Page 25 - Friedman Archives

Major Improvements to its predecessor 25

The bad news is that none of your old Sony or Minolta flashes will fit
without an adapter (and the adapter Sony sells is poorly designed and
doesn’t always stay in place.) And the new flash foot has many delicate,
unprotected contacts on the bottom which make hurriedly tossing your
flash into your camera bag a risky venture. Add to that the fact that the
new footed flashes won’t fit into anyone’s commercial radio slave receivers
and you have what is in my mind the worst electronic connector design I’ve
ever seen in my professional career (and I’ve seen my share of connectors
as a former engineer.)

1.1.8 A MORE REFINED UI
The user interface has been tweaked quite a bit, borrowing from some of
Sony’s more recent cameras:
 The Fn screen now has two levels and is much more customizable than
before.
 The camera will now play back your stills and movies in reverse
chronological order. (In the past you could only play back either stills,
AVCHD movies, or .MP4 movies depending upon a menu settings. If
you had all three of these intermixed you couldn’t look at them all at
once. Sony kept people scratching their heads for two years wondering
“What the hell were they thinking by sequestering playback items in
that way?”)
 The menu screen lets you quickly jump from one menu category to the
next.
 More of the buttons are reassignable.
Also under the "UI" umbrella is that wonderful twist-and-flip display. For
reasons I've yet to understand, Sony is the ONLY maker of high-end
cameras that have this feature. I shoot kids in the studio a lot, and this
means I can shoot vertical images at eye-level without having to get down
on the floor. (See example later on in this chapter in Figure 1-13.)