Review: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX100

If you could guarantee your phone had the biggest camera sensor, the best lens, and deeper controls than anything else out there for the next few years, that'd be a good thing, yes? And if this super camera happened to be detachable, letting you use it with future phones, that’d be even better, right?

That's essentially the promise of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX100, a $450 attachable lens-style camera that clips onto your smartphone. Unfortunately, while the idea sounds great on paper, in practice you quickly discover some key failings.

The QX100 comes equipped with a stabilized F1.8 lens with optical zoom and a large 1-inch-type sensor. Sony has shrunk down the guts of its former flagship compact camera–the $700 Cyber-shot RX100 II–into a device the size of a can of Vienna sausages.

Image quality is top-shelf. The QX100 will outperform any smartphone for the foreseeable future. It’s better than virtually every compact camera, too. Its large 20-megapixel sensor, coupled with its wide-aperture and wide-angle zoom lens (28mm to 100mm) helps it excel in low light and capture shallow depth of field.

As you might expect with any lens-and-sensor tube, there's no LCD panel; instead, you link the QX100 to your smartphone via Wi-Fi Direct and use your mobile device as its viewfinder and control panel. You don’t need a Wi-Fi hotspot. The camera shows up as an access point for your phone, and you type in a password printed on the underside of the QX100’s battery compartment to link the devices. If you’ve got an Android device, you can ease future pairings with a simple NFC bump.

Still, using the QX100 depends heavily on that Wi-Fi connection, and that’s where this device starts to disappoint. It has rudimentary hardware controls built into it–a shutter button and a zoom control–but you’ll be shooting blind if you only use those. To see what you’re snapping and to make adjustments, you need to pair it with your phone and control it with Sony’s free PlayMemories Mobile app for iOS or Android.

That critical Wi-Fi connection works OK as long as the QX100 and a device are right next to one other. But if the phone is 10 feet away from the QX100, the wireless controls get laggy. When you’re trying to zoom and snap from afar, there’s a beat or two of delay. Worse yet, you’re often met with a whirling connection-status icon, which can take a few seconds to resolve. It’s a level of controls-lag that hasn’t existed in cameras for about a decade, and all that Wi-Fi dependence saps its battery life. The QX100 gets around 200 shots per charge, which is weak.

Once you take a shot, the Wi-Fi connection saves a two-megapixel preview to your phone instantly. From there, you can opt to transfer a full-resolution image to your device–if you have a MicroSD card inserted in the QX100. If not, it’ll save that low-res version only. There’s also no way to delete shots on the card from your phone. That means you’re stuck with two-megapixel shots if your MicroSD card fills up until you can manually delete them from the card.

This sawed-off camera has a sawed-off feature set compared to the RX100 II. There’s no full-manual exposure, no burst mode, fewer video options, no RAW-shooting mode, and no flash. You do, however, get aperture-priority and a “Program Auto” mode, where you can tweak the exposure compensation. There are two auto modes, and the best one (Superior Auto) uses burst shooting and image stacking to widen the dynamic range. There’s a manual focus option that lets you use a ring around the lens to fine-tune focus, but there’s no magnified view to help you out. It’s really only useful if you’re using the QX100 while it’s mounted on your phone.

That’s a shame, because the QX100’s best traits are the weird things you can do when it’s not mounted to your phone. Using it as a small, disembodied lens you can control remotely lets you get creative and have fun, and its small size and flat bottom make any flat surface an ad hoc tripod. (There’s a proper tripod mount on the QX100, too.)

You can stick it in a flower bed pointing upward for a bug’s-eye view of flowers and the sky. You can place it near some birdseed or a food bowl to get ground-level shots of pigeons or dogs. You can point it at your smartphone screen for an infinity shot. You can also take really good selfies, if you’re into that sort of thing. (That is, you can do all these fun things if you can handle a laggy connection due to the phone being several feet away from the QX100.)

If you do use the QX100 while it’s attached to your phone, the mount is a well-designed piece that keeps it securely connected. It twist-locks onto the back of the camera, and has two flip-out gripper tabs that hug the edges of your phone. One of them has a spring-loaded arm that keeps the 7-ounce device clamped on tightly. It’s surprisingly snug, even when you swing your phone around. But the mount blocks the QX100’s battery compartment, so make sure to input the Wi-Fi password underneath the battery door before you twist it on.

Once it’s physically mounted and wirelessly connected, the QX100 works largely as advertised. The problem is, it’s a four-step process that takes a minute, and walking around with the QX100 permanently attached to your phone isn’t a realistic option. Other than mounting directly to your phone, it doesn’t do anything different than Wi-Fi-enabled premium compacts. While it may offer deeper smartphone controls than the RX100 II, the latter is a far superior overall package. Plus, compact cameras are way more pocket-friendly than the can-shaped QX100.

That’s the ultimate curse of the QX100: It’s another object you’ll need to carry around. The fact is you’re better off carrying around a good Wi-Fi compact camera instead. It’s a feat of engineering and imagination, it takes great photos, and it’s cheaper than Sony’s similar high-end compacts. Problem is, it isn’t exactly cheap. The price, the lag, the cumbersome shape, the battery life, and the fact that it’s unsuitable as a standalone camera make it a very hard sell.

Editor's Note: Sony claims to have improved the initial Wi-Fi connection speed for the QX100 via a firmware update. The company also added a few more shooting modes–shutter-priority mode and a wider range of ISO settings–most notably. The QX100 hardware we tested didn't have this firmware update, but the main issues we had with the camera were largely unrelated.