Sony Rx100 Vi Settings
Magdalen Dano
Hi all. I just purchased the RX100 II from a company that stated that they were "Proudly Australian" I have since found out that it ships from Hong Kong. Problem is I have a brand new Rx100 II in Japanese or Chinese, The company Camerasky.com.au is no help at all changing the language to English. I have been told by Sony Australia that maybe it cannot be changed. That it is for the Asian market only. Has anyone had the same problem and if yes how did they solve it?
Hope someone can help
Cheers
John
3:15AM, 22 October 2013 PDT(permalink)
It's just a way of protecting home resellers from the grey market.
The other issue is that sometimes the camera is cheapper because the duties have not been paid on it.
ages ago(permalink)
HI All
I have had this problem and was about to return the camera as there was no way I could understand the Japanese in order to be able to change the language settings
I spent 40 minutes on the phone to Sony support in the UK and by just counting the number of times to scroll up and down we sorted the problem and changed the language to English
You need to switch on camera, press menu button and scroll to setup (spanner) then scroll down until you get to a symbol that starts with the letter "A" in what seems to be a text box. If you select this you will find an option to change to English or other languages
I hope that this helps
ages ago(permalink)
Excellent housecalluk.
The question remains, does Sony ship the RX 100 in one version that is pre setup for a local language or do they have multiple versions in multiple languages?
ages ago(permalink)
HELP, I just bought a made in Japan rx100 from Japan via eBay. I found the toolbox but don't see the boxed "A" anywhere. I've pressed each option within the toolbox also but English never comes up. This is the only forum with owners who have had success switching to English language. Even everyone on dpreview.com says it's not possible to switch to English
www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3401328
Please help !
ages ago(permalink)
Yep, the instructions worked perfectly for my RX100. It should be the second one down in the 3rd spanner menu.
However, looking at the DPR thread, it seems there is a model marketed in Japan that has only the Japanese language.
You should be able to use it ok on defaults, I guess. Numerals are common world wide for setting aperture and + or minus ev. Not a great solution, I know.
Originally posted ages ago. (permalink)
jthommo101 edited this topic ages ago.
Phew....! Thank you Flickr Family. Just like John Hunt I bought an RX100 from the 'Australian' company Camera Sky. The camera arrived this morning, once again in Chinese / Japanese. I phoned them and googled the settings. This thread saved me.
120 months ago(permalink)
I would like to make a comment about those people that have had Sony RX100 cameras that had the Japanese menu on them. In regards to changing the menu from Japanese to English. I am thinking about buying one from Ebay that is in Japanese. So I called Sony tech suppose this afternoon and talked to somebody. Here is what he told me. On the bottom of the camera where it gives the model number, if it says made in Japan then the language can't be changed. If it says USA on the bottom than it can be changed. I would be curious to know how many of these camera that are or were in Japanese have USA on the bottom of them vs. Japan.
119 months ago(permalink)
Hi All
My camera says made in China on the bottom, but I think the language was Japanese. However the 'spanner' menu does not have a spanner at the heading but a toolbox (rather like various television settings which is how I recognised it). Other than that it is in menu no 3 and the option to change is in the boxed A section. Also like others, thank goodness for the English option.
However, I still have a japanese instruction leaflet and the english download is big even when printed 2 pages to each A4.
116 months ago(permalink)
Like some of the others in this thread I was about to send the Sony RX100 2 back.
However, within minutes going through the set up menu I found "English" and confirmed.
So elated that I don't renember where exactly it was.
Camera is made in China, not sure which language it was set to when I got it.
Thanks a lot.
114 months ago(permalink)
I signed up to Flickr just to say thank you for helping me out with this issue. I purchased a barely used RX100 and everything was in Japanese, and I was stressing out to say the least. Thanks again for the help guys, I'm loving this camera already.
113 months ago(permalink)
My problem is slightly different. I have a US version of RX100 V. I would like to get a .pdf of a CHINESE language owner's manual. I have searched the net pretty hard but no luck. Anyone have one, or have a link?
42 months ago(permalink)
I just bought a Sony DSC-RX100. After a couple years shooting my personal projects on a Canon 7D, I needed something more compact that I could carry with me at all times, and the Sony DSC-RX100 looked like it could be the one. The great reviews, the ability to shoot 1080p at 50fps with a fast Zeiss IS lens, full manual control in video mode, focus peaking and a 16mm sized sensor convinced me to go for it!
My footage shot on the 7D improved quite a lot during the time I've been using it, knowing a camera's strong points and especially its limitations is very important to getting good images out of it, so the first thing I did with the Sony DSC-RX100 was to shoot some tests to help me decide which settings I'll be using when shooting video with it.
Like most people around here I learn so much from online reviews and discussion forums, and those have been a great help deciding my gear purchases, so I'm sharing what I learned from my tests as a way to return the favor and give something back to the community. There's been some good reviews of the Sony DSC-RX100 online, and some useful info spread around the internet, but I think this post will cover a lot of useful information for whoever's interested in this camera for video, and much of this info will also apply for any other similar camera.
I started by turning off all the automatic picture improvement options, as they usually degrade the quality of the image and make it less gradable, then I set the codec to AVCHD at 28mbits and 50p (PS).
The RX100 does have a dedicated Movie Recording button, and can shoot video on any Stills mode, but you might get aspect ratio and exposure changes once you hit the Record button in these modes. In video-M mode you'll get what you see on screen.
The Sony RX100 can shoot movies in two different formats, MP4 and AVCHD. All MP4 options are below 1080p resolution though, so I won't get into those. In AVCHD mode however, we get 3 different 1080 options:
The 50i mode is actually capturing 25p images out of the sensor and encoding them as 50i footage, this means that we do end up with interlaced footage, but since it was captured progressively, de-interlacing it will produce a clean 25p image!
Shooting 50fps however would have neighboring frames changing less than when shooting 25fps, helping the encoder do a better job, but still the per frame bitrate is lower, and here's a comparison that shows is. If you look at the darker areas in the back where the window is, you'll see that the 50i version is slightly cleaner.
On the top left you have a frame shot using the Portrait Creative Style, with all the settings set to 0, on top right you have a frame shot using the Portrait Creative Style in its flattest settings (Contrast: -3, Saturation: -3, Sharpness: -3).
On the bottom right frame I added some sharpness to the flat image, which responded quite well, and on the bottom left frame I added not only sharpness but also increased the Saturation and Contrast in order to match the top left frame (Contrast: 0, Saturation: 0, Sharpness: 0).
The result is an image that matches in color saturation and contrast, but with a much nicer detail and less compression artifacts. It looks sharper and cleaner overall, which made me decide to use this Creative Style and these settings from now on.
"If the camera is compressing B&W footage instead of color footage, maybe it can do a much better job at it since it doesn't have all the color information to process, so even using the same bit rate could give us better results."
On the middle left frame, I increased the sharpness and the contrast on the image to make it less flat, and on the middle right frame I did the same, and also desaturated it. As you can see both images are different, since the B&W Creative Style's color conversion is not merely desaturating the image to create a B&W version, it's using a more clever process that also looks better, but anyway, the point here is to test the image compression and figure out which one gives cleaner results, so on the last test frames I increased the exposure by 2 stops to find out how well the images handled it.
On the bottom left frame you can see how much cleaner the image shot with the B&W Creative Style is, compared with the one shot using the Portrait Creative Style, it's actually beautifully clean and overexposing it by 2 stops didn't show any ugly artifacts at all.
So my conclusion on this one is, if you're shooting for black and white, and you're sure that's the look you'll want (since it's kind of hard to color B&W footage if you change your mind afterwards), then using the B&W Creative Style will give you far superior results!
Its purpose is to capture more detail in the areas that are more prone to get lost when using compressed formats, such as dark shadows. It works in the darker areas of the image, making them brighter and producing a flatter image, which makes it easier on the image compression to achieve better results.
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