When I get a camera, the first thing I do is change some of the default settings. I want to get the best the camera has to offer when I capture photos and video. Here are my Top 10 settings I changed first on the Sony RX100 MK VI.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 VI: http://jerad.link/rx100vi
Sony AGR2 Attachment Grip: http://jerad.link/rx100grip
Sony PCKLM15 LCD Protector: http://jerad.link/rx100screenprotector
Lowepro Newport 30 Camera Case: http://jerad.link/newport30
SanDisk 64GB Extreme Pro SD Card: http://jerad.link/64gbextremepro
Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad with Ditch Auto. Today I have the Sony RX100 Mark VI, and we’re going to talk about the Top 10 settings that I changed on the camera first. Now I just opened up this camera. Today is the day that everybody started receiving it if they purchased it. Of course, some folks are lucky enough to get things from Sony early for review but I bought it and here it is. As always, I have links down in the description below to the camera, the extra gear, the batteries, the SD card, anything that’s going to make your experience using this camera better. Clicking on those links help support our channel.
I typically customized my camera a bit because I use other Sony cameras. I use currently the A7 III and the A7R III, and those cameras have a certain way of working. And I like all my cameras to kind of work the same. There are also shortcuts and things that I have come to just enjoy that actually make the camera a little bit faster and easier to use. And so I’m going to talk about those things in this video.
Now one of my more popular videos on the internets is my RX100 Mark V settings video. This is the compact camera I’ve been using for the last couple of years here. In that video, I did seven settings. Now there are a few more things that I have done and came to kind of enjoy as far as custom settings go and that’s why this video has 10. I’m going to get rid of my RX100 Mark V and replace it with a VI. I’m kind of sad that it doesn’t have as wide of an aperture, but I’m excited to have more zoom so we’ll see where that goes. I’m definitely going to come back and do a full review of this camera because a lot of people are going to wonder is it worth the little bit of extra money or actually it’s a bit of extra money to get the Mark VI over having the Mark V. The Mark V, of course, is still a fantastic camera by today’s standards and the different features that are available today. So I definitely want to do kind of some comparisons and talk about that in another video.
So this Lowepro case is what I’ve been using. I’ve used it for the last several years. Actually, I think I’ve had it for like four years now and it’s held up really well. I typically wear it on my belt when I’m out and about. Taking pictures and shooting video clips of my kids. I’ve used my Mark V, my Mark IV and now this Mark VI as a vlogging camera quite often. I’ve done vlogs. I’ve done a lot of B-roll type of stuff or other videos. And then I’ve also taken some pictures with it because it does a good job with that as well. So it’ll be interesting to see how I end up using this camera now because I have more cameras I think that I’ve ever had before. And so this camera still is going to be that pocketable, go to, quick grab camera to get all the shots and all the photos when I don’t want to carry around something much bigger.
So let’s talk about the first things that I think are important. I’m going to go ahead and set that aside. I have the battery out because I am excited kind of that they’re using the same battery as before. I think I’m excited because I don’t have to buy new batteries and I did just get done buying a whole slew of new batteries for my A7 III and A7R III. So I’m glad not to get double taxed to this year.
So okay, let’s jump into the camera. We’re not going to be talking so much about the features of the camera so much as the settings. This is a settings video on how to customize the camera. I will come back and do a video that’s more of a review, more of a walk-through of this camera and teach everybody who’s interested a little bit more on how to use this camera and get excellent photos and video out of it.
Set The Date and Time
So the first thing that you’re going to want to do, and this is the one thing that I have already done is actually set your date and time. Your date and time is important to set because when you copy files and stuff like that over to your computer that’s going to come with it, the date and time. And organizing your footage and your photos is going to be kind of a pain in the butt. And if you upload your photos to something like Google Photos or some sort of cloud sharing service, those photos are going to be logged in, in the order of the date and time that they were taken. And if the date and time is not set correctly, you’re going to have a heck of a time. So if you forgot to do that, you can go over to this panel here and set up five and the fifth panel and go ahead and set your date and time so that all of that is done.
Pur Your Camera in Manual Mode
Another thing is just put your camera and manual mode. We’re not even getting started on the settings yet but shoot in manual mode. The whole premise here of ditching auto is getting out of auto. A camera like this is like … I mean this is a $1,200 camera. You do not need to be shooting an auto you need to learn how to use those manual settings so you can get the best looking footage and photos out of this little camera as possible. So put it in manual mode and start learning how to shoot in manual mode. If you need any help with that, my free course called Ditch Auto unlocking manual photography is a course for you it’s going to help you understand the settings that you need to know on pretty much any type of camera that has a manual mode so that you can optimize your camera to get the best photos and train your brain to be the settings that … you’re the auto mode. You’re using your eyes and your brain to control the camera and it does require a little bit of practice, but with some practice you’re going to get much better quality content out of your little camera.
Format Your SD Card in-Camera
One more important thing I keep forgetting is to format your card in the camera. Always format your card in the camera. Don’t format it on your computer or in another camera. Before you start shooting format. Make sure you back up the card of course, but then format it within the camera. Formatting is basically just right below the date and time. Formatting your card in the camera is the safest bet so that you don’t end up with corrupted data and stuff like that.
Sony RX100 VI Top 10 Settings to Change
- Shoot in RAW + JPEGThe first thing that we’re going to do is actually change our file format to RAW plus JPEG. Now I’ve had a back and forth on shooting RAW plus JPEG or just RAW. I never shoot just JPEG only, but here’s my thoughts on this. When I only shoot RAW, all I’m getting is RAW images. They’re very large images, they’re great. They’re exactly what I want. But when I want quick and nimble files that I can transfer over to a smartphone or that I can copy over fast for maybe editing on a phone or whatever, even though phones most of them can edit RAW files these days, the JPEG is just easier to transfer.There’s a rare very weird circumstance that I had with my Sony A7R III whereas I was only shooting RAW and some of those RAW images ended up being … something was wrong with them. They were corrupt. And if I had, had the JPEGs in there, I probably would have been okay. But I lost like 15 images out of 400 and something images. It was really weird situation, but it made me wish that I was shooting in RAW plus JPEG.Simply go to your first pane here, the first setting RAW plus JPEG. If you don’t care about the JPEGS, you can shoot and full RAW. Or if you don’t care about having flexible images, you can shoot in JPEG. The RAW image is going to give you much more control over your image. It’s going to allow you to better adjust the white balance and the contrast and stuff like that. It gets some of the highlights and details back in your image if your exposure was off, if you shoot in RAW, versus JPEG is a compressed image. So it’s compressing, it’s basically chopping the ends off of your image data so there isn’t as much room to work with. So I always shoot RAW or RAW plus JPEG. And since I just recently have that kind of snafu with my RAW only files, I think I’m going to be shooting RAW plus JPEG for a little while.
Now the JPEG quality doesn’t necessarily have to be set to extra fine if you are shooting RAW plus JPEG. But if I was only shooting JPEG, I would choose extra fine. But since I’m shooting RAW plus JPEG, I can go with just fine quality and then I can set my JPEG quality as well. Now, if you’re just going to be sharing your images on Instagram or something like that, you don’t even need to have your JPEG quality or image size up above medium. You can set it to the 10 megapixel because that’s far larger of an image, not by a lot, but it’s far larger of an image than what Instagram is going to display anyways. So, if you’re shooting and RAW plus JPEG, you’re going to get that huge nice big RAW file you can edit, that you can take onto your computer and use Adobe light room or anything like that. And then you’ll have a JPEG, that’s a smaller compressed image that’s more nimble for shooting out to your Instagram or whatnot. Very, very, very simple there.
- Customize Autofocus SettingsThe next thing that I do is change my auto focus settings. By default your camera is going to be set to your wide focus area and this is … the wide focus area I mean, these cameras are getting so much better at choosing what to focus on and people have been kind of getting on me about not letting the camera do as much thinking with auto focus because that’s one of the reasons that Sony is as good as it is. But when I’m shooting photos, a problem that I constantly have whether I’m using the A9, the A7R III, any of these cameras, is that even though the auto focus is super good and it always, almost always picks exactly what I want to have in focus, it sometimes picks the wrong part of what I want in focus.For example, if you’re shooting a person from, like a side angle here and so the face is tilted. You want the camera to choose that eye as the focus point. You don’t want the camera to shoot the back eye or choose some further away aspect or maybe over here that the ear or something that’s a little further back to where you get just a hint of softness on the eye. You want that eye to be the thing that’s in focus. And most of the time the camera will get it right, but it doesn’t always. And so I still use selected point focus. I don’t use these big focus areas.
So there’s two ways that you can get to change this. You can tap on the function button and then choose your focus area and go down to Flexible Spot focus area and there are three different sizes. So that’s your medium. You can also choose your large or your small spot depending on what’s in your scene. If I’m shooting a portrait, maybe something that’s more close up, I will use that small focus spot because it’s less likely that I’m going to miss if I move the camera a little bit what I was trying to focus on. If something is further away, I may use that wider spot just to make sure that I get that thing and focus and the camera doesn’t end up searching. Because if that small focus bot comes off of your subject and falls off of whatever it was that you’re focusing on, then it’s going to focus on something else and your entire shots going to be out of focus.
Because you are kind of taking control of focus here. You’re telling your camera, I don’t want you to guess all over the screen you’re available sensor. I don’t want you to guess. I want you to take this exact spot and focus on it. It’s essentially assisted manual focus. Because manual focus you would have to manually focus using the ring and use your eye on the back of the screen to try and make sure that everything’s in focus. Or maybe you could turn on some sort of focus assisting feature. But for me this is as close as I can get to manual focus while still having auto focus functionality. And it works great for me.
So I essentially set that to like the medium. And then I can move that spot all around. Of course, it’s not easily moved around right now because there’s one other setting that I’m going to change. But another thing that you can do is tap on those spots. So if you have a subject maybe over here, you can just tap on that area and it’s going to move the focus point to that spot. This is fantastic. I absolutely love this. I use this tap on all of my cameras. Even more so on this because it’s not likely that I’m using the viewfinder here. I actually wouldn’t mind if they got rid of this little pop up viewfinder, so I never have my eye up on this camera or my face up to the camera. I could just simply tap and it’s very comfortable for me to do that. And you can even tap and drag around on the screen as well, which I think is a fantastic feature for your auto focus.
- Set Creative Style to NeutralI’m going to be changing which is setting the creative style to neutral and that is just a couple of panes down here on pane nine. Creative style, typically is set to standard. And so if you’re shooting those JPEGs, they’re going to get the standard treatment here. And of course you can set vivid, clear, deep, light, portrait, landscape. There’s all sorts of options here that you can choose from.I like neutral because it’s more of a flat color profile and I’m going to be taking all of my images into some sort of an editor anyways. So I just want that to be taken care of. I want it to be flat. I want to have more room to work within the editor. I don’t want everything to be kind of crushed already as it is. So I just set that creative style to neutral.
- Turn on Image Auto ReviewNow another thing that I find important is having an auto review of an image. By default that’s turned off. So, when you go and take an image … so let’s see if I can show you that here. When you go and take an image, it’s ready to go. It’s ready to shoot again. It’s not giving you an instant replay. Now of course you can hit the playback button here and you can of course see your images, but if you want that auto review, you’re going to need to turn that on. And I kind of like having that especially in photo mode because with a camera like this, I’m trying to maybe take some pictures of my kids I want to make sure I got the shot and if I have to go and look and spend time clicking around to see if I got the shot, then I may miss the opportunity to take the photo again if I didn’t get it the first time.So we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to set that up by going to the … we’re going to go back up here, it’s on the second pane, just a further bit down. So the second camera tab on pane eight, auto review set to two seconds. So now I’ve got my image review as you can see for two seconds, and then the camera kicks back on. Now if I don’t want to wait for that two seconds, all I have to do is just press down on the shutter button just a little bit and it’s going to take me right back in to shooting photos. And if I’m in a burst mode, like I’m shooting a burst of photos, it’s not even going to give me an auto review at all until I let off the shutter. So I hold down the shutter button. It takes a burst of photos. I let off the shutter button. It shows me that last one. It’s not going to make it go slow. Like every time it takes a picture, it’s going to take two seconds before it does it again. So I like that auto review taking place there.
- Remap the Control WheelNow one of the things that I have done in the past is and this is standard on my other cameras, is made it easier to adjust the ISO or the ISO. So up here you can adjust your zoom of course. Right back here, I can rotate this to adjust my shutter speed. And then of course we have the ring here to adjust our aperture, but we need to be able to easily adjust the ISO or the ISO pretty fast. And on earlier versions of this camera like the Mark V, there just wasn’t an easy way to do that. Well on the Mark VI, they’ve made the trashcan button or the custom button, your adjustment for your ISO which is cool, I like that, but it’s not consistent with the way that I use my other cameras. I have the Sony A7R III and A7 III, and I typically use the ISO where there’s the flash icon here, it’s ISO on those other cameras. And I want that to be ISO because that’s just naturally the way that I’m going to be using my camera.
- Remap the Custom Button (C/Trash)So I’m going to go here into my settings. We’re going to go to custom key, down to right button, and we’re going to change that to ISO, ISO. And now I can press this to the side and just start rotating. So press right and rotate and then center to confirm. And what’s nice about this is that it’s exactly the way that I typically would do things on my other cameras. And so it’s not going to be confusing to me. I do like the fact that they did map it to the trashcan. Nobody would even know that unless you happened on it by accident. But that’s just not the way I typically would use the camera by using that there.
Another thing, and this is earlier when I was talking about setting my focus points, being able to move the focus point around, I need a way to be able to verify and confirm where that focus point is. Now if I’m not wanting to use my finger to slide around here and set my focus point, I’m going to need to use this control wheel over here to move it around. So, I need to set the center button from IAF. We’re going to go to focus standard. So, now I can press that button and see it turns to something that allows me to move that around to each of the points on the grid. And then I could press the button down to confirm. Press it again, move it around and confirm.
Now this isn’t as important as it once was because having the touchscreen on here makes it very easy just to go to whatever focus point I want. But it’s the way that I use my other cameras and I want to have it set up that way. It doesn’t make sense for me to have my cameras set up differently. Of course on my other cameras I’m using the EVF. On this camera like I said, I’m not. So, it’s more likely that I’m going to tap to a focus point. But I still want to be able to have that functionality set.
So since I went ahead and set this camera up like the other cameras with the ISO, I don’t need the sea or the trashcan button to take me to ISO anymore. I can basically set it to do anything else. We’re going to go and do that. We’re going to go to the C button and we can set this to anything. Basically anything that we want. There’s a lot of different options that we can choose from here. And like focus modes, that’s another thing I could do. I could set it to my focus mode so that way I just tap right here and I change between AFS or AFA or even AFC, which I would only use typically in video. Those are options and I’ll talk more about those auto focus type of settings in another video. The different forms of auto focus here such as single shot, automatic AF and continuous AF are good for different reasons. But that’s for a whole video in it of itself.
I just wanted to touch on that for a second because I hate it in videos where people say something and then they don’t explain themselves and you’re like, “Wait a minute, what about that thing though?” So, focus area might be good because then I can easily change between my different size focus spots. Whereas I would have to go to the function key tap and then do that. I’m now saving myself a step by mapping the trash can button to that different focus size. So, that’s definitely something. But you can set that to anything that you would find useful. Maybe you want to have it toggle so that you can shoot JPEG and RAW or just JPEG only or just RAW only. You can customize that button to pretty much anything that you want just as you saw here. We have auto focus, like all the different menu settings just about give you those options. So there’s lots of different things that you can do and set that button to. So, have fun with it.
- Set Audio Signals to Shutter OnlyI don’t like that verification signal whenever my camera achieves focus. It turns green around the focus area. So I know that focus has been achieved. There’s also a green light down here. There’s a lot of different things signaling to me that focus has been achieved. So I don’t need that audio signal. Now, there is one thing that they did add that’s pretty cool, and that’s when you rotate the ring, you get kind of this tick, tick, tick, tick. It’s really hard to hear this tick, tick, tick sound kind of giving you some sort of feedback that something has changed. And so, that was a problem that I had with the other cameras, is that if you’re not looking at the screen, you don’t necessarily know that you’re changing your aperture unless there’s some really noticeable exposure difference on the screen. So I do like that, but I don’t like it so much that I am okay with the beep. I don’t like the beep at all whatsoever.
So in order to disable that, we’re going to go to our 10th pane here, in the second camera option menu and choose audio signals, and we’ll just go to shutter only. Now the bummer here is that it’s literally just going to be the shutter and when you do take a picture, there’s an audible sound for the shutter. There isn’t a real sound for the shutter. So if I go and actually turn this off. If you’re just in single shot mode, you can hear a little bit of a click sound. So there’s a little bit of a click. But if you do go into a continuous mode, so let’s go into our drive mode and go down to high speed shooting if you have all audio signals turned off and you hold down that shutter button, I just took 30 images and there was no representation of anything happening on my screen until I let off. How annoying would that be if you accidentally took 100 photos on accident because there was nothing signaling to you that a photo is actually being taken.
So I have to wait for the buffer to clear here, which it’s about done. And then I can go back into the menu and I could choose shutter only. So now at least … it’s a horrible sound, but at least there’s an audio signal for the shutter and I can hear that and know that photos are being taken. A lot of times I’m not using this camera in continuous mode, in the continuous drive mode. So that’s not really a problem, but it is nice to at least have that one audio signal. But now with shutter only selected, achieving focus does not make a beep and I like that. I do not like the noise of achieving focus having a beep to it. So that’s a thing that I changed.
- Set Video Formal and Video Manual ModeWe’re going to go ahead and change our camera mode here to video and there’s some things that we’re going to go in to change. Because like I said, I use this camera quite a bit for shooting video. And so there are settings that need to be changed and adjusted. So the first thing is on the first panel here of the second camera tab is changing it from exposure mode of program auto, down to manual exposure. This essentially gives us the same type of functionality when shooting photos as far as being able to adjust our aperture, our shutter speed and our ISO. I want to be able to have control over all those and so I have to go into that mode in order to get control. Otherwise, that camera mode here is going to assume you want program auto it’s going to do all of your settings automatically for you.
So now I’ve been shooting everything in 4K. So I’m going to go up to XAVC S 4K and choose that option. I’m going to go down to record settings and you can see we have different record settings down here. This camera caps out at 30 P when you’re shooting 4K, which is kind of a bummer. I was hoping we’d get 60 but we didn’t. But if you do go into HD and then go down to record settings, you get a whole slew of options even all the way up to 120 P. So keep in mind when you are shooting in one of these modes, so for example, say we’re shooting in 60 P, which you would shoot in one of these higher frame rates because you want more data for doing slow motion. So when you slow a clip down, you’re essentially stretching that clip down. And if you stretch it out below 30 frames per second, then you’re going to get blur and it’s just not going to look good. So you want to shoot at least 60 P if not 120 if you’re going to be doing anything slow motion.
Now if you’re going to be doing anything slow motion … and this is a mistake I made in my last video. So here’s my public apology to anybody who called me out on this. Is that your shutter speed needs to be double of what your frame rate is in order for your camera to do that. So if you’re at 60 P, you need to be at least 120, like 125, because you can’t go to 120. So, you need to be at least 125 in order for it to be capturing 60 frames per second. Now if you’re going to go up to that 120, then you’re going to have to go up to 250 in order to get that 120 frames per second. So keep that in mind that your shutter speed always has to be double of your frame rate, and I’ll talk more about this in another video.
This isn’t hard for me to achieve because I’m typically shooting in 4K, Which means I get that 30 P and I’ll do 100 megabits just so I can get the best quality file that I can get. And then I can go down to … because I’m at 30, I can go down to one 16th and be safe, which means I can use these adjustments, such as closing down my aperture a little bit to get more depth of field or not having to rely so much on hiking my ISO to get more light sensitivity out of that sensor.
A huge wish list item that didn’t come true for me on this camera was having audio input. Some sort of an audio in jack for a microphone. They also didn’t change the audio recording giving you anything other than on or off. There’s no manual settings for your audio, but you can go and actually choose to turn on wind reduction for when you’re outdoors in a more windy situation, you can turn on wind reduction from the menu. So that’s definitely an option.
I have seen people, because you have your two microphones up here on top of the camera as you can see, and I have seen people come up with creative ways to kind of muffle that. A lot of times with microphones you put what’s called a dead cat or some sort of a covering over the microphone that then cuts down the wind noise. But on a camera like this, there’s nothing to slip over. So, you can maybe take like a little piece of cotton or something like that and put it over the top of that. Just keep in mind that anytime something hits that cotton it’s going to make noise right into your microphone. So I typically don’t do that. Just in windier situations, I use that wind noise reduction. And when I have more control over my environment, I leave it turned off.
- Turn on Rule-of-Thirds Grid LinesThe grid works nice because it’s going to give me the ability to more easily frame up my shot. I like using the rule of thirds. And so I’m going to go and turn grid lines on to rule of thirds grid. And as you can see now it added lines to my preview here, my screen, so that I can more easily frame things up. This works really well, especially if you’re going to use this camera for vlogging and you’re constantly pointing it back at you. One of the issues is just making sure that you’re framed up well, or that your shot is framed up, because everything kind of appears a little bit backwards. So having the rule of thirds just definitely helps you get things framed up a little bit faster and make sure that you’re not missing anything. I also use that for portraits and whatnot. And so it makes it really nice just to be able to tap or position the focal point on that rule of third, which is where I typically would be putting the person that I was taking a picture of, or even shooting maybe something like a little interview segment, I would put them maybe off to one side versus the other.
- Set Image Copyright DataLet’s add copyright data to your images. And we live in a digital world where our images are being shared everywhere. And if you want to maintain some sort of rights on your image, you have to have the copyright data written to it.
Now it’s not impossible for somebody to strip this data out, but if it starts out as part of the image, then it’s going to be better, you’ll have a better chance of proving that it was your image. Now this doesn’t actually right information to the face of the image. It’s meta a data that exists within the image. So that way when you pull up that data, there’s underlying information about your image. And some of that even includes your camera settings, the type of camera it was used to shoot with it and all that stuff.
So, if you go into setup five here, which is under the briefcase in the fifth pane. Tap on copyright. Turn copyright info to on. Go to set photographer, tap there or click there because this is not touch activated, unfortunately. So you’re going to need to go through and actually add your name or whatnot. And then when you’re done, hit okay. You can then set copyright and you can put like all rights reserved, or have fun using my images for free or whatever. I mean, there’re are certain copyright titles that need to be used in order. There’s like creative comments and all that stuff. There’s different ones that give different limits of access to your images. You can set those as you wish. And then display copyright will show you the preview of that.
This is good to set just so that you can maintain control over your images. Especially if you’re like me, you’re taking a lot of photos of your kids and stuff like that. I’ve had blogs use my photos without me asking. They’ve even told me like, are you sure it’s your photo, and I’m like, look at the EXIF data or the metadata. I promise to you, unless you stripped it out, that’s my photo. So it’s just better to write that in and have the camera handle the writing of that so that you don’t have to do it in post-production later.
Of course, I do that in LightRoom. But if my image goes straight from my camera to my smartphone, I want that metadata to be in there already.
That’s it! The 10 settings to change when you get your Sony RX 100 Mark VI. I hope you enjoy the camera. I’m going to be back with more content on this camera. A full review, my thoughts on the camera. Some tutorials on how to better use the camera and if there’s anything that you want to see, definitely let me know down in the comments section below. Make sure to subscribe to the Ditch Auto YouTube channel for more tutorials, reviews, and tips.
