Sony's Cyber-shot RX series is just two years old, but it already has a strong heritage. When the first RX100 debuted in 2012, many reviewers heralded it as the best pocket camera ever made. The RX100 III is even better. It has a brighter lens, an eye-level viewfinder, better-looking video, and better low-light performance. It comes at a price, and that price is $800.
The big question is whether the RX100 III's extra features are worth a few hundred more dollars than its predecessors, which are now its main competitors. It really depends on your shooting style and your video needs. The new camera is more similar to the RX100 II, which has a similar tilting LCD screen, the same Wi-Fi/NFC capabilities, and the same low-light-optimized sensor. The RX100 II now costs $650, while the original RX100 sells for $500 or less. They're both top-shelf compact cameras, and they offer slightly different traits than this new one.
You’re starting with the same rock-solid foundation, though. As has always been the case with the RX compact cameras, the secret sauce is the sensor. This camera fits inside your pants pocket with ease, and its 1-inch-type sensor is massive within that context. Size matters here: The image quality for a pocket camera is mind-boggling, with very good performance in dark settings and shallow depth of field that rivals mirrorless and APS-C cameras.
Just like its forebears, the RX100 III has a fast F1.8 lens at its widest angle setting, manual exposure controls, a lens-barrel control ring, and—perhaps its most important trait—usability that will please both novices and more-experienced shooters. The RX100 III is quick to autofocus—fast enough to shoot at 3fps with AF enabled (or 10fps without)—and the control ring is a wonderful tool for manual focusing. If you've used any RX100 camera, you’ll feel at home behind the controls of the RX100 III.
From there, things venture outside of familiar territory for the RX100 series. For instance, the new camera has a shorter optical zoom—2.9X as compared to the 3.6X zoom of previous editions—but the lens gains ground in other ways. It has wider-angle coverage than its predecessors (24mm vs. 28mm), and its aperture stays wider through that zoom range. At 70mm telephoto, the maximum aperture is F2.8; at the same focal length, the maximum aperture was F4.0 in previous RX100 cameras. The extra speed is nice, but it comes at the expense of sawing off the best focal lengths for portraits.
The marquee addition is an eye-level OLED viewfinder with a resolution of 1.4 million dots. I receive a ton of emails lamenting the disappearance of eye-level viewfinders on compact cameras, so it will be a huge draw for some. In an impressive feat of engineering and/or magic, Sony added it without taking up any surface space. It does add bulk to the camera, however, as the RX100 III is a bit fatter and heavier than the previous generations. It also loses the hot shoe found in the RX100 II.
The viewfinder pops up out of the top left corner when you slide a switch on the side of the camera, and doing that also powers the camera on or off. After it pops up, you slide the eyepiece out so that it’s flush with the back of the camera. There’s a diopter-adjustment lever on top of the eyepiece, and a proximity sensor turns it on as you hold it to your eye. Once you move your eye from the EVF, the 3-inch LCD turns on.
It works very nicely for what it is, just as long as you don’t want to pop the EVF back into the camera without shutting everything off completely. You can leave the EVF up without draining battery due to its proximity sensor, but as soon as you click it back into the body, it powers the camera off. You’re also better off favoring your right eye. When you use your left eye, your nose can smudge up the RX100 III’s 3-inch display.
You can tilt that LCD to adjust it just like you could on the RX100 II, but there isn’t a position where it’s entirely out of your nose’s way when you use the EVF. The two-hinge LCD folds all the way up, facing forward if you need it for selfies. It also tilts downward at about a 45-degree angle to help with overhead shots.
