Blog

On Jan­u­ary the 26th, 2021, Sony intro­duced the new flag­ship of the Sony Alpha series, the Sony Alpha 1. Here is the video of the live presentation:

Appar­ent­ly, the goal with this cam­era was to sur­pass the Canon EOS R5 in all points. On paper, this seems to have been achieved:

Tech­ni­cal data accord­ing to press announcement:

• 50,1 megapix­el BSIs­Sensor (8.640x5.760px)
• Up to 30 frames / second
• OLED viewfind­er with­out blackout
• Eyes AF for birds too
• Real-time eye AF with 120 AF cal­cu­la­tions per sec­ond (A9 only 60/s)
• AF area: 92% of the image area, 759 phase-con­trast AF points
• 9.44Megapixel opti­cal OLED viewfind­er with up to 240fps (but then only 5.76Megapixel)
• Flash sync speed up to 1/200s with elec­tron­ic shut­ter, 1/400 with mechan­i­cal shutter
• IBIS with up to 5.5 stops of stabilization
• Almost no rolling shut­ter (less than a9)
• 8K/30P video (down­sam­pled from 8.6k) in 10bit 4:2:0 for up to 30 minutes
• 4K/120P Video in 10bit 4:2:2
• Dynam­ic Range: 15 stops pho­to, 15+ stops video
• New more intu­itive menu sys­tem with touch oper­a­tion ( sim­i­lar to the one of the a7S III
• Sup­port for loss­less com­pressed RAW files, finally.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the cam­era also sur­pass­es the Canon EOS R5 in price by far: Sony spec­i­fies an MSRP of $6,499.99.

All in all though: WOW, what a camera!

Sony has appar­ent­ly tak­en all the remain­ing crit­i­cisms of the pre­vi­ous Alpha mod­els and elim­i­nat­ed them. The announced Sony Alpha 1 com­bines the advan­tages of the a7RIV and a9 in one body and even goes beyond that.

At least on paper…

I am very curi­ous about the first test reports. The cam­era is sup­posed to be avail­able from March 2021. Let’s see how Canon will react regard­ing this mod­el, the rumors about an EOS R1 are already increasing.

The first short review is now avail­able from Tony Northrup:

So, the guys from Sony still put their pants on one leg at a time…