Hardware and user interface

The A6000 is one of Sony's beefiest-looking mirrorless cameras yet. The body is still quite compact, but a high-quality metal build means it should survive minor bumps and tumbles without suffering any dents and scratches. This model replaces Sony's NEX-6, retaining the OLED electronic viewfinder, full-size hot shoe, dedicated mode dial and pop-up flash. There's a 3-inch, 921k-dot, tilting LCD, as well as a 24.7-megapixel CMOS sensor, WiFi, 1080/60p video and a top sensitivity of ISO 51,200. It's clearly not lacking in the spec department.



The A6000 is hardly the most intimidating mirrorless camera, but it does have its fair share of buttons and dials. You can select your shooting mode using a dedicated wheel mounted up top, then make tweaks to aperture and shutter speed with the secondary dial to its right. The bundled 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 power zoom lens has a toggle on the side for adjusting focal length, or you can zoom in and out by turning the front lens wheel. There are plenty of dedicated and customizable buttons on the back, ranging from exposure compensation to ISO, along with a video record button positioned beside the thumb rest.



The camera's software interface is identical to what you'll find with recent NEX and Alpha cameras. While there's no touchscreen, individual tabs make it easy to click through to the setting you need. You can also make tweaks on the fly using the quick-function menu, and you can fire pics and videos off to a smartphone or computer over WiFi by pressing the clearly marked transfer button.

Performance and battery life

Sony claims that the A6000 sports the "world's fastest autofocus." That's difficult to verify without testing several recent models side by side, but the Alpha is certainly speedy. There are 179 autofocus points, making it easy to get a sharp shot quickly even with complex scenes and the 11 frames-per-second consecutive-shooting mode should serve sports shooters just fine. The only process that remains a bit time-consuming is transferring shots to a connected smartphone. After you pair the two devices, you'll still need to wait for your phone to connect to the camera's WiFi network before you can start moving photos over, either one by one or several at a time.



As for battery life, Sony's managed to make improvements over the years without replacing the 1,080mAh cell. The A6000 comes bundled with Sony's NP-FW50 battery back, which has been shipping with the company's mirrorless cameras since the NEX-3, a model that first hit stores just about four years ago. Officially, you can expect to get 360 shots with a full charge, though we got through a full day of shooting, including more than 500 stills and three minutes of HD video, with a nearly 50 percent charge remaining.

Image quality

The A6000 offers fantastic image quality, on par with recent Sony NEX and Alpha cameras. You won't necessarily notice a tremendous difference if stepping up from the NEX-6 or comparable models, but if you're moving over to this ILC system, you should be quite pleased with the results. Click through the gallery below for some examples, then scroll down as we evaluate a selection of images.