Sony has ported over the A6000’s amazing autofocus system to the “new” camera deemed the A5100— sorry buyers of the original Sony A5000. The Japanese camera hasn’t skimped on the phase detect AF points either with the Sony A5100. It has the same fully loaded 179 AF points as its higher-end sibling.
What’s more is that the new compact body also has the A6000’s 24.3 APS-C Exmor CMOS sensor and Bionz X image processor. With all these flat improvements, the Sony A5100 seems like it’s just the A6000 in a smaller package with some slightly different ergonomics and no integrated electronic viewfinder. Which is all perfectly fine really. In our review of the Sony A6000 we found the small shooter to have great image quality and incredibly fast autofocus performance.
As for a few other improvements, Sony has passed on Eye AF and Lock-on AF modes, which first debuted on the Sony A7 and A7r. Lastly the new sensor can record full HD 1080p video in AVCHD as well as the XAVC-Scodec for 50 Mbps footage
The Sony α5100 will be available this September black and white for $550 for the body only. There’s also a $700 kit version bundled with the 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 motorized zoom lens. Read on to see more images and specs on the Sony A5100.
Sony A5100
- Approx. 24.3-effective-megapixel ExmorTM CMOS image sensor
- High-speed BIONZ XTM image processing engine
- ISO sensitivity: 100 – 25600
- Continuous shooting at up to 6fps with continuous AF/AE for up to 56 frames (JPEG Fine L)
- Fast Hybrid AF (179 phase-detection AF points / 25 contrast-detection AF points)
- Lock-on AF
- Eye AF
- Touch Focus / Touch Shutter
- Full HD Movie XAVC S (60p/50p, 30p/25p, 24p), AVCHD (60p/60i/24p) NTSC/PAL
- 3.0 type wide 921K-dot tiltable LCD touchscreen
- Built-in flash (GN4) Clear Image Zoom
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