Wingpilot Loc: Wasilla. Ak

The other day I noticed what turned out to be some redpolls attacking the bird feeder in our backyard. I grabbed my A6300 and put the 55-210 zoom on to try to get some pics of them. (fast moving little buggers, they are). I was using the clear image zoom feature in order to get it up to 420mm eq. zoom. Then I noticed that the birds were not in good focus, so I went to change from wide area focus to the flexible spot focus mode, only to find that that feature was not available. What the heck's going on? I tried different shooting modes and that made no difference, then I found that going back to the native zoom range restored that feature. I selected spot focus, only to find again, that I lost it when I zoomed out. Now I was frustrated. I contacted Gary Friedman, who wrote the book on the A6300 and asked him. He suggested cleaning the camera's and the lens's electrical contacts. That didn't work. So I sat down this morning and worked with the camera, hoping I wouldn't discover that I'd have to send it in for repairs. Here's what I found: You can select and keep whatever focus mode you want, and keep it in place, so long as you don't use clear image zoom. As soon as you engage CIZ and go beyond the lens's native zoom range, in this case, 210mm, the camera defaults to wide area mode. So what I learned is that using clear image zoom has two drawbacks--this one and you can't use CIZ when shooting in RAW. Lessons learned, and now I know more than I did an hour ago. I post this in case anyone else has experienced this problem, or if they do in the future. My thanks to Gary Friedman for answering my emails and working with me on this.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Thanks for that. I wonder if the a6000 has that feature.

Yes, it does.
https://eriknaso.com/2015/12/21/sony-clear-image-zoom-gets-2x-zoom-with-no-image-quality-loss/

Wingpilot Loc: Wasilla. Ak

I didn't know that that issue existed until I wanted to use spot focusing and found I was stuck with wide area focusing when using CIZ. I hope this helps others with the Sony A6xxx and A7xx series cameras with clear image zoom.

Adicus Loc: New Zealand

I've had the 6300 for about 9 months now and still really have to get to know it. I didnt know of this feature at all until today so really must get to know this camera before our Scandinavia trip in a few months time.

Wingpilot Loc: Wasilla. Ak

I'd never paid attention to this until yesterday. So I did some research and educated myself and learned something I didn't know previously. It's good to keep in mind that it will only give you wide area focus when you use the clear image zoom feature. It's probably not an issue if you are focusing on something in the far distance, but if you want to focus on something small, like a bird, which I wanted to do, and it's fairly close--in this case, about 75 feet away, you're going to get other stuff in focus other than what you necessarily wanted. I got some brush branches in focus and a fuzzy bird. Live and learn.