35-item Setup Menu, Format is No.29

There have been some animated debates over Sony's NEXt cameras to be shipped and to hit the retailers' shelves. While the photography community railed at the mediocre optical quality of the 16mm pancake lens, Sony made the announcement which sounded unusual to me that all the 16mm lenses were pre-production samples. Is this a hindsight? Well, this doesn't really matter as long as Sony lends an attentive ear to us and makes improvements to the lens.

Then some critics are concerned about the ergonomics of the machines. To be honest, I quite like the way how the testers hold the camera by the lens barrel. The camera body is really slim and chic. I pointed it to a few non-into-photography ladies who immediately said that they could buy it. But the critics are actually more upset by its way of doing adjustments which they think are simply cumbersome.

I really admire Samsung for making the menu system of NX10 so blissful easy to work with.

The ladies' approval and the critics' disapproval can prove which I pointed out in an earlier post. The NEX cameras are not targeted at the more serious photographers. They are for the point-and-shoot users who wish to take "good" photos with a better camera. Now, when so many serious and professional photographers are using something with changeable lenses, they can easily want one but at a lighter size. This I believe is the rationale behind the design of the NEX3 and NEX5.

But the cameras are really cool. Small enough in size, big enough in the sensor. So, to resurrect my Minolta lenses, I was at a point almost determined to buy the NEX5. I thought to myself, maybe the menu system was still bearable. Then, I sussed out the facts but was horrified by the following descriptions of the its menu system:

The Sony NEX-5 is a blend of more traditional digital camera design with an SLR sensor and interchangeable lenses, but the best of both worlds were not always chosen. In this case, Sony says they completely redesigned the interface to make it easier to control with only a few buttons, but it really brings to mind the inconvenience of some of Sony's recent Cyber-shot menu systems. My first impression of the NEX-5's menu system was quite positive, because it was snappy and beautiful. The most attractive item is the Scene menu, in fact, which includes high resolution photos to illustrate the purpose of each. Very nicely done. For the first time, too, the sound that accompanies menu selections -- a sharp click -- is actually quite nice. Unfortunately, my initially positive reaction to the NEX-5's menus didn't survive my actually trying to use them.

Rather than using the truly simple menu from the other Alphas, which are among the best in the business, Sony opted for a more complicated scheme that uses buttons to get to icons to get to menus, some of which are pretty long -- and when you get to the bottom of some very long lists, the menus don't wrap back up to the top. Worse, once you've found and adjusted a menu item, you're dropped into Record mode, rather than back to the Menu, where you could make further adjustments. Instead, you have to hit Menu again and start all over from the top.

Thanks to the large, high resolution screen, there are plenty of icons to tell you about the camera's settings, but to change any of them, you have to first look on the four-way navigator, then hit the Menu button (provided it's available, since it is a "soft" button, whose use may change as the mode changes). Once the Menu pops up, you have to choose the right one from among six: Shoot mode, Camera, Image Size, Brightness/Color, Playback, and Setup. Here's where tabs would have been nice, because it's not exactly obvious that ISO and DRO are hidden under the Brightness/Color menu rather than the Camera menu.

The GXR's DSLR-like menu is really ace.

As if those are not enough, the simply-not-simple menu of the NEX5 has yet more surprises to "offer". I was appalled to read "... Setup menu, which contains 35 items. Format is number 29."

And a Quick menu would make changing things like ISO or DRO/HDR more easily accessible. As it is, you have to press the Menu button, navigate to Brightness/Color, scroll down to DRO/Auto HDR, and press the center button. Then the screen goes completely black, and you're taken to the live view, where the little DRO/Auto HDR options pop out of the right side of the screen. Rotate the control dial until your selection appears and press the center button again. Take your shot! The big problem I have isn't how hard it is to turn on, though. It's how hard it is to turn back off, because I seldom want to shoot in Auto HDR for more than a few images, and then I forget I have it set for the next shot, and right when I don't want it to, the Sony NEX-5 will rattle off another three shots. It's then that I have to go back into the menu, navigate to Brightness/Color... You get the idea. What's worse is if you need to change a setting on the Setup menu, which contains 35 items. Format is number 29.

There are also many instances when a menu option is inexplicably unavailable. It's just grayed out, and the pop-up explanation doesn't offer any remedy. The Face Detection option for example, is grayed out by default, and the only way to activate it is to first turn on Multipoint AF and Multi-area exposure. While the camera has 80 photography tips, none of them address such a fundamental issue as this. There's always the manual, yes, but some of this stuff should just be automatic (turn on face detection and it automatically changes to Multipoint AF and Multi-area exposure).

Another peculiarity is that you can't review both images and videos in Playback mode at the same time. Playback confines the list of available items to whatever you shot last. That is, if you've been shooting stills and movies, and the last thing you shot was a still, when you press the Playback button you'll only see still images. To see movies, you have to switch to Movie mode, or else a quick movie. You can also hit the Menu button, select the Playback menu item, and scroll down to Still/Movie Select, press that menu item, then select between Still and Movie on a separate screen. We think this might be because scrolling through movies takes a long time -- like two or three seconds per item -- while stills are easy to flick through. Rather than please consumers, though, idiosyncrasies like this are going to make users think they've lost images or videos. Hopefully this is due to the prerelease nature of the NEX cameras.

The GF-1 and G-10 have their own ways to make the menu systems less complicated with success.

Now, is Sony nuts? Or does it not know that such a menu system can kill its sales? No, if you consider which market segment the camera is aimed at. With long years of experience of selling popular consumer goods under its belt, Sony is surely aware of what it is doing: it is creating a market segment to seep up the spending power of the P&S community, a.k.a. the larger segment of the camera market, before it goes higher up to sell some cooler stuff for those who are pointing angry fingers at it.

So, let's keep our pointing fingers crossed instead that the NEX7, 8 and 9 will take the serious photographers' needs and suggestions into account:

Here's a summary of things we'd like to see change in the NEX-5's menu system:

• Add an option to the Setup menu that would let you configure the camera's default menu behavior to drop you back to the last-used menu position, rather than always at the top level. Call it something like "Menu Default," with options of "Return to last setting" and "Return to top."
• Likewise, as noted above, an option for the camera to leave you in the menu system after making an adjustment, rather than popping you out to shooting mode again would be a real convenience.
• Make the system less modal; let the user change more things regardless of the mode the camera is in. For instance, rather than requiring that the user first set AF area to Multi and change the AF mode to Autofocus or DMF before they can select Face Detection, why not just make the choice of Face Detection put the camera in AF/Multi-Area mode? Telling the user that the Face Detection function is disabled isn't at all helpful. And why shouldn't users be able to select digital zoom with zoom lenses if they want to? Ditto panorama direction or panorama size, when they're not in Panorama mode? Having items mysteriously greyed-out only makes the camera more confusing for users of any level.
• If you can't get rid of the modal nature of the menus, add explanatory text, telling why an option is greyed out, rather than just saying "This function is currently disabled." - This would arguably hold more real end-user benefit than the current 80 pages of shooting tips.
• In Playback mode, make the Menu button take you immediately to the Playback menu, and make the first option there be Still/Movie Select. (This is one place where the camera really needs one more button, as all the buttons on the back already have necessary functions assigned to them.)
• Add a setup menu item that would let you configure the lower-right button as a custom function button, rather than defaulting to Shooting Tips. Let the user configure it to optionally control their choice of White Balance, ISO, AF area (it does currently turn into Focus when you're in Flexible Spot mode, so you can adjust the focus point, but it'd be nice if you could choose to make it select AF mode all the time as an option), Face Detection, Metering Mode, DRO/HDR, Creative Style, and possibly Steadyshot.
• Add a Quick Menu, optionally activated by the lower soft button, to give quick access to a number of common settings. (The list above would be a good start, but add things like image size/quality, movie type/size, etc as well.)
• On future models, don't be quite so focused on reducing the number of buttons. Even one more button in the lower right corner of the rear panel, or to the left of the Movie button on the angled top panel could have really helped with some of the user interface complexity.

Should we make it a petition list and start a campaign? Or with the suggested alternations to the camera, will the next NEWs still look like what they are now? In any case, no counterintuitive menu again please.

(Texts and the menu photo in the quotation, as well as the NEX sectional image, originally appear in Imaging Resource NEX5 Review, used with permission; Copyright © Imaging Resource)