Sony A1 First Impressions
FedEx delivered the brand new Sony A1 to our front door today. At first glance you would be hard pressed to think it was a new camera. The A1 has the same styling as Sony’s current Alpha line (closer to the a9 II than others), but when you turn it on things change. Drastically.
The Sony A1 has a brand new menu system and it is much easier to navigate than previous Sony bodies. Now you can see what options are behind each main menu item.
That being said if you are used to the previous menu system, Sony has moved menu items around and added a larger breakdown to menu options. So it may take you a moment to figure things out.
We have already thrown an SD card into the camera, set it for 20FPS, turned on auto focus tracking and went to town.
Sony A1 Hold On to Your Butts
The speed at which this camera does everything is like a Jack Russell on steroids. The camera will capture JPEG, HEIC, and RAW files. Within the RAW setting you now get the option to record Compressed, Lossless Compressed, and Uncompressed file quality types.
Our simple auto focus tracking test dealt massive results. Using a SanDisk Extreme Pro SD XC II card (300MB/s speed) gave us 78 photos in Uncompressed RAW, 96 Lossless Compressed RAW, and 188 Compressed RAW photos before the camera hesitated to write into the buffer. Those are 50MP RAW files!
That is just the beginning. We will be testing the Sony A1 over the course of the next month. The final article will be released on the BorrowLenses.com blog. Until then, know that Sony has kind of dropped the mic here. Again.
