Sony recently posted some new a6500 4K Footage on their official Youtube channel, plus the camera is now shipping a bit earlier than anticipated in Europe. Amazon UK is listing 2 in stock, albeit at a slightly higher price of £1532 inc. VAT compared to most places which are taking pre-orders still at £1499. Amazon US shows the camera as currently out-of-stock, meaning that early pre-orders of the camera have already shipped.
The Sony a6500 was a bit of a surprise announcement from Sony in early October, not even a year after the a6300. Even though the a6500 shares quite a lot with the a6300, there are two new major features that may sway a lot of folks who plan to use the a6500 for video towards the newer model. Those new features are a 5-axis in-camera stabilisation and a touch screen, which lets you use your finger to lock and move the focus point(s) around when looking through the EVF.
Here’s some 4K sample footage from the new Sony a6500:
And some slow-mo:
Sony a6500 Features
- 24.2MP APS-C Exmor CMOS Sensor w front-end SLI
- BIONZ X Image Processor
- 4K UHD/30p in XAVC-S 100Mb/s 8bit 4:2:0 internal
- 1080p/120fps plus NEW S&Q for 1-120fps Slow-Motion!
- XGA Tru-Finder 2.36m-Dot OLED EVF
- 3.0″ 921.6k-Dot Tilting Touchscreen LCD
- S-Log2/ S-Gamut3.Cine/S-Log-3 and S-Gamut3/S-Log3
- 5-Axis SteadyShot INSIDE Stabilization
- Built-In Wi-Fi with NFC
- 4D FOCUS with 425 Phase-Detect Points
- Records onto a single SDXC card
- 3.5mm Audio mic input
- No headphone input
- Micro HDMI out – UHD 8bit 4:2:2 to external recorders
- Up to 11 fps Shooting and ISO 51,200
- US Price – $1,399 at B&H
- EU Price – approx. 1,700 Euro
- UK Price – £1,499 inc. VAT (Wex)
For those of you looking to “rig” your new Sony a6500 as to bring it up to production standards, the good folks at Italian premium accessories manufacturer LockCircle have devised a rather beautiful cage for the a6500, which you can read more about in our post here.
Sony also apparently implemented a new setting allowing users to select a higher temperature setting, or in other words preventing shutdown when things get too hot – like on the a6300. The ‘High’ temperature setting option allows the 6500 to continue recording up to the 29 minutes and 59 seconds limit. According to Sony, users can then immediately resume recording in 4k without any cool-down time.
There is no guarantee that this wont damage the camera in the long term, as the “temperature switch” is just raising the operating temperature limit of the camera. Long term tests are required to determine whether this actually works or not. And now that the camera is shipping (at least in Europe) and soon the States and worldwide, we’ll have a better idea of whether the overheating shutdown has been finally fixed.
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