For a very long time, smaller cameras with giant zoom lenses were kinda crappy. Sure, you could zoom in on the action from the cheap seats of the stadium, but the resulting image you snapped probably wouldn’t be too impressive. You could get good results from a DSLR with a bulky, several-thousand-dollar telephoto lens, but portable zoom cameras, with their smaller sensors and inferior lenses, rarely produced anything beyond blurry shitstorms.
Cameras like Sony’s RX10 and Panasonic’s Lumix FZ1000 have flipped that script, combining crazy optical reach with ample 1-inch sensors. They use the same size sensor found in Sony’s RX100, a compact camera that’s been universally praised for its exceptional image quality. And now, the same size sensor is available behind a lens with even more zoom.
The brand-new Sony RX10 III is—you guessed it—the third iteration of the company’s high-zoom/big-sensor RX10 camera. It now has more range than Steph Curry: The big change is that its lens has more than tripled its optical reach from 8X zoom to 25X (24mm to 600mm). The lens is bright, too, with a maximum aperture of f/2.4 at the wide-angle end and f/4.0 at full telephoto. A lens that long needs serious stabilization, so it’s good news that Sony’s latest optical-stabilization system is built in.