August 3, 2022

Sony A6000 custom buttons

The camera has two buttons that you can assign to any purpose.
C1 is on top of the camera next to the shutter button.
C2 is on the back of the camera at the lower right.

To make these buttons do what you want, press the menu button, go to the "gear" (settings) page 6 and look for "Custom Key Settings".

As a note, I just upgraded my camera from 3.1 to 3.21. Before the upgrade the custom key setting page was a confusing mess. Now with 3.21 it makes sensse.

I have C1 set to "focus magnifier", which is OK by me.
C2 is set to "lock on AF". We will see about that. I change it to AF/MF Ctrl toggle.

Other buttons

It turns out you can remap essentially any button on the camera. A list is as follows: 
AEL button  (AEL hold by default)
C1 and C2 (as already mentioned)
center button ("standard")
left button (Drive mode)
right button (ISO)
down button (exposure comp)
Interestingly, you cannot remap the "up" button (display). Also I find it surprising that you can remap the center button. It seems like once you did that, it would be impossible to work with the menu system.

The options vary for each button.

And then there is the Fn button

This gives access to 12 commonly used functions for quick access.
These are displayed in a 6 by 2 matrix. You have a top (upper) row of 6 and a bottom (lower) row of 6.

You can change the default setup in much the same way as you set up custom buttons. You press "menu", then go to the "gear" (settings) page 6, and look for "Function Menu Set".

When you press "Fn" to access the matrix, many of the settings have icons for which you may not have a clue what they mean. For example on my camera, the first (upper left) just shows a rectangle. What could that possibly mean (it is drive mode in single shot mode). It actually tells you in plain english above the matrix, but who would expect that?

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org