Sony’s bought a teeny-tiny new field digicam that’s small and light-weight sufficient to be despatched into the sky on a drone, and it’s packing the high-resolution 61-megapixel full-frame sensor of its A7R V digicam.
The Sony ILX-LR1 is a brand new E-mount full-frame mirrorless digicam that’s solely a bit bigger than a mean deck of taking part in playing cards and weighs simply half a pound, but it has the most recent Bionz XR processor and helps 4K video as much as 60 fps. That’s an extremely small package deal for lots of imaging output, but it surely additionally lacks an digital viewfinder, a display screen of any kind, a regular handgrip, and even a battery. This $2,950 digicam, anticipated to launch in December, is tailored for flying on high-end drones and specialty industrial makes use of — like surveying and photogrammetry measurements.
Whereas field cameras are nothing new, the ILX-LR1 is a very specialised design with drone-first priorities. Because it doesn’t have a battery, it should depend on a drone’s exterior energy supply whereas in flight, and it additionally lacks in-body picture stabilization of any sort as a result of Sony claims its absence saves treasured measurement and weight and that pilots flip it off anyway. And Sony ought to know, because it’s been testing the ILX-LR1 with pro-focused flight techniques from firms like Skyfish and Event 38. (Although, one way or the other, the corporate neglected its personal Airpeak S1 drone, which the ILX-LR1 isn’t suitable with.)
This nifty little digicam might not be for normies such as you or me — additional emphasised by its retailers being restricted to specialty B2B and quantity gross sales networks — but it surely seems like a cool little little bit of artful engineering. And after splitting its A7C digicam into two new fashions (one in every of which additionally has this 61-megapixel sensor), Sony simply can’t appear to cease itself from creating new digicam fashions for even essentially the most area of interest of circumstances.
