Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been waiting a long time for this camera. I never pre-order cameras but when I read the specs on this a few months ago I decided to risk it. The elements that caught my eye were: electronic viewfinder, purported low-light sensitivity, 30X zoom, and integration with smartphone. I'd characterize myself as an advanced amateur user. Meaning I like to learn all the functions and play with different features and mode. I've also been disappointed many times by cameras with poor low-light performance and poor focusing, so those are particularly important to me. Having said that, here's my review after 2 days of using. Interface: I've used Panasonics before so switching to a Sony took a while to get used to. There are lots of rings and dials and very tiny buttons. If you have fat fingers, don't get this camera. My fingers are average for a guy and I do have to be careful where I press. If you leave settings on full auto of course you don't need to use buttons, but if you want to control a lot of settings, then you do. One nice positive is the big control ring around the lens. It can be used to adjust shutter speed and aperture. Viewfinder: You have to manually pop up the viewfinder with a tiny slider. I'm somewhat nearsighted (-1.50) but the diopter adjustment was easy and I have no problem seeing perfectly clear through it. The viewfinder is high enough resolution that I can actually see that the image is focused. Lots of information is also presented in the display. Display: The main display is great and I like the fact that it can pivot 180 degrees up to do selfies, and also is good for taking pictures close to the ground. It also can display whether the camera is level, which is great for shooting landscapes with horizons. It is also good enough in bright sunlight, though in such situations I do prefer the viewfinder. Low light: Low light performance is above par for a camera with such a small sensor. Sony has a nice feature where it will take multiple fast exposures and blend them together to achieve a low-noise yet non-blurry low light image. I've included an example of that. Zoom: the 30X optical zoom is amazing. I've include pictures comparing full-wide to full-zoom. On other 30X cameras I've tried, the long end of the range is almost always unusably blurry. With this camera, it is quite acceptable and even impressive from the samples I've uploaded. Dynamic range: The camera has 3 modes - regular mode, expanded dynamic range mode, and HDR. Photos with HDR do look a bit odd, but the camera does a great job of blending multiple shots together without blurring. I didn't spend a lot of time playing with these modes, but most people will leave it on the expanded dynamic range mode and let the camera decide when to activate HDR and by how much. Video: The camera promises 5-axis stabilization. It does work quite well as my hands have tremors and I'm usually disappointed with handheld videos from my smartphone and previous cameras. I shot a video rapidly changing subjects far and near and moving the zoom a lot, and the camera kept up the whole time without doing that annoying "focus search" that other cameras seem to do whenever the subject changes. I'd give it high marks for being intelligent. Conclusion: I wanted a great pocket-sized camera that works for travel, indoor parties, and some fine photography such as flowers, landscapes, and portraits. I believe I've found the camera with the best of all worlds, without excessive compromise. Would I get better images from a 1" sensor? Probably, but then I'd sacrifice the zoom. If I were to have just one camera, this would be it.