Industry News: Sony announces their new flagship camera, the alpha a1

Sony makes an announcement 26 days into the new year. It'll be eight/nine months before Canon/Nikon even hint of a mirrorless flagship, quite frankly I might not wait. I never thought I'd say, "I'm getting a Sony Camera." I'll wait for some reviews then go from there. Nikon and Canon have their work cut out for them .

What do you shoot today? Does one REALLY make such a decisions, owning some ecosystem, to not wait .... even for something like 10-12 months?
 
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As resolution increases and in camera RAW becomes more commonplace, CFEa might be limited in what it can offer in terms of performance, but outside of RAW (which I personally would not shoot on a hybrid anyhow), I don't think CFEa is a bad compromise.
I think technology will provide even better compression than what's available now, so CFEa is probably remains sufficient.
There is not much reason why Prores RAW or BRAW can't be recorded internally by stills cameras as long as they care to pay for licensing it and implement it to cannibalise their cinema cameras a bit more - oh wait :)
 
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I love that they have two card slots that are the same. I wish my R5's did but for my work I will stick with my R5 but for some people I think this will be a great choice.

I love the speed of the CFE card, but I'm traveling, I'm bringing the laptop, which only has a SD slot. I shoot to both cards or copy from one to the other when I have down time, but it's nice to have something I can put into the laptop without lugging around another adapter/dongle.
 
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Joules

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Manny Ortiz/Fro live blog confirms the mechanical shutter speed only 10fps. lmao.
Wow, 10 FPS mechanical on the top end. Talk about crippling the camera :LOL:

Their electronic shutter marketing material suggests awesome electronic shutter performance though. I have not seen the bit depth at 30 FPS mentioned yet. Does it drop that far down that they are afraid to mention it, or did I miss it?
 
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Wow, 10 FPS mechanical on the top end. Talk about crippling the camera :LOL:

Their electronic shutter marketing material suggests awesome electronic shutter performance though. I have not seen the bit depth at 30 FPS mentioned yet. Does it drop that far down that they are afraid to mention it, or did I miss it?

--

Sony has had electronic GLOBAL SHUTTER since the late 1980's on their 3-CCD Betacam SP ENG camera (DAMN! I can't believe we paid $55,000 USD for an equivalent 756 by 486 pixels SDTV resolution camera and $35,000 for the Fujinon SDTV-resolution Servo lens!)

SONY KNOWS ELECTRONIC SHUTTERS VERY VERY WELL having 30+ years of experience with them starting with their Hyper-HAD sensors!

It's the OTHER manufacturers who have to catch up with Sony on that and I still love the Betacam-style 4K Shoulder-mount ENG Cameras for ergonomic reasons!

We have a few of the following Global Electronic Shutter ENG cameras:

CCD:

CMOS:

They are AWESOME to use!

V
 
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Joules

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Jul 16, 2017
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--

Sony has had electronic GLOBAL SHUTTER since the late 1980's on their 3-CCD Betacam SP ENG camera (DAMN! I can't believe we paid $55,000 USD for an equivalent 756 by 486 pixels SDTV resolution camera and $35,000 for the Fujinon SDTV-resolution Servo lens!)

SONY KNOWS ELECTRONIC SHUTTERS VERY VERY WELL having 30+ years of experience with them starting with their Hyper-HAD sensors!

It's the OTHER manufacturers who have to catch up with Sony on that and I still love the Betacam-style 4K Shoulder-mount ENG Cameras for ergonomic reasons!

We have a few of the following Global Electronic Shutter ENG cameras:

CCD:

CMOS:

They are AWESOME to use!

V
The a1 defintively does not have a global shutter though. And so I am curious how far they drop the bitrate to achieve 30 FPS and the incredibly low distortion they demonstrate in they launch video. Do you have the firgures for that by chance?

Also, purely talking about the latest consumer ILC, I don't have the impression there is all that much catching up to do anymore. The R5 has already demonstrated that Canon can do high resolution, high throughput imaging with very quick read out speeds now. With the R1, that can only improve.
 
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Some other disappointing news here: Sony went with CFExpress A which further buggers up sharing cards when Nikon and Canon have went for the more sensible and faster type B cards. It is almost as if Sony just wish to be different, and never in a good way.
Type A does not make much sense for this camera since using SD never makes sense but I get why Sony would want to standardize across models where switching between SD and Type-A make sense.
 
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Bert63

What’s in da box?
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Disappointed that it wasn't something that will pressure the R5/6 pricing downwards. R5 is now a “budget” option.


Said if before and I’ll say it again. The R5 is a bargain - it costs the same as the 5D4 did at launch and there is nothing else like it out there.
 
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jam05

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What am impressive improvement once again - a realy impressive featureset.
I think the a7s III was very specific for video people - while this camera looks like a perfect, high end allrounder. Sport, landscape, productshots, video... it simply got everything one could wish for...

It runs "up to 30 minutes", according to sony in 4k60 or 8k. So similar overheating is to be expected like on the R5. Lets see how this plays out on the fans :-D
Impressive on paper anyway. It’s putting it up to Canon. It puts the R1 under pressure and makes the 1DXIII almost old fashioned. You’d need a lot of storage space. 1TB laptops will fill quite quickly. It’s so fast you wonder will it be robust . It must have some very fine engineering inside with tight tolerances . You could burn through 100,000 shutter cycles in no time. I look forward to the reviews especially its focus tracking abilities.
Get a grip. Perfect for who? Don't assume that you speak for everyone. One can say that about many cameras. Simply say that it may have everything for you. You can 't possible speak for every genre of photography and every photographer.
 
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jam05

R5, C70
Mar 12, 2019
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Wonderful camera but I don't know where I'm going to put it. I'm buying cameras faster than I can clear space for them.

But why Alpha 1? Where did Sony learn to count?
Then you're simply attesting to being a gear head. Buying more cameras than you have room to place them. Cameras don't take up that much space individually.
 
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Then you're simply attesting to being a gear head. Buying more cameras than you have room to place them. Cameras don't take up that much space individually.
That's why I like mirrorless cameras so much. I've got 600 of 'em packed under the cushions of my sofa, nobody notices.
 
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