Sony a6400: no mirror for vloggers and nothing for videographers?
30.1.2019
Translation: machine translated
Video: Dominik Bärlocher, Luca Fontana
A new camera should enable Sony to defend its leading position in the market. A first glimpse of the Sony a6400 shows off some new features and a potentially fatal criterion.
Sony has finally released a new camera. This decision is all the more important given that the Japanese manufacturer has turned the camera market on its head. According to its own information, the group is even the market leader in cameras, and not just those with interchangeable lenses. The brand is proud of this and is determined to retain its title. The a6400 is not only expected to keep Sony at the top of the camera world, but also to open up the world of Sony cameras to a new category of videographers: vloggers.
Vloggers are special. You can usually recognise them by their outstretched arm holding a camera, the fact that they talk very loudly and stand in interesting places. They talk about themselves and the world, do a bit of product placement, and, from time to time, give information too.
The Sony a6400 - Sony Alpha 6400 or Sony α6400 by its official name - introduces a feature that will delight the vloggers among you: a touchscreen that rotates 180 degrees. So you can see yourself while you're filming. Sony is also offering a handle of sorts for triggering important functions and creating the "optimal vlogging experience".
The lightweight body
When you first pick it up, you immediately notice that the a6400 is extremely light. This may, in part, be due to the small 18-135mm E-mount lens attached to the camera, which was seen at Sony's launch event at the Komplex 457 in Zurich, or the body, which weighs just 403 grams. For comparison, a normal camera, like the Sony a7sii, weighs 584 grams without a lens. With lens, my a7sii comes in at around 1.4 kilos, while the a6400 with APS-C CMOS sensor is well under a kilo.
The device conceals some interesting details, even if not necessarily on the hardware side. Certainly, a faster processor, the Bionz X, should bring more performance. On the first try, the a6400 responds quickly, but its strength lies in the software.
IA in the lens
The Sony a6400 is one of the first cameras from Sony to incorporate artificial intelligence at software level. This detail won't please all professional photographers and M-mode fanatics, but the result is convincing. In full auto, the a6400 does a good job and the promising autofocus that automatically detects subjects' eyes - animals will come later, their passion for photos being rather limited - works right up to the back of a dimly lit concert hall.
What's more, the autofocus is fast. Very fast, in fact. According to Sony, it's even the fastest autofocus in the world, with a reaction and adjustment time of 0.02 seconds.
Really only for vloggers and not videographers?
But the ILCE-6400, as the Sony a6400 model is named, has one flaw: the camera has no output for headphones. Sure, you can plug in an external microphone, but you still have to get the sound to the camera properly And the verification in all this? You can't. If something went wrong, you'd realise it at the latest after launching Premiere Pro and watching a silent film in 4K HDR.
Another very nice detail and one that benefits everyone who films? The new "No Limit Recording". The predecessor, the Sony a6300, used to switch off automatically after 29 minutes of recording. So does the a7sii, by the way. The a6400 can now record unlimited takes. This detail makes it interesting again for anyone shooting with a Sony camera.
So the camera isn't for videographers like those in the Digitec Galaxus video team? Or is it anyway? A test will show us.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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