Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ckurose 3349 days ago
What this article totally misses is that this is Sony's flagship offering not for all professional photographers, but specifically for professional SPORTS photographers.

Sports photographers need super fast continuous shooting so you can get 20 shots of that epic catch in one shutter press and choose the best one. Likewise 1/32,000th of a sec shutter speed is twice as fast as most cameras' 1/8,000th of a sec fastest shutter speed, which helps to freeze quick motion.

The high number of AF points is a sports feature too - one area that mirrorless still significantly lags traditional DSLRs is that their AF systems are not as fast as the type used in DSLRs, which have dedicated AF sensors (mirrorless does AF off the imaging sensor), so a ton of AF points is one way mirrorless tries to narrow the AF gap.

3 comments

> their AF systems are not as fast as the type used in DSLRs

Heh, my Canon 600D's autofocus is EXTREMELY slow D:

Yes, but 600D is not meant to be a sports camera :)
1/32,000th is 4x faster than 1/8,000th, no?
Might it also be useful for wildlife?
Yep, wildlife too. Sports and wildlife have been the weak points of Sony kits due to AF speed and lack of long native lenses (they announced 100-400mm lens today too).
I was immediately thinking of the hummingbird example and then looked up the stats and it has a wing beat 70 times per second; So this is more than fast enough as I would imagine are many other cheaper offerings for that refresh rate.