“Unless you’re going to shoot a specific type of assignment, like a portrait or an interior,” explains award-winning travel photographer and Sony Artisan of Imaging Bob Krist, “when you’re traveling or on the road, you just don’t know what you’re going to encounter. One minute, you can be inside a building, shooting an interesting interior, and the next moment, you’re out trying to get a quick portrait or street scene.”
That need for moment-to-moment flexibility is what drew Krist to the Sony RX10 IV. With its extraordinary 25x zoom, covering a 35mm-equivalent range of 24-600mm, Krist can shoot wide-angle architecture and landscapes, intimate portraits and super-tele wildlife, with a compact, lightweight camera that’s ideal for spontaneous creativity.
“The Sony RX10 IV allows you to be ready for anything, from interiors to wildlife, without having to carry extra lenses or a second body. You can carry it all day and most of the night without getting that camera bag fatigue that sets in after a few hours of lugging even a modest mirrorless or DSLR, multi-body, multi-lens setup,” Krist observes.
“That zoom range just opens up so many more photo possibilities,” he says. “To have a super telephoto on your shoulder at all times is remarkable.” It allows Krist to capture the unexpected, like his image of an egret with wings outstretched, taken in Mexico. “My shots of the egrets in the jacaranda trees are an example of what I mean. They did not happen on a specific birding shoot. It was the end of a day, exploring the city of San Miguel de Allende, and I was sitting in one of the city’s beautiful parks when I noticed a tree full of egret nests—turns out they roost here in the spring for a short period of time.”
Without the Sony RX10 IV, Krist would have missed the shot. “Nobody lugs a 600mm lens around while they’re doing city coverage, but I had that capability at my disposal with the RX10 IV, and I was able to get some nice looks at the birds at the long end of the zoom. Best of all,” he says, “I wasn’t lugging a bazooka-sized lens and huge tripod all day in order to capture those shots.”
To have that range in a camera that weighs less than 2.5 pounds and is about the size of the smallest DSLRs is impressive by itself, but equally noteworthy is the camera’s incredible speed. The RX10 IV’s autofocus system employs 315 phase-detection AF points that cover approximately 65 percent of the 1.0-inch Exmor RS CMOS imaging sensor, and enable the camera to acquire focus in as little as 0.03 seconds. The camera’s High-density Tracking AF Technology allows it to track moving subjects for continuous sharp focus as it captures up 24 frames per second for up to 249 frames in a single burst—exceptionally fast and especially useful for sports and wildlife photography.
“The image quality out of the 1-inch sensor is remarkable,” Krist confirms. “Previously, these super-zoom ‘bridge’ cameras all featured tiny chips, and the image quality just didn’t cut it, especially in low light. But with this camera, you’re getting the best of both worlds … the convenience of compact zoom camera design, with the image quality of a larger-chip mirrorless or APS-C camera.”
In addition to still photography, the Sony RX10 IV also excels at video. It’s capable of recording ultra-high resolution 4K video with the same Fast Hybrid AF used for still images, and offers both headphone and microphone accessory jacks for superior sound quality and usability. And when it comes to working with video, for Krist there’s another big advantage of all-in-one camera design over interchangeable lens cameras: protection from dust.
“One aspect of the RX10 IV that I particularly appreciate is the total freedom from worry about sensor dust spots,” says Krist. “I travel in some pretty windy, dusty and dirty environments and no matter what you do with a detachable lens camera, some dust is bound to find a home on your sensor.” It’s especially advantageous, he notes, with video recording. “With stills, removal of a dust spot is just a matter of using a cloning tool and doesn’t take too much time—unless, of course, your sensor is covered with dust spots. But in video, retouching out dust spots is a much more complicated time-intensive procedure. No worries with this camera.”
To learn more about the RX10 IV’s incredible technology and versatility, visit www.alphauniverse.com/rx10iv.
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