attached you will find two photos I have taken, exposure manually. I have taken these with a Sony RX-100 and as you can see the sky is overexposed while the landscape is exposed "alright". I was wondering if I am doing something wrong with the exposure or if the dynamic range of the Sony RX-100 (or better the chip) is just not good enough to capture a cloudy sky (the sun was behind the clouds, no direct sunlight).
Any help would be appreciated.
No, you're not doing something wrong, and yes, this is a dynamic range issue. It's very common no matter the camera, and typically becomes more common the smaller the sensor format. The RX-100 is actually better than most P&S cameras in this regard.
In a situation like this, if you're shooting JPEG, and not RAW, you may want to use the RX-100's HDR mode. In this mode, the camera will take three shots: one "underexposed", one "correctly" exposed, and one "overexposed" and then combine them into a single JPEG that will (hopefully) have everything exposed well. The camera does need to be kept as still as possible for the three shots. You can also tweak how wide a dymamic range to cover in the image (from 1EV to 6EV).
The term you're looking for is dynamic range, which is the difference between the brightest and darkest areas.
If this was shot in RAW I would be surprised if you couldn't pull the highlights back and recover the detail in the clouds, but if this was a JPEG then it's simply a case of the camera not being capable of knowing which bright areas to darken and which bright areas to leave alone. Cameras tend to make decisions that affect the whole frame, not just parts of it, which is your job once you get the files on the computer.
attached you will find two photos I have taken, exposure manually
Not just dynamic range, but mostly how it is used and how it is exploited. Such shots need to be exposed correctly, and camera settings need to be low contrast, low saturation and no sharpening; most of the cases lowest possible ISO too (in case of Sony, 1 stop over the lowest ISO because of the limitations of the analogue-to-digital converter, it plugs shadows at the lowest ISO setting but with a little of ISO boost it does its job). The exposure needs to be such that you are 1/3 EV below overexposure warning to give some room for image postprocessing (unless you are recording raw, where you can go 1/3 to 1/2 EV over the warning, depending on the camera). Bracketing the exposure and using a tripod helps a lot. Next, exploiting the dynamic range in Photoshop, Photoline, GIMP,...
To use the dynamic range better, you can put a magenta filter (CC40M) on the lens.
I never tried built-in HDR modes, but they are worth a try if you are not going to use raw mode.
