Sony a1 - Most Fun I've Had in Awhile! _ Initial Review 50MP 30FPS 8K

Okay, welcome back, Hybrid Shooters. It's Jason Vong, and we can finally start sharing our tests and results that we've been getting from the brand new Sony A1. And let me just start off with this epic photo here that I got of this peacock. Just absolutely stunning. The amount of details, the colors from its plumage, like wow, this is why I love high megapixel cameras, because let me go ahead and show you what this looks like uncropped. By all accounts, the framing was not 100% perfect, but I didn't have a longer telephoto zoom lens. Best that I got was my Zeiss Bodice 135, and I didn't want to get too close to it because I didn't want it to freak out and close its tail train. So this was the best that I could get, given the distance and the spontaneity. And if I were to share with you this, it'd be like, yeah, whatever. But by reframing and cropping in, just wow, this looks like a high quality print. And I do hope you're watching this in 4K on either a desktop or your TV, because that's where this photo will really pop. If you're watching from your phone right now, promise me, promise me that you'll rewatch this video when you get back to a bigger screen. Okay, 50 megapixel review. So in that instance right there, that's where the high megapixel count comes in clutch. It allows you to recrop and reframe your shot and still get pixel perfect results, especially when you have those split second moments, you're caught with your pants down, but you still need to get the shot. Oops, the framing wasn't perfect, but you can crop to make it perfect. Now I know generally there's a stigma about cropping your photos, like, oh, a good photographer would just get it right in camera. Well, if you can't, that's great. But for moments like these where you can't, something like a 50 megapixel camera can save you a shot. Now for the average consumer, this is absolutely an overkill. I'm talking about casual portraits, personal pet photography, day-to-day functions. You don't need it. 12 megapixels, 24 megapixels, that's more than good enough. But if you travel, if you do a lot of outdoor stuff, you do landscapes, you do streets, you do casual wildlife, local team sports, this is a nice safety net to have, especially when you don't wanna invest in a super long telephoto lens. You can crop in and get a variety of different shots. In my A7R IV video, I mentioned I got this one cityscape shot from a super far distance with a 35 millimeter lens. But because it was 61 megapixels, I was able to crop and reframe and made it look like I shot it with a 70 to 200 millimeter. And that photo still came out pretty damn good. So definitely consider the A1 or save that money, go straight for the A7R camera if you always feel like you fall short in terms of distance in your photos and not wanting to carry a massive telephoto lens around. Moving on to 30 frames per second. If you plan on bursting 30 frames per second, 50 megapixel compressed RAW, I highly urge you guys to get a CF Express type A card because it clears that buffer out insanely fast. When I was doing initial testing with it, I just wanted to see how well it would respond to me navigating my menu and changing a few settings around while the photos were still being written in. But before I could even get to any part of my menu, the A1 already finished writing in all of the photos. Wow, that is insane. Now I've tested burst with lossless and compressed and it still writes pretty fast. It's just when you're comparing bursting compressed RAW, the progress bar does stay up a little bit longer. But in that time I was able to access the menu and change a few things. But what about bursting with an SD card? Now, obviously it's slower, right? Even with the best Sony SD card, we're comparing a 700 megabit write speed versus 299 right here. I think it goes without saying, but if you're a pro, the choice for memory is obvious. But even if you're not bursting much, do consider getting yourself a decent SD card. So 30 frames per second review. If you're gonna be shooting 30 frames per second and you need to deliver right away, it would be bonkers to shoot 50 megapixel compressed RAW, let alone 20 frames per second lossless or compressed RAWs. I think anyone who needs to be bursting 30 frames per second would opt to deliver in JPEGs. Now I've shot concerts before, A9, 20 frames per second, and my clients, they don't want RAW. I'm gonna be delivering them an SD card full of JPEGs. And we would have runners during the show coming up to me and another photographer where we would trade cards and I would continue shooting while they are curating and offloading my photos onto their laptop. That way when the moment, the moment when the artist walks off the stage, five of my photos along with an article talking about their successful show would already be up in the internet. Now I can't speak for sporting events, but likely I think it's the same story. Team wins, boom, front page. But unlike my situation, they probably don't need a runner. They would be taking advantage of the wired LAN, the Wi-Fi or the FTP function. So bursting 50 megapixel RAWs when you have time to filter and edit, I think that would be like in a very highly specialized scenario. Okay, Sony A1 groundbreaking 30 frames per second and 50 megapixel RAWs, great. But can the autofocus keep up? This I'm going to have to revisit in a future video just because I didn't test it with the right Sony lenses. Meaning I'm not using Sony lenses with the new extreme and dynamic linear motor. And what that is, is a mechanism that is the thrust inside of some of the newer lenses that helps keep up with the autofocus instruction that the camera is demanding. As you know, the A1 has 120 calculations per second versus 60 on the A9. So it's able to calculate focus at twice the speed. So this new mechanism currently only exists in the 400 and 600 G Master, as well as the recent 20 millimeter and the 35 G Master. Now, unfortunately at the time of testing and the launch of this video, most of the super long telephoto lenses were already out for the Superbowl. So I couldn't get my hands on them. I don't have the 35 G Master quite yet, but I do have the 20 millimeter. And this one has the dual extreme dynamic linear motors. And my God, it kept up so well at F 1.8. My eyes are super sharp in every photo. But it's also unfair. It's a much wider lens. So I definitely want to test it out with the 400 or the 600 or at the very least the 100 to 400 or the two to 600. The latter lenses, they don't have the XD linear motor, but it does use the direct drive supersonic motor. But the reason why I wanted to specifically use these lenses because they're a lot more common for high speed action stuff. And that would give us a more accurate test of the A1's 120 calculations per second. Now I did use the Zeiss Bodice 85, a shorter telephoto lens at F 1.8. While it doesn't have the same focusing mechanism like the Sony lenses, it's not bad. Excuse the double chin. I feel like it does loses a bit of focus as I got super close to the lens, but the ones that were leading up to this point were in focus. Now, 1.8 is a bit extreme because the depth of field is so shallow and I'm running towards the camera. As you guys know, this is a very difficult focusing situation. But again, not a bad job. Now, if we look at the actual longer telephoto lenses, they're obviously not gonna be F 1.8. Especially the zooms, they start at F 4.5 or 5.6. And I actually did a test with the Zeiss Bodice 135 at F 5.6. And I was getting really great results. Sharp. Feel free to rewatch any of these sequences and pause to analyze the frame. And you can actually go frame by frame on YouTube with the comma and the period button on your keyboard if you're watching it on your desktop. Okay, since we're talking about autofocus and I did show you a photo of my peacock, I wanna quickly say I'm not qualified to give my opinion on bird eye autofocus. Number one, I am not a bird photographer. And again, I don't have the proper lenses nor the patience to actually do actual bird photography. So you might wanna get a review on this particular subject matter from an actual bird photographer. But with the peacock though, the bird eye autofocus, it was triggering maybe 50 to 60% of the time. Again, I'm not doing actual bird photography as the function is intended. So I don't know if the AI would classify peacocks as the type of birds it's programmed to recognize, but it definitely didn't feel as good as if I were to do dog or cat eye autofocus. That in all of my testing with Sony cameras works spectacularly. So if you're planning on getting this camera for birds, I would say definitely do more research and find someone who actually does bird photography and is testing out the Sony A1. Okay, 8K. I can confirm it can shoot an hour and a half continuously without the heating signal popping up. And it could probably do more if you have more card space. During this test, I was using the 160 gigabyte CF Express card along with a 64 gigabyte SD card. I had them do an automatic switch when one card fills up. So yes, you can record 8K with a high-end SD card. And the cool thing was, I had it connected to a wall charger because the A1 does support USB 3.0 power delivery. And the battery didn't seem like it got used at all. It showed a healthy full bar the whole time. However, the file sizes were massive. It takes all of the 160 gigabyte just for it to record approximately 50-ish minute of 8K. So I take back what I said in the last video. I am not shooting wedding ceremonies in 8K. I don't have time to deal with the file sizes. But for quick one to two minute videos, maybe max five minute, hell yes. Especially for these landscape gimbal push-in shots, it looks really good in an 8K timeline or we can downsample it to a 4K timeline. Hell, you don't even need to resize it in a 4K timeline. It still looks just as good. There's a lot of latitude to play with when you're shooting in 8K. Now, there were some minor shakes in my gimbal footage. So I tried warp stabilizing these clips in Premiere and they actually ended up looking pretty damn good. I did have IBIS turned off in-camera so I can take advantage of the gyro capability. If you throw this into Catalyst Browse to maximize the gyro data stabilization, it's even better. I've done gyro stabilization with 4K and the a7S III and for the most part, it works extremely well. But depending on how much work it needs to do to stabilize your clip, sometimes it might end up cropping in a little too much and you lose some of those details in your footage. But with 8K, even if it doesn't have to do a massive crop in, when you export out in 4K, it won't put too much dent into your footage. Now, speaking of which, Catalyst Browse only lets me export max 4K resolution so I couldn't even re-export this in 8K anyways. But I believe if you sub to Catalyst Prepare, the pro version of this software, you can export the gyro stabilized clip in 8K. So while I was testing out 8K, I also tried out S-Cinetone. This is a new picture profile for alpha cameras. I believe this is in the FX6 and the FX9, which are high-end cinema cameras. Now, S-Cinetone isn't really Venice color science, but it's Venice-like colors, if I'm not mistaken. But for right now, I don't really have a strong opinion on S-Cinetone yet. I wanna shoot a little bit more with actual film lighting, but apparently it doesn't need much color grading. It's supposed to give really good results straight out of camera. You sort of expose it to how you see fit. So if you underexpose, it has a lot more contrast to your footage, but if you overexpose, it could look a little washed out. So I'm still learning a little bit more about S-Cinetone. I'll go ahead and link a video down below by Alistair Chapman. He introduces what S-Cinetone is. It's a video on the FX9 and the FX6, but I think a lot of the information can be applied to the S-Cinetone in A1. But to me, I mean, yeah, the S-Cinetone looks good, but I still kind of prefer the no-picture profile standard look. To me, it just pops more, and it's more fitting for YouTube content like this. But for movie folks, you know, I get it. Apparently what I like is it's a little too TV, right, or too YouTubey, I guess. So that's why they have these color profiles, or this specific color profile for cinematic movie production making. Now, I've been getting a lot of questions asking me, how does the A1 low-light compare to the A7S III? And boy, the A7S III is still king, okay? And that's because the smaller pixel size in the A7S III sensor is what helps keep that noise level to a minimum. I'd say about 12,800, the A1 is still acceptable, but the next bump up to 16,000, that's when things in the A1 starts to fall apart. It's getting mushier. It's starting to lose details, while the A7S III holds up quite nicely. I would say this, if you have to push the low-light with the A1, shoot in 8K and down-sample it into the 4K timeline. It definitely looks a lot better. As you can see at ISO 32,000, the max for the A1 video, there's a bit more details in the 8K frame compared to the 4K. And of course, the A7S III can scale up all the way to 400, 9,600. Not that it's usable, but if you need to see into someone's dark soul, the A7S III will do the job for you. By the way, in case you're wondering, the LCD and the viewfinder displays are extremely clear. And I bring this up because some people were asking me in the previous video if they were any good. I'd say it's pretty on par with the A7S III screen. It's nice and bright. When I was reviewing some of my 8K footage or the 50 megapixels, whether I was looking through the viewfinder or the LCD display, I can tell if I nailed focus or not. And there's simply a lot of details when you're looking back on these footage. These are all just really preliminary tests. It's only been about a week since we got our hands on the camera, so it's a little unfair to call this a full-blown review. There is still so much more left uncovered about this camera, but I only have a few more days with it. So hopefully I'll see what I can do, what other things I can do with it before I have to return it. Otherwise, I will share more when my own unit of the A1 arrives in March. Guys, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace. Vivian and I always strive to bring you guys the best and most unique image and video samples whenever we talk about cameras and lenses. And oftentimes, we have high production costs to make this all happen. It's sponsors like Squarespace that help funds our production budget so we can keep bringing you guys more high-quality samples. So the best way to support us and to help us continue to do what we do is to simply check out how Squarespace can help you. Link down below. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform to create beautiful websites. No coding knowledge whatsoever. Perfect for people like me because I just wanna make YouTube videos for you guys and not have to worry about coding my entire website. 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