Sony Starts Long Slog of Fessing Up To Spec Sheet Footnotes

Remember that super camera that would give us 30 frames per second? Welllllllll, the first people getting their fingers on the Sony A1 body are finding some, um, subtleties. Foremost among these is that the 30 FPS shooter will actually be a 15 FPS shooter unless you’re using one of a subset of Sony’s first party lenses.

The logic to this is a bit strained: because the autofocus calculations are happening so quickly, the third party lenses are assumed to not rack the focus quickly enough to respond. Yeah, that didn’t make sense to us either. Suffice it to say that Sony is very appreciative of all the third party lens love its received while it spun up its E-mount camera system, but now all you nice manufacturers can go die. Arigato gozaimasu! 

Some other downers include an effective ISO cap at 32,000 before you’re just turning up the gain; The pixel shift feature gives you four times the resolution, but needs 16 captures to do so, with each one providing an opportunity for the off-camera processing to choke.

It’s not all bad. There are some useful-sounding features regarding flash tuning while in electronic shutter. You can also play with settings for how it interprets an image into a JPEG file. There are enough new innovations that it appears not all have yet come out in the launch materials.