat when shooting a lot of 4k video and actually chews through battery really quickly. During this too, this is the rx100 mark iv, after just the first five minutes of 4k recording and in the middle of my third consecutive clip of doing this, it just shut down from overheating and refused to turn on for about 10 minutes.
I actually dealt with this problem at the motorola event, literally standing there in the event playing with the phone just holding the overheated camera waiting for it to be able to turn on again. But then again, if it’s making super crispy videos like that, i can’t even really be mad. So at the end of the day, this camera is really great, but not quite perfect.
I would still put it as the best hybrid, like pocket video camera in the world. For photos and videos, if you’re into both, but as far as it being a thousand dollar video camera, it’s kind of hard to consider this, like the perfect youtube camera. I know a lot of people have said like this. You know because it shoots 4k video and it has such a crispy image – is basically like the perfect camera to buy to start a youtube channel or even run a youtube channel. You don’t have to buy a thousand dollar camera to start, but if i would nitpick, i would say that this isn’t the perfect youtube camera because of the slower autofocus uh, because of the fact that if you want to shoot in 4k, you’re limited to 5 minutes And then it’ll start to overheat and if you want to shoot for long periods of time, you’re. Basically using this as a 1080p camera, which means you might as well get the mark iii and then the fact that you can’t use any audio inputs and the microphone.
That’S built in, isn’t all that great. You know. If i’m nitpicking for a thousand bucks, you could probably go with something like a dslr or i’ll try to link some other options below or even like. I said something like the rx100 mark iii, but i think this is one generation away from being something really incredible. I think the rx100 mark v is probably going to be able to next year shoot 4k video without overheating, without a five minute limit and might even have audio input, maybe if sony’s listening to us. So this is a pretty great camera to start good job sony.
I know it’s not the first pocket camera you’ve ever made, but uh looking forward to the rx100 mark v already, thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace .