Sony Photography News and Rumors

Very few will try to defend Sony’s menus and Maarten Heilbron’s video about how to fix them has gone a viral, but beyond his desire to consolidate parts of the menu I don’t agree with his suggestions. Sony’s current left/right navigation allows you to navigate tabs very quickly beyond the pages within them. If Sony were to make the changes he suggests about navigation than the consolidation Maarten suggests would be negated by slower navigation of the pages and tabs.

Further many really don’t like touch screens and leave the feature turned off. I haven’t used a camera with good touch screen controls yet and that includes cameras like the Leica TL, which is very smartphone-like and the closest to a good touchscreen interface on a camera yet. I am sure someone will get touchscreen camera interfaces right in the future, but beyond pinch to zoom, I am not interested at this time.

In my opinion, I think Sony needs to more logically consolidate their options like Fujifilm and they need more physical controls similar to Fujifilm cameras. The Sony a9 was a good start and it’s handling is far superior to the Sony a7RIII thanks to the extra added controls, but the menus are still a mess. The difference being that the added physical controls allow you to almost never have to dive into the menus on the Sony a9, whereas the Sony a7RIII requires the user to dive into the menus to make adjustments to things like AF. Here is where fanboys point out the quick menu, but I hate quick menus and I do not use them on my Fujifilm cameras either.

Sony could greatly improve their cameras going forward simply by updating their firmware, but it’s highly unlikely. It took years of unhappy photographers to get the current menus, which aren’t much better than the old menus. Sony isn’t very responsive about their menus being poorly designed for whatever reason and it is a shame since their current generation of cameras are a substantial step ahead of their competitors.