Call it serendipity. I had experimented last season with turning off SteadyShot and at the same time increasing shutter speeds. This is about birds, some in flight and mostly not. But birds who are not flying are usually not holding still either; they move their heads and other parts almost constantly. That technique made it harder to use the camera and did not satisfy me, either. To be clear, SS works for the live view, not only for the moment of exposure.

This post is only about my RX10 IV and my a6500. It may apply to other Sony's and it's possible it would apply to other brands and cameras but I have no data on that. The RX10 IV has a maximum aperture of F 4.0 and the FE70200 on my a6500 is also F 4.0 maximum. Both are very sharp wide open. The lenses are 220 mm and 200 mm respectively, at full zoom. The equivalent (full frame) focal lengths are 600 and 300 respectively.

Recently, for other reasons, I switched my settings as an experiment. I had been using shutter priority at 1/1250 or 1/1600 with and without SteadyShot. I was never satisfied with the IQ. I changed to "almost manual" (a recent thread argued that auto-ISO + M is not really manual). I used the opportunity to close down to F 5.6 or even a bit more and slowed the shutter to 1/800. Below that, the motion of the subject becomes a problem. The light levels were approximately "sunny 16" but the birds are not always in direct light; hence auto-ISO. I use the Zebra feature to avoid over exposing the bright areas on the birds and that works very well via Exposure Compensation when indicated. Since the Sony's are "live view" this can be done in real time and chimping is not needed.

The slight increase in DOF helped. But I think there was a noticeable increase in image quality gained by letting SteadyShot work. I'm not sure, but there is a lot of data to suggest that it can't work correctly at the higher shutter speeds and Sony says to turn it off when using a tripod. I was not using a tripod. I've had previous threads on that subject and never came to an unarguable conclusion. These results support the idea that SS doesn't work well at higher speeds but the accurate numbers are still hypothetical.

A few shots were blurred because of subject motion but overall, the results are an improvement over my previously favored settings. The bonus is that increasing DOF sometimes gets more of the bird in sharp focus. In addition, if there are multiple birds there is a better chance of getting both within acceptable DOF.