New stills cam from Sony boasts super stabiliser

There’s a new full-frame camera on the block and it’s toting a 5-axis optical stabilisation system on the sensor – a world first, apparently.

It’s Sony’s A7 II, building on the success of a line of cameras including the highly-rated-for-video A7S.

Sony says the camera offers “outstanding image quality in a compact size and light build”. It boasts a 24.3 effective megapixel 35mm CMOS sensor mounted such that it can wobble along five axes and thereby compensate for camera shake when taking both stills and video. The company reckons that’s good enough to equate to a shutters speed 4.5 stops faster for stills.

“FIVE axes?” we hear you say. Yes: angular shake – pitch and yaw; shift shake – X and Y axes; and rotational shake – roll. And because the sensor’s got the stabilisation it means even non-stabilised lenses feel the benefit.

An LCD screen and OLED viewfinder provide monitoring and there’s “30% faster” autofocus with a 117-point phase detection system and 25 point contrast detection.

As to video, the camera can shoot 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) at 50p and 24p in the XAVC-S 50Mbps format that Sony’s rolling out to most of its video gear these days, with linear PCM audio, all wrapped in an mp4 file. No mention of 4K video though which is unusual these days…

Picture profiles can be set up including the S-Log2 gamma for a wide dynamic range. Sony also says the camera starts up 40% faster than before.