Sony announces the new A6500

Sony has been known for updating products at a rapid rate, and that is held true here with their new flagship mirrorless camera, the A6500. The camera comes just months after they released the A6300 not that long ago.

The A6500 has a 24.2-megapixel APS-C sensor and has the first for Sony’s E-models to offer 5-axis-in-body image stabilization. There are features found on the older model that are also found on the newest one such as 4K video and an 11fps shooting mode that has continuous autofocus.

However, the A6500 can shoot 11fps for up to 307 frames in RAW mode, which is 30 full seconds of shooting time. The camera can also read out its entire 6K sensor but scale it down to 4K without any pixel binning. A new feature found on the A6500 is called “Slow and Quick mode” which lets the user take pictures as slow as 1fps all the way up to 100fps. The user can shoot 4K video at up to 100Mbps, and view 4x slow motion in real time. Just as on the A6300, the A6500 also gets a 3.5mm headphone input, but no headphone output.

There are some new physical changes to the A6500, such as there is now touch screen operation, as well as a touchpad which lets users shift the focus point just by dragging the finger across the screen. That feature can be found most helpful in Video mode, as it makes the process for pulling focus easier just by touching the new focus point on the screen. There is also a 2.4 million dot XGA OLED electronic viewfinder, as well as the ability to extract stills from videos (8-Megapixel stills from 4K and 2-Megapixels from HD modes) WiFi, QR, and NFC are all on board, as well.

As someone can expect, all these new features won’t come cheap, as the A6500 is going for $1,400, or €1,700 in Europe for the body only.