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Sony’s new A6500 boasts a bigger buffer and in-body 5-axis stabilization

By Marcus Wong - on 7 Oct 2016, 3:12pm

Sony’s new A6500 boasts a bigger buffer and in-body 5-axis stabilization

Barely ten months after the launch of the A6300 comes the new A6500. Announced in New York yesterday, the new A6500 shares a similar body design to the A6300 but adds a host of operability improvements, and some new technological advancements to let it sit as Sony’s flagship APS-C mirrorless camera.

A newly developed front-end LSI chip has been added to the camera which enables faster internal processing, allowing for better performance than ever. The A6500 uses the same thin wiring layer design for its APS-C 24.8MP Exmore CMOS image sensor as the A6300, but the combination of the BIONZ X image processor and this new LSI chip is supposed to give the A6500 better performance over its ISO range of 100 to 51,200.

While the maximum continuous shooting speed is still 11 frames per second, the LSI chip allows the A6500 a much bigger buffer for continuous shooting – up to 307 frames (JPEG). Combine that with the 4D Focus system from the A6300, and you should get a camera that’s perfect for shooting sports.

The A6500 will have a total of ten custom buttons.

The camera's 425 phase detection AF points, focusing tracking and accuracy are also available when using non-native A-mount lenses with Sony's LA-EA3 mount adapter.  It also adds a silent shooting mode,  Eye AF in AF-C mode, AF in focus magnifier modes and an Expand Flexible Spot AF mode so you should have no problems getting perfect focus.

Another major addition for this camera is a 5-axis Image Stabilization (IS) system that allows up to 5 stop compensation. This means greater resolution even in challenging lighting, and Sony says the IS will work with both E-mount lenses and A-mount lenses (when used with mount adapter).

If an E-mount lens with OSS is mounted pitch and yaw will be compensated in the lens, while horizontal, vertical and roll axes will be compensated in the camera body.Also, half pressing the shutter button will allow you to see the effect of the image stabilization in the viewfinder or on the LCD screen, so you can continuously monitor framing and focus.

The rear screen allows for more accurate touch focusing. 

The A6500 will also allow for touch screen focusing, allowing you to lock focus on a subject by just touching it on screen. Dragging your finger across the screen will shift the focus point appropriately, allowing for greater accuracy in placing focus.

In terms of video capabilities, the A6500 will again offer internal 4K (3840x2160p) recording, using full pixel readout without pixel binning in Super 35mm format on the full width of the sensor. When shooting in this format, the camera gets 6K of information, and then oversamples the information to get quality 4K footage with improved detail and depth.

The XAVC S will again be supported, allowing the A6500 to record at bit rates of up to 100 Mbps during 4K recording and up to 50 Mbps when shooting Full HD. What’s new though, is the incorporation of a “Slow and Quick” (S&Q) mode for slow and quick motion video. In this mode, you can choose frame rates from as low as 1 fps to as high as 120 fps to achieve anything from 5x slow motion to 60x quick motion. The A6500 processes the video in-camera, so you can review the footage after shooting without transferring the clips to a PC.

You will get S-Log gamma recording for up to 14-stop latitude in the S-Log3 gamma setting, and S-Gamut is supported for an even wider color space. Both options allow for greater flexibility in post, and still shooters will also be able to extract still frames from shot footage in-camera too.  Stills pulled from 4K and Full HD modes will be approximately equivalent to 8MP and 2MP images respectively.

The new magnesium alloy body should be more robust while sporting a deeper handgrip.

The A6500 will get a new magnesium alloy body and a high-durability shutter with a tested life span of approximately 200,000 release cycles, as well as a robust lens mount, recessed grip, larger shutter release button, and a total of ten custom buttons. Meanwhile, there’s also a newl user interface, which is supposed to allow for easier settings adjustment. Two new metering modes will also be introduced: Highlight, where exposure metering is focused on the brightest area of the frame, and Entire Screen Avg, which maintains an average metering for the entire image.

The A6500 will be available in North America in November at a RRP of US$1,400, so we can probably expect to see it next year at roughly S$2100. Stay tuned and we’ll update this post as soon as Sony Asia sends out their press release!

Source: Sony America, DPreview

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