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Sony has dominated the mirrorless camera market in recent years, but we’ve always known it intended to release a line of flagship cameras that is even more powerful than its popular a7 and a9 models. This new flagship has arrived today: the Sony A1. At $ 6,498, it’s clearly aimed at professional photographers and videographers only – or those with big enough budgets.
Featuring a 50MP sensor with a pair of new Bionz XR processors, the camera is capable of capturing 30 frames per second. I’m not talking about video here: it’s a whopping 30 full-res RAW frames per second. It’s practically like being able to shoot 50 MP video in bursts, giving photographers great flexibility to capture the right moment. In comparison, 4K video is only around 8.3 MP, while 8K video is around 33.2 MP.
Speaking of video, the camera can record 4K at 120fps, which allows you to slow down high resolution video more than normally possible. It’s also relatively easy to smoothly resample this footage to a more cinematic 24fps, as well as 30 or 60fps.
The A1 captures 8K at 30p, which is nice on a spec sheet, but not as useful given the scarcity of 8K TVs. Of course, shooting in 8K gives you extra wiggle room for cropping and panning video intended for lower resolution screens. In fact, the camera actually captures images at 8.6K – using the full width of the sensor rather than cropping them – and resizes them to 8K. This should actually improve the sharpness even more.
Despite the larger sensor, Sony claims it was able to reduce the roller shutter by 1.5x compared to previous models, leading to less wobbly video while panning or weird artifacts in photos. It also helps improve flash sync up to 1/400 sec.
Some other notable features:
- 5.5-stop in-body image stabilization (not new, but still nice to have).
- Sony evaluates the dynamic range at 15 stops, which can be exploited in video with the S-Log 3 curve.
- 199 MP images can be obtained by combining up to 16 images using Sony desktop software.
- The viewfinder has a magnification of 0.9x with a resolution of 9.44 million “ dots ”, which translates to a resolution of around 2048 × 1526. This is the best currently available, but if you go down at 1600 × 1200 (5.76 million dots), you can increase the refresh rate to 240 fps, providing a more realistic display of movement.
- The new AF system covers 92% of the sensor, calculates data 120 times per second, and can now track birds’ eyes in addition to other animals and people.
- It supports 16-bit RAW video output via HDMI
- The A1 has dual-band Wi-Fi for faster photo transfers.
- It is the first Sony camera to support the compressed lossless RAW format to deliver the same quality in a smaller file size.
The camera is on pre-order starting tomorrow for $ 6,498, in the US ($ 8,500 CAD, € 7,300, £ 6,500). UNits are expected to start shipping around February 25 and greater availability in March.
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Published January 26, 2021 – 23:04 UTC
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