Amanda Schmidt: City Moments: Sony Nex 5n from Mike Kobal on Vimeo.

The NEX-5n has been reviewed by Cnet UK (Click here): “That rather leaves us wondering why you’d choose a conventional dSLR over the NEX-5N, assuming you haven’t already bought into one manufacturer’s body and lens system. It’s smaller, more convenient and much more fun to use. In many cases it’s cheaper, too, which in our book makes it very highly recommended indeed.”

Ricoh GXR Mount Sony Nex 5N comparison (Dpreview forum).

Sony NEX-5n Addendum – By Sean Reid on Luminous Landscape (Click here / scroll down to the bottom of the article).

A reader sent me this: “I’ve posted a video on Vimeo http://vimeo.com/29216506. It is a BTS video of an AHA Image Studios shoot for Sbyke. I’m using nothing but his lighting, 2 HMIs and one gelled 650 tungsten. NEX 5n with a 16mm f2.8 lens. The entire video was shot on the Program setting. The sound is from the built in stereo mics. The lack of volume control is a big problem. I spent a lot of time in post trying to match levels with less than complete success. I’ll be using double system sound for the rest of my projects. Hope you enjoy, and maybe learn something. I find real world videos more informative than the typical bug and flower test videos.”

The good news for Sony is that the NEX-5n is selling very well in USA. Actually it is the only non-Canon and non-Nikon cameras that made it into the Amazon top-20 cameras (Clcik here to see the full ranking). And that success is also pushing the lens sales (Click here to see the full camera/lens mirrorless ranking). I guess the NEX-7 would have reached an even better ranking. But I guess we will have to wait ealry 2012 until we can see that camera in Stock.

The NEX-5n sells extremely well at Amazon UK too where it is on position one of the mirrorless chart (Click here to see the ranking).

The NEX-5n is on third position of the Amazon De ranking (Click here). The surprise here is that the NEX-7 is on top! Amazon de is still accepting preorders (Click here)!

And here are the rankings for Japan (Click here), France (Click here), Italy (Click here) and Spain (Click here).

Our reader “QX” sent me a link to an article he posted on Dpreview Forum: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1037&message=39655557.

UPDATE: The test caused heavy discussions on dpreview forum and on Sonyalpharumors. Many questioned the conclusion and quality of the test. QX sent me an email that explains better the test and resutls of his test:

“Andrea,
My apologies for getting you into that shitstorm.

I have posted a summary of my findings in the comments section, maybe that will help.
I was just trying to put the information out there, and maybe my Original Post in the forums was too strongly worded.
I was alarmed because my A700 did not exhibit this kind of behavior in RAW.

1) If you’re shooting JPEG, choose whatever ISO you want. For High ISO try NR Weak, Clear -2,+2,-2 settings. Those worked for me at 6400 in 6MP mode. 24MP JPG high iso isn’t really… acceptable. You’ll see what I mean.
2) If you’re shooting RAW, stick to ISO 1000, and underexpose by whatever you need to get the equivalent ISO. For example, ISO 1600 means ISO 1000 and -2/3EV compensation. You can bring exposure up later .
3) If you are shooting in good light, don’t bother exposing to the right, as it seems that the RAW file stores almost the same number of levels per stop, so there is no nett gain by exposing to the right. This was my beef in claim 2 in my original post – there is no way to buy yourself any more processing headroom by ETTR (stuff like increasing clarity and contrast will increase noise, and if you tried to boost a properly exposed, low contrast subject, you will get more noise. Traditionally, if you ETTR, reduced exposure in ACR and then boosted contrast, you’d get better results).
4) Make sure you tune the focus correctly for your lenses. The A77 is really high res – it will make you pay for any small front/back focus. I had to tune my 16-50 kit to +3 to make it spot on, and it’s been behaving ever since.

It seems that there are many who just looked at the first post in that thread and jumped to conclusions. There was a lively discussion in that thread punctuated by trolls.
I don’t claim to be perfect, but as in Science, any hypothesis will be tested rigorously, and I am happy that happened in DPReview forum. I also learned a lot from the other posters.

Once again, I’m sorry for the trouble that I caused you.”

—

One more thing: Every RAW file has some form of compression (also Nikon NEF files!). Our reader Oneguy sent me this: “ In the DPR thread that you linked, one of the poster is ejmartin (Real Name:  Emil Martinec, Professor of Physics at  the University of Chicago and a member of the particle theory group. He is also creator of Amaze, Raw demosaicer algorithm). See his article on noise: http://theory.uchicago.edu/~ejm/pix/20d/tests/noise/noise-p3.html
Scroll down to “An aside on “lossy” NEF compression” section and read the conclusion:”Bottom line: The “lossy” form of NEF compression is a clever use of information theory to save space by eliminating redundant raw levels. The noise which is unavoidably present in light effectively dithers tonal transitions so that the compression is lossless in that the image is still encoded without loss of visual information. In this sense, “lossy” compression is perhaps an inappropriate appelation.”