Sony Alpha NEX-6 review: A really, really nice camera

Maybe I’m just getting easier to please as I get older, but Sony’s been winning me over recently with its enthusiast-targeted models. The Sony Alpha NEX-6 delivers an arguably better design and speedier performance than its Editors’ Choice Award-winning but more expensive sibling, the NEX-7, and equally excellent photo quality. Its only real weaknesses are the wireless implementation and annoying apps architecture. But as a camera for advanced photographers who want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses, it hits all the right notes. And as such, it replaced its older linemate as our Editors’ Choice for this market segment at the time we originally reviewed it.

Image quality
The NEX-6 produces excellent photos. As I said, in photo quality it matches the NEX-7 and, despite using the same sensor, is better than the NEX-5R at midrange ISO sensitivities. Sony’s image processing is extremely good, and images shot though ISO 400 look very clean; depending upon content they can be usable and printed large (13×19) as high as ISO 6400, and ISO 12800 when scaled down. While shooting raw still helps when you need to perform exposure corrections, above ISO 800 you’re just exchanging one type of artifact for another.

The color and exposure are generally very good, although Sony tends to produce cooler white balance, which make the NEX-6 very good at correcting for tungsten lights, but not quite as good at automatic white balance under cloudy skies. The biggest annoyance is a lack of a neutral Creative Style, which Sony stubbornly refuses to offer in any camera under $1,000. However, the camera has sufficient, if less efficient, controls for you to be able to tweak color to your taste. Raw files also preserve a reasonable amount of detail from which to recover blown-out highlights and clipped shadows.

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ISO 100

ISO 800

ISO 3200

Video also looks quite good. While there’s a little more in the way of moiré and other types of crawling-edge artifacts than I like, overall it still looks smooth with excellent tonality in both bright light and dim.

The new 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 lens, which comes as part of a kit option for this model, performs about as well as you expect from a kit lens. At its widest, there’s quite a bit of distortion and vignetting — the camera defaults to automatically compensating for the angle-of-view distortion but doesn’t seem to fix the problems at the edges and the corners remain visibly dark under some circumstances — but otherwise it’s a pretty sharp, bright lens. I also got to test the new 35mm f1.8 lens, which displays excellent edge-to-edge sharpness and low distortion, but also has some aberration/fringing problems at its widest apertures; that’s not unusual, however.

Performance
Note: We recently updated our testing methodology to provide slightly more real-world performance, so the results aren’t necessarily comparable with previous testing. Until we’re finished refining our procedures we will not be posting comparative performance charts.

A noticeably fast camera — probably one of the fastest ILCs I’ve tested thus far, though methodological differences in testing mean I can’t say so definitively — the NEX-6 only shows some signs of sluggishness after shooting raw+JPEG and in bringing up the user interface when powered on or waking up. It takes about 2 seconds to power up, focus, and shoot, partly because you have to wait for it to load the interface before it can register a shutter press. Time to focus, expose and shoot in good light runs roughly 0.2 second. It takes the same 0.2 second to shoot two sequential JPEGs or raws, rising to 1.8 seconds with flash enabled.

Continuous shooting varies with image format, mode, and how many shots. A standard JPEG burst of 20 shots never slowed and maintained a rate of 3.5fps; in Speed Priority mode, which fixes exposure on the first frame, it managed 10.2fps for 12 shots before slowing. You can burst raw for about 12 shots at 4.1fps before it slows, or about 10 shots at 10.4fps in Speed Priority. Those are sufficient burst runs for almost any nonprofesssional needs, and even after slowing the camera maintains a reasonable clip.

The autofocus generally operates quickly and accurately — with the usual caveat that like all cameras it invariably picks the wrong subject when in multipoint AF mode. I’m also not a big fan of Sony’s choice to expand the focus area to the entire scene in low light. When shooting video, the power zoom lens operates quickly and quietly and the autofocus behaves well, without pulsing on static subjects.

The LCD is large and bright and refreshes comfortably fast for both burst shooting and video. I do find the eye sensor on the EVF a little too sensitive, with the camera cutting off the LCD when shooting close to my body. Plus, if you’re a heavy viewfinder user, the battery life is entirely too short; the perils of OLED.

Design and features
The design facilitates fluid, streamlined shooting, even single-handed. While the NEX-6 isn’t as compact as the lower-end models, it’s a hair smaller and lighter than the NEX-7. It’s a great size for people who hate tiny controls, with the usual large NEX grip and a bigger area on the back to rest your hand on than the smaller models have; as I invariably hit the ISO sensitivity control on those, the NEX-6’s expanded back makes it a less accident-prone design for me.

On the top of the camera sits a standard mode dial with the usual manual, semimanual, and two automatic modes plus scene program and sweep panorama. The mode dial is stacked above a big, easily operated context-sensitive control dial; in front is a function button that calls up user-programmable quick-access settings. There’s also a nice pop-up flash that can be tilted back for bouncing the light, along with Sony’s new Multi Interface Shoe. (The manual cautions that you have to remove the large viewfinder eyecup when you use the shoe, though it’s perfectly comfortable to shoot without it.)

On the back is the standard control wheel with programmable buttons that default to ISO sensitivity, drive mode, exposure compensation and display settings, plus reprogrammable autoexposure lock, menu and Wi-Fi connect buttons. I did find a few of the buttons a little too flush with the body and harder to press than I like, especially the movie record button.

One other dissonant design note: the battery charges via USB, which I have mixed feelings about. On the surface, it seems very convenient. But you still have to carry a charger-sized adapter (though it uses a Micro-USB cable, it doesn’t work with standard phone chargers) and it means you can’t use the camera while charging a spare.

The power zoom kit lens is similarly well-designed, with a big zoom switch that’s easy to feel and operate in both portrait and landscape orientations. Plus, there’s a ring for manual focus or zoom operation, though it’s a little too twitchy for zooming.

While the camera is physically impressive, as with the NEX-5R (from which much of the subsequent discussion is lifted) the less time you have to spend in the NEX menus the better. On the surface, they seem so straightforward. But in order to make the top-level icons accessible and friendly, everything’s jammed unevenly into the level below. The image size menu has 7 options under it, the camera menu has 16, and the setup menu has 67. Plus, with all the usual combinations of limitations — things that are unavailable when raw’s enabled, in some AF modes, and so on — it’s impossible to figure out why something’s grayed out. What did I change that suddenly made it impossible to show the AF points?

This model also incorporates Wi-Fi along with connective Android and iOS apps: Direct Upload for connecting to hot spots and mobile devices and Smart Remote Control for using your mobile device as a secondary screen. Connecting directly to the camera is straighforward — it acts as an access point, generating a unique ID and password. But I had problems consistently connecting to a hot spot, a problem I didn’t have with the 5R. The connectivity comes in conjunction with support for proprietary in-camera apps.

Rather than using a third-party API like Android, Sony currently plans to be the only source of these apps, which are distributed through the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN). Echoing my complaints about this system from the 5R review: neither of the basic wireless apps come on the camera, and in order to download them you have to create a useless-to-all-but-PlayStation-owners SEN account for its redundant and unoriginal PlayMemories service. Plus, the SEN EULA includes a mandatory binding arbitration (MBA) clause that makes the SEN account requirement doubly irritating. The EULA also gives Sony the right to remotely delete any apps you buy license. The direct upload options are pretty lame: Facebook or PlayMemories. Even Canon’s mediocre Canon Image Gateway allows you to set up pipes to other services, if you’re willing to grant it a piece of your privacy pie. PlayMemories doesn’t act as a sharing hub, just a syncing hub among all your Sony devices. So, as with Canon’s options, the best solution is to copy the photos you want to share to your phone or tablet and upload them that way. And despite what looks like a built-in browser, there’s no way to connect to access points that require passing through terms-of-service screens.

In addition to the connectivity apps Sony currently offers two apps and some multilingual keyboards for free. The first app, Picture Effect+, has two extra filters (watercolor and illustration) that are excluded from the built-in effects choices. So in addition to mostly duplicating an in-camera feature, and operating more slowly through the apps interface, Sony removed the filters that it had included on the Alpha NEX-F3. If you’re still interested, it also offers a free Photo Retouch app. There are also a handful of paid apps, Bracket Pro ($4.99), Multi Frame NR ($4.99; noise reduction), Cinematic Photo ($4.99; for cinemagraphs, stills with animated portions), and Time-lapse ($9.99). The last of these sounds useful, if expensive. The apps tend to function a bit sluggishly as well.

It’s tempting to ding Sony for making a bunch of the capabilities extra-cost app options, but there’s really only one key feature irritatingly absent: saved custom settings. Grrr! In addition to all the physical options, such as the EVF, hot shoe, tilting LCD, and Wi-Fi, it provides all the essentials, including focus peaking. For a complete accounting of the NEX-6’s features and operation, download the PDF manual.

Conclusion
It’s a relatively expensive kit, but the NEX-6 is considerably smaller than a comparable dSLR, with competitive performance and photo quality, plus better video autofocus. The sacrifices you make opting for a mirrorless ILC are loss of an optical viewfinder and reduced battery life, which will make some people pause and others just shrug. But for now, at least, it’s my favorite ILC option for less than $1,000.