SonyA6000 Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera with SELP1650 Lens Kit - Black (24.3MP)

I came to this camera having been impressed with my NEX6 and having tried a NEX 3nl and NEX 5. I have also tried three different Panasonic micro 4/3 cameras.Overall, for me this is the ideal camera and a nice step up from the NEX 6. It is small enough to be portable (with the 16-50 kit lens) but large enough to be ergonomically great to use.The Sony APS-C sensor provides great results with nice rich JPEG colours. The tilt screen is extremely useful (especially for video) and the viewfinder is of very good quality.The operation is pretty quick and its focus speed is greatly improved compared to the previous NEX models. However, Sony still have not caught up with the Panasonic micro 4/3 cameras that I have tried - they are unbelievably fast. What put me off the Panasonics though was the lower quality of their sensors, poor JPEG colours (noticeable green tint) and their own small collapsible lens.The Sony E-mount lens range is slowly growing and offers some pretty good lenses. I love using the A6000 with the sel1670 Zeiss lens. It balances perfectly on the A6000 and provides an very useful 24mm to 105mm range. (Although that lens is generally way too expensive given what it delivers. I bought it from Amazon when they were selling it for just £400.) The Sony sel18200 lens is a good option if you need reach with a general purpose lens - although it does make the A6000 rather front heavy.Overall I would thoroughly recommend this camera and the E-mount system.However, there is one note of caution. If you plan on only using this camera with the kit lens then there may be better options. For example, you may be better off with one of the large sensor compact cameras such as the Sony RX100, Sony RX10, Canon G7X, G1X, Panasonic LX100, etc. The Sony 16-50 kit lens doesn't get much love in reviews but I find that for its size it is a pretty good lens optically. I have tried at least 4 versions of this lens with various Sony NEX cameras and they do vary quite a bit so I have kept the best of these 4. Ergonomically the 16-50 is fairly horrible and actually works better on something like the Sony NEX3n where you can use it with the cameras zoom lever.The large sensor compacts I listed above tend to have much better lenses than the 16-50 Sony kit lens. For example, these cameras tend to have lenses that are much faster (e.g. f18 to f2.8 vs f3.5 to f5.6) or cover a longer range - or both as is the case with the RX10 lens. This offsets much of the disadvantage of having a much smaller sensor than the A6000.

Probably one of the most important items I've bought for my photography interest. It's now been 2 years since I bought this camera and it's been a constant companion to me, won me several competitions and placings in some prestigious national competitions. The secret to this amazing camera lies in it's versatility. I work in the city of London and up until I bought this camera I was shooting a full frame DSLR which simply isn't practical for day to day use, however having such a small lightweight camera available has allowed me to capture some amazing moments during my work day in the city. Light weight body, with the standard lens it's razor sharp and lightning fast focus. There are a huge wealth of options that I couldn't possibly begin to mention here, the most notable being NFC, wifi transfer, full manual control, swivel back screen. The camera is very small indeed and for someone like me with large hands I was concerned at first that it might be too small to use properly, I was wrong. I found it very useful for street photography images, I was able to hold the camera in one hand by my side, whip it out and capture shots I wanted incredibly quickly due to the lightning fast focus. The low light performance blew me away. I was able to shoot and print images shot using the kit lens at ISO3200. Even at ISO1600 the images are still incredibly sharp. If you're a novice and looking for your first serious camera, i cannot reccommend this highly enough as the internal menu system contains an onboard help system that instructs you with not only the operation of the camera with some basic photography tutorials about correct usage and composition, which some may find handy if they find themselves in an unusual situation and need a little assistance.Nothing is perfect and there are some minor niggles with the camera. The first is that I found the lens contacts get dirty quite quickly and I have to clean them once a month, they're quite exposed so this is most likely why. Due to the very small form factor the exterior controls are liimted and so a lot of the functionality is placed on menus, so adjusting such things as ISO and timers has to be done using a serious menu options and it's not always clear why you can't select a certain option and you sometimes find yourself having to try the various shooting modes to find out which mode will allow which option to be adjusted. I rarely shoot in full manual and so some options are closed off in AV or SP modes however it's not a major stumbling block but can be irritating when you need to change an option and it means going into a different mode and resetting all other options to get the one you want. However the last one is a serious killer. The battery life is atrocious! I have some genuine Sony batteries and with the camera on constantly and using the kit lens with it's power zoom a battery will last me about 2-3 hours maximum! I tend to carry 4 or 5 full charged batteries on a day's shoot just to be sure. I know you can disable various options but in order to shoot the way i feel most comfortable it means I cannot disable some of the more power hungry options. I think more could have been done on the power saving front. It's more of an irritation than a serious flaw and just something you get used to after a few months.Overall I cannot speak highly enough of this camera and I've recommended it to many people and several people I know have bought one and have been extremely pleased with it too. I'm about to upgrade my 8 year old Canon full frame DSLR and after my amazing experience with this little marval I'm seriously considering dumping my Canon gear in favour of the higher end Sony kit like the new A9.Below are some of the images I have shot using the A6000, one earned me a placing in the prestigious Landscape Photographer of the Year Urban section 2015, the only image shot using a Sony A6000 to have made it into the LPOTY competition.