This is one beast of a camera! Sony’s A1 is a 50-megapixel camera that offers 30 fps shooting speeds at 8K and comes with a built-in LAN connector! And it doesn’t come cheap … costing a cool $6,500 just for the body.
Taken from Engadget … Sony has just dropped a bomb on the camera world with the launch of the A1, its new flagship full-frame mirrorless camera with some breakthrough features. Thanks to a new 50-megapixel Exmor RS stacked CMOS sensor and the cutting-edge Bionz XR processor, it offers 30 fps shooting speeds, 8K 30P/4K 120P video and a lot more. With all that, it can easily take on Canon’s R5, though it comes at a significantly higher price.
The A1’s key feature might be its incredible speeds. It can shoot 50.1-megapixel images at up to 30 fps, with both autofocus and auto-exposure enabled, using the electronic shutter (that’s 1,500 MB/s worth of data, Sony noted). At those speeds, you can capture up to 155 compressed RAW files before the buffer fills. Speeds drop to 10 fps with the mechanical shutter, but that’s still excellent considering the very high resolution sensor.
What’s more, you’ll get a blackout-free view of those images thanks to the “world’s first” 240Hz OLED electronic viewfinder (EVF) with 9.44 million-dot resolution and 0.90X field of view. That’s similar to the EVF found on the A7S III, but the A1’s EVF has double the refresh rate and a larger field of view.
If video is more your thing, you can shoot 8K 10-bit 4:2:0 video at 30 fps internally (to either SD or CFexpress cards), using the full width of the sensor. That 8K video should be sharp, as it’s super-sampled from an 8.6K image size. 4K recording at up to 60 fps also uses the full width of the sensor, or adds a small 1.1x crop if you turn on active image stabilization. If you want to shoot 4K at 120 fps with a full sensor readout, it will crop down to Super 35 mm with 5.8K oversampling. Autofocus works in all video modes.
The S1 can record with 10-bit 4:2:2 color detail and S-Log or hybrid log-gamma (HLG) modes, using Sony’s latest HEVC/H.265 code with intra-frame coding. If that’s not good enough, it will output 16-bit RAW video to an external recorder. The A1 also features Sony’s S-Cinetone color matrix found on its Venice, FX6 and other Cinema Line cameras. One downside for video shooters and vloggers is that the rear display only flips up and not around like on the A7S III.
Read the rest at Engadget
You’ll pay for all this power. Pre-orders start tomorrow at $6,498 for the body only, which is $3,000 more than the Canon EOS R5. However, the A1 is now Sony’s flagship aimed at professional photographers and videographers, who won’t balk at that price for a second. Shipping is expected to start around February 25th, with consumer availability sometime in March.
Source: Engadget
