Sony RX100 VI review: The ideal pocket-sized snapper

Pocket-sized snapper - Mark VI

In the camera world, size has always been associated with quality. After all, a larger sensor offers better light collecting capabilities and literally more room for engineering advances.  However, the global ubiquity of smartphones means that these pocketable devices have now become the main camera for everyone's daily needs. After all, the best camera is always the one you have with you. You can leave home without a camera, but there's never a time anyone leaves home without their phone.

Sony’s RX series has been their attempt to bridge the divide between quality and convenience by placing a larger 1-inch sensor into small compact cameras that you can pocket. The RX100 series, in particular, has been about pairing a small body with a zoom lens with enough coverage over focal lengths to capture your everyday needs. The RX100 III gave the equivalent coverage of a 24-70mm lens (35mm equivalent), while the RX100 IV brought a stacked sensor for faster readout and processing. Meanwhile, the RX100 V brought phase detection AF and a high burst rate of 24fps.

What does the RX100 VI bring to the table then? It again uses a 20.1MP 1-inch sensor, but now adds a new lens with the equivalent range of 24-200mm (35mm equivalent). That comes with improved autofocus speeds, and optical image stabilization. Sony says this provides the equivalent of raising your shutter speed 4.0 stops at the 200mm telephoto end, so that's definitely a good addition to minimize handshake at longer focal lengths.  

In terms of autofocus, the RX100 VI again spreads 315 phase detection AF points across the image area, with 25 contrast detection points to match. Despite having the same number of focus points as the RX 100V, the better processing means the camera can focus in just 0.03s, impressive indeed.

Design and Handling     

In terms of design, the RX100 VI hasn’t changed much from its predecessor, with just a slight gain in thickness (42.8 mm compared to the 41mm of the RX100 V, while all other dimensions remain identical).  The camera is also a feather heavier at 301g (including battery and memory card) compared to 299g from before. That’s quite an engineering feat considering how much more reach the new lens gives you, and more importantly, keeps the camera small enough to be comfortably pocketable.

The RX100 VI maintains the EVF from before, and this again has a resolution of 2.35 million dots. It’s probably the same one used in the RX100 IV, but it works well, and Sony obviously sees no reason to replace it. The lens-mounted control ring has also been preserved, allowing you to use it to adjust aperture, shutter speed, or even lens zoom. That’s a pretty good way of maximizing the limited amount of space on the camera, and the gives a nice tactile feel that’s otherwise lacking from the camera.

The rear TFT LCD is again a 3.0-inch type monitor, but this now has a slightly lower resolution of 921,600 dots compared to the 1,228,800 dots from before. In return, you get the ability to tilt up 180^o and down 90^o (compared to just down 45^o before) as well as partial touch capabilities. Sony has also added a new Touch Pad AF feature, so you can set focus by dragging your finger across the rear LCD to set your AF point. This works even when you’re using the viewfinder, and so is most handy when trying to adjust focus with the camera near to your face.

This works well in practice, and we feel it’s a boon for such a small camera as you can’t really put a good-sized physical joystick there to accomplish the same thing. That is why we’re puzzled as to why Sony has elected to limit the use of touch controls to just setting focus points instead of enabling it throughout the user interface. Given the small size of the camera, that’s something that would have made navigating the menus a lot easier - definitely a lost opportunity to make the camera even more user-friendly.

Imaging Performance

The RX100 VI captures images with good color accuracy, with nice contrast in the out-of-camera JPEGs, just as you would expect from a quality compact. The option of using touch to set your focus point really makes it easy to get the desired focus as you intended. Being able to jump into the Fn menu and change the size of the focus point certainly helps too, as there are three sizes the Flexible spot method can take. 

Obviously, continuous autofocus isn’t quite as accurate as with the incredible A9 or even the A7 III, but we did find the face tracking to be very good. The camera detected and held focus on our subject’s face fairly quickly, so we didn’t have to fuss with the AF-selector and could instead focus on capturing the right moment.

One thing that really impressed us with the RX100 VI was the burst capture capabilities. Shooting JPEGs at the maximum resolution of 20MP, the camera was able to fire off about 230 images at a rate of 24 frames per second before slowing down (with autofocus enabled); an impressive feat indeed.

We like that the camera's lens zooms in and out quick enough to keep up with the action, and having a range of 24-200mm certainly allows you to easily cover a good variety of situations. Take for example the two images above. Both were taken from the same spot, at maximum wide and maximum telephoto respectively. Because the reach is achieved optically, we're able to further crop in to get an image of just the dragon boaters without loss in image quality, so that makes this compact a lot more versatile.  

In terms of high ISO performance, we were again pleasantly surprised to see that the RX100 VI is able to maintain a good amount of detail throughout its ISO range. However, that wide zoom range seems to have come at the cost of sharpness dropping off greatly as you move away from the center of the image.

If you can look beyond that slight softness, we’d say you can probably use ISO settings up to 12,800 with some sharpening and noise removal in post. That’s definitely impressive for a camera this size, but also testament to the capabilities of Sony’s 1-inch sensor and Bionz X image processing engine.

Sample Images

The images below are sample photographs shot with the Sony RX100 VI. The photos have not been post-processed and are copyright to SPH Magazines. They are provided for your reference only and we ask that you do not reproduce them elsewhere.

Conclusion

The RX100 VI is a fantastic camera if you’re looking to cover a wide variety of subjects and don’t want to carry an assortment of lenses.

24 FPS capture with AF tracking is nothing to sneeze at, and optics with an effective 24-200 mm focal length certainly give you enough versatility to cover almost all subjects and situations. It fairs well at high ISO levels and in low light, plus it gives you a variety of nice video capabilities like 4K video capture, slow-mo videos and it even supports HDR video to capture a wider color range thanks to Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) recording capabilities - a first for Cyber-shot cameras (but you'll need an HLG-compatible TV/monitor to appreciate it). 

The sticking point then would be its price. At S$1,649, the RX100 VI isn’t cheap by any reasonable measure, as you can easily get a larger sensor ILC with twin lenses at that price point (like the Canon EOS M50 here or the more recent Fujifilm X-T100 here or even Sony's very own A6300) which will give you better image quality overall. If you value compactness and versatility over image quality (and money is no issue) though, then the RX100 VI is just what you've been looking for - the ideal pocket-sized snapper that will trounce whatever phone you might have in your other pocket.

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