Ian Reid............ LCD in low light video.
Hi Ian,
Re your query with the RX100 "going dark" in low light when pressing the red video record button, perhaps the following may or may not be useful.
With top selector dial set at any of the Photo settings eg Intelligent Auto, P, M etc and pressing the video record button in LOW LIGHT, the LCD display and resulting video will darken to varying degrees. I am not sure why this happens, maybe something to do with 50fps when set to photo mode.
One way to solve this is to set the top selector dial to "video" mode ie the video symbol. With this you can select P, A, S or M (fully manual) in video mode.
If using P (in VIDEO mode), for example, you can set the ISO to say 1600 in low light, to bring up the LCD display to a desired level of brightness. Now if you press the red record button in this mode, the LCD display will NOT change and grow dark, the LCD display will remain at the same level of brightness. The resulting video and grabs will be as displayed on the camera's LCD.
Furthermore, if you set the large adjusting ring to exposure compensation, you can fine tune the brighness to your liking. You can actually adjust exposure compensation real time when taking a video !
I find it better to be slightly underexposed, since grabs can be tweaked in Sony's image grabbing software.
The down side is that you have to return the top dial when taking stills. Since I mostly take video this isn't a problem for me.
The above is a LOW LIGHT fix. The camera will take acceptable video in the photo settings in GOOD LIGHT.
Hope this helps.