Sony RX10 II First Shots posted! Take a look at the new stacked-sensor high-speed superzoom

by William Brawley

posted Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 5:22 PM EDT

Sony RX10 II First Shots are here -- hot and fresh, straight from the lab!

As the name suggests, the RX10 II comes as the successor to the very popular Sony RX10 and maintains many of its hallmark features, such as the versatile Zeiss-branded, 24-200mm-equivalent lens with a bright, constant f/2.8 aperture. Also remaining largely unchanged is its sturdy, modern body design. What has changed is all under the hood, with the biggest feature being an all-new image sensor. Though it keeps the same 20.2MP resolution, the Sony RX10 II -- like its new smaller sibling model, the RX100 IV -- houses Sony's all-new 1-inch-type Exmor RS stacked CMOS sensor with integrated DRAM. The new sensor tech gives the RX10 II a huge boost in speed, especially when it comes to continuous burst shooting and now 4K video.

According to what we've seen and heard from Sony, the sheer image quality performance is largely similar to its predecessor, with the focus on the Mk II being speed. The JPEG processing with the RX10's BIONZ X image processor, in fact, goes against the grain so to speak, in that it's been purposefully tweaked to be less agressive on noise reduction in exchange for better fine detail at higher ISOs.

Below are a few 1:1 crops at base ISO and 3200 comparing the new Sony RX10 II against its predecessor, the RX10 Mark I. We invite you to head over to the Sony RX10 II Samples Page to view all our lab First Shots and download both full-resolution straight-from-camera JPEGs and RAW files for your own analysis and tweaking. Be sure to check out the Comparometer, as well, and match up the RX10 against other competing cameras, such as the Canon G3X and Panasonic FZ1000, as well as any other camera we've tested.