Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour

Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour

Sony A6000, the latest in the company’s line of excellent sub-$1000 interchangeable-lens compacts, follows the same pattern we saw with the A5000 announced last month: Upgraded specs all around, on a slightly more advanced shooter. It’s formulaic, maybe, but that’s not a bad thing when you’re talking about these little cameras.

This time around, we’re looking at Sony’s replacement for the awesome NEX-6, and as with the A5000, we’re seeing the company slowly but surely abandon the NEX branding. The E-mount camera has a 24.3-megapixel APS-C image sensor and the new Bionz X processing engine. The latter has been trickling its way into every new Sony introduction since last fall, the former has 25 contrast detect focus points and 179 phase detect points. Combined, the processor and sensor give the camera the fastest AF in the world — faster than the just announced Fujifilm X-T1, according to Sony. The camera also sports and impressive drive system that tops out at clip of 11 fps. The rapid fire shutter is a great way to blow off steam.

Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour

Some other now-standard Sony features to round out all that upgraded goodness: The A6000 shoots 1920 x 1080 AVCHD video at 60p/60i/24p/24i frame rates. The old Wi-Fi capabilities are now topped off with easy NFC pairing to compatible devices.

So far it all sounds great. Here’s the sore spot.

The A6000 sports a 1.44 million dot OLED viewfinder, which is much lower resolution than the 2.3 million dot EVF on the NEX 6. This is a huge bummer. One of the reasons we’ve recently been writing off cheap DSLRs recently is because a lot of new mirrorless cameras from the likes of Olympus and Sony have viewfinders that are so good that the optical viewfinders on their big brothers seem like a petty excess. Scaling back the resolution of the EVF might be good for cutting costs and saving battery life, but it’s a step back when it comes to making a compact that’s competitive with DSLRs. The tilting 921,000-dot rear LCD remains unchanged.

Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour

Overall, the A6000 is a much more powerful camera with better image quality than its predecessor, which sadly, has some scaled back viewfinder hardware. It doesn’t exactly have a scaled back price in Australia, however. Australians will be able to buy the A6000 for $1199 from mid-April with the SELP1650 E-Mount APS-C lens included. That’s compared to the $US800 our Ameri-friends are paying. Hmmmmmm.

Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour

Sony A6000: A Sweet Interchangeable-Lens Camera With A Touch Of Sour


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.