Sony held an event in Manhattan to announce a new camera: the RX100 Mark V. The Mark V sits at the top of the range, and boasts an even faster autofocus system than the predecessors. It has a 1-inch, stacked Exmor RS CMOS image sensor with 20.1 l-MP of resolution, 24-70mm equivalent f/1.8-2.8 aperture zoom lens, and Sony’s latest Fast Hybrid AF autofocus system. It’ll be available this month for $1,000.
The Sony Cyber-shot RX100 V offers what Sony calls the ‘professional level AF performance’ in the form of new sensor with 315 phase-detection AF points over 65% of the frame, claiming that the world’s fastest AF speed at 0.05 seconds. The front-end LSI gives a turbo boost to performance, allowing the sensor to be read faster and more data to be buffered. That means the Mark V now offers 24 fps shooting at full 20.11-MP resolution with autofocus and auto exposure for up to 150 frames for the JPEG + Raw. That’s stills shooting at movie frame rates, folks. Eye AF is also available in AF-C mode.
There’s still plenty to make a video enthusiast happy: a 960 fps slow motion mode (that is upscaled to 1080/30p) for up to 8 sec, 1080/120p and S-Log profiles are all here.
Wi-Fi and NFC haven’t gone anywhere, but you will find a new way to initiate the connection between the camera and your mobile device: QR codes are available for those of us without NFC, or the next-to-useless NFC.
The new RX100 doesn’t look much different than the ones that preceded it, and still has a compact size that can fit in a jacket pocket. It has the same pop-up viewfinder and LCD display, as well as control ring around the lens found on prior cameras.