Why Sony Camera Menus Are So Confusing, Even After the 2020 Redesign
Ask anyone who shoots Sony about the menu and you’ll get a story. Usually it’s about a setting they knew existed, needed right then, and couldn’t find. Sony’s Alpha bodies have some of the best sensors and autofocus on the market, and for a decade they also had the menu system photographers complained about most. It got so familiar that Sony’s own ambassadors joked about it during launch presentations.
How It Got This Bad
Sony’s interchangeable-lens business came from two directions: the Konica Minolta camera division it bought in 2006, and its own consumer electronics side, which launched the NEX mirrorless line in 2010. The menu logic A7 owners fought with for years goes back to NEX.
Then Sony shipped bodies fast. Every generation brought new features (more AF area modes, eye detection, log profiles, new video codecs) and each one was slotted in wherever the existing structure had room. Nobody went back to reorganise. By the A7 III and A7R IV the menu was a row of top-level tabs, each split into numbered pages, with items grouped by internal engineering categories rather than by what you were trying to do. Autofocus settings lived in more than one place. Stills and video options sat side by side. Labels read like spec-sheet shorthand (“AF w/ shutter”, “Priority Set in AF-S”). Options would grey out with no hint about which other setting was blocking them.
Mirrorless makes all of this worse. A compact body only has room for a few dials and buttons, and the camera has hundreds of settings covering stills and video. Whatever doesn’t get a button ends up in the menu.
What the 2020 Redesign Fixed
Sony rebuilt the system for the A7S III in July 2020. Categories moved into a colour-coded column down the left side. The whole menu, Fn menu included, became touch-operable for the first time. Stills and movie modes got separate menus that switch with the mode you’re in, and the layout shows two levels at once, so highlighting a category shows its settings before you open it.
It was a real improvement with a catch. The new interface needs the Bionz XR processor, and Sony said it wouldn’t come to older bodies by firmware. The A7 III, A7R III, A7R IV, A9 and A9 II all kept the old menu. Even the original A7C, launched a couple of months after the A7S III, shipped with it.
Those are the cameras that fill the used market. A lot of people’s first Sony is a secondhand A7 III, which is why the complaint never died.
Why It Still Feels Like a Maze
The new menu is better organised. There’s just more of it. The A7 V, Sony’s current mainstream full-frame body, has 62 pages of settings. It also adds a Home/Status panel at the top of the menu that’s easy to leave by accident and tends to get between you and the tabs you want.
Some of the old habits survive. Video formats are sorted under Sony’s XAVC branding, with resolution and compression in one menu and frame rate and bit depth in another. Timed exposures past 30 seconds still need a separate Bulb Timer setting, where other brands let you dial in longer shutter speeds the normal way.
Reviewers are split. Some now rank Sony’s menus among the best in class and find settings quicker to reach than on Canon’s R6 III. Others still call them sprawling. Both camps have a point. Sony fixed the layout, and the volume kept growing.
Set It Up Once, Then Stay Out
The practical answer on any Sony, old menu or new, is to stop visiting the main menu during a shoot. Spend one evening going through every page with the camera in your hands. Newer bodies show a short in-camera explanation for each setting, which helps.
Anything you change more than once goes into My Menu. The settings you change constantly go into the Fn menu, which has 12 slots and opens with one press. Then assign the custom buttons, AF-ON and the rear dial to what you actually use, and store a second full configuration on a memory recall position (one for stills and one for video, or one for street and one for portraits).
Newer bodies can also save the whole setup to a memory card. Do it. A factory reset then costs you a minute instead of an evening.
The hand on the forehead is optional.