THe World Through My Lenses: New firmware for Sony a33/a55 and NEX3/5

New firmware upgrade for owners of Sony Alpha a33, a55 , Sony Alpha NEX 3 and Nex 5 released by Sony which includes the new Picture Effects mode in all of them and a new enhanced manual focusing function in NEX series called 'Peeking Mode'. The 'Peeking mode' allows users to select color (red,white,yellow) and are shown in the live view LCD screen the Depth of Field area which are the point of focus (refer to a youtube link below). In addition, the orange Alpha logo appears when turning off the NEX and some other improvements.

The 'Peeking Mode' allows better manual focusing for NEX users with manual lenses and best of all is available during video recording. The Picture Effects mode is available for video recording but the effects aren't changeable during recording. Also the 'Picture Effects' mode limits the user on settings like aperture, shutter, ISO, DRO/HDR and metering. The method to overcome that is with manual lenses with own aperture ring to control the DoF.

For the Sony alpha a33/a55 users, the current D-RANGE button are now customize-able to few other functions such as the metering mode, creative style (profile) , picture effects, sweep panorama and flash exposure. But in my humble opinion (IMHO) , those functions are accessable from the 'Fn' button and the picture effects and sweep panorama are only access-able in their 'Dial-mode' , thus making the button quite useless and is an insignificant customized change. IMHO , the best function is still the DRO/Auto HDR+ mode remain there.

Apart from that the new update is awesome and saves time for editing and photoshopping for some users =)