I have an M5 and find the Sony far, far superior for AF. Point the Sony RX10 IV at a bird or a dragonfly perched, and the AF detects the subject, the little green focussing squares dance around it and if the bird hops around, the AF locks on to it and retains focus. For BIF, there is no comparison, with the Sony locking on far faster and tracking so much better. The M5 is excellent for scenes, portraits etc and is much better in poor light but not for action.It seems that you have more experience with the RX10 IV camera and I appreciate your thoughts on it. I had it for less than a week and had no time to truly test its features. Because of no external charger provided, I had to charge one battery at a time in camera via USB. I had to leave the power on because of on/off time was quite long and it chewed through the battery quite fast. From my limited experience, diffraction at f/8 or even f/5.6 was giving me quite soft pictures. Your example birds seem to fly left to right and not towards you. Perhaps because of positioning, I could get only a handful of shots in focus when the creatures were coming towards me, because the AF was locked during zoom in/out. Focus speed was very good only when leaving it at a fixed focal length. At the end of the day, my wife with her M3 in green mode could get better shots and more of them in focus than me!
Cameras that don’t have interchangeable lenses have copy variation of the lens just do copies of interchangeable lenses and I bought my Sony after carefully testing it in the store, which also had a 30 day return policy. An earlier copy had to be returned because it was soft.
Regarding BIF, I tend to take photos of birds going across the frame with all the cameras I use as, apart from owls, birds tend to look better in profile or at angle towards you rather than straight at you. You can’t zoom the Sony during a burst in continuous AF, you have to take your finger off the button and you can zoom. This is more problematic for video rather than stills.
A 1" sensor has a crop factor of 2.7, which means that f/8 which you used, has a depth of field equivalent to f/22. My 5DSR would be seriously diffraction softened at f/22 and I try to use it at f/5.6 or wider. Sony put an f/2.4 to f/4 lens on the RX10 IV camera which is sharp wide open and within the diffraction limits, and the lens should be used wide open.
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