Sony A6000 with Nikon Glass
When I was shooting a lot with my Sony NEX-7, before it died on me, I would occasionally use Nikon lenses on it, with a Novaflex adaptor. I really liked the results, but I didn't do it that often, because personally, I found that the process of manual focussing was a little to awkward for my style of shooting. Even with the great focus peaking feature (which isn't always accurate unfortunately), it just wasn't worth it for the amount of times I wanted to do it. With my newer A6000, I had put off trying to shoot with Nikon lenses because of this, but I recently took the opportunity to try it out, and boy, what a difference.
First of all, the focus peaking feature seems much better on the A6000. The refresh rate is faster and the focus peaking display seems clearer, and it appears to be more accurate. Because everything works much faster and smoother on the A6000 than it did on the Nex-7 in general, this seems to make a big difference when manual focussing. You can also easily set one of the custom buttons to zoom in. You could do this on the Nex-7 too, but the command for doing this was buried in the badly laid out awful NEX menus. It's much easier to set up on the A6000, and jumping in and out of zoomed mode is much more responsive too. Overall the experience is much more natural and I could definitely find myself using it more.
It's the image quality though that is what makes it worth it. The difference putting decent glass on the front of the A6000 is quite noticeable. I know that's kind of obvious, but it wasn't until I started using my good nikon lenses on the A6000 that I realised two very important things about the little Sony. Firstly, it has an amazing sensor. Secondly, it made me realise that the Sony lenses that I have are not great optically. To be fair, I only have relatively inexpensive ones, and I haven't tried the newer f/4 and Zeiss lenses that have come out, but even so, the difference is pretty significant.
With good Nikon glass on the camera, micro contrast and sharpness are much improved, but it's the overall look that's the real difference. The images are delicate and rich, and colours are much better and more natural looking. It looks like the results came from a different camera. It really shows off what that sony sensor can do, especially with its great dynamic range. I tried several different lenses, including a newish 50mm f/1.4, a 35mm f1.8 (which itself, isn't a particularly expensive lens) and an old Nikon 105mm macro (the old Af-D version). I also tried the 24-120 f/4 on it, but I didn't shoot too much with that. Here are some examples shot with these combinations. (And yes, I know they aren't particurlarly interesting photos by any means, they're just examples of colour and light)
The results of this have me thinking that maybe it might be time to invest in some better Sony glass, but then the range for Sony's cropped sensor e-mount cameras is somewhat limited. This has been a general complaint against Sony from the community for some time now. Some people are concerned that Sony are putting all their lens efforts into the FE line, and I guess they have a point. I have the Sony 35mm f1.8 and the 50mm f1.8 for e-mount. Both are effectively top of the range because it's a very small range. The only better lenses are full frame, or maybe the Zeiss Touit models (which are hard to get here) If you want the best glass and autofocus, I'm guessing you need to use the FE lenses.
If you want to see more, I've posted a range of these to SmugMug. They are pretty much straight out of the camera too.
