SONY ALPHA 6400
Sony’s latest mirrorless camera looks like its predecessor, but has a range of enhancements. Angela Nicholson gives it a thorough workout
Find out how this camera compares to its predecessor
The Sony a6400 is the replacement for the a6300 announced over three years ago, and it has a lot in common with its predecessor. Sony has stuck with the same pixel count, 24.2 million on the APS-C format Exmor sensor, but the a6400’s chip has a front-end LSI and it’s paired with the latest incarnation of Sony’s BIONZ X processing engine. According to Sony, this enables up to 1.8x faster processing than is possible with the a6300. As a result, the native sensitivity range has risen to ISO 100-32,000 with a maximum expansion setting of ISO 102,400. New image processing algorithms are also present to boost image quality.
Sony has gained a lot of fans for its autofocus (AF) systems and the a6400 has some exciting new developments in this area. A total of 850 AF points, 425 phase detection and 425 contrast detection, cover 84 per cent of the imaging area, and the BIONZ X processing engine helps reduce the focus acquisition time to just 0.02 seconds. That’s the world’s fastest for a APS-C format camera.
Sony’s Eye AF system is incredibly useful for wedding, portrait and social photographers shooting with the a9, a7R III and a7 III, and the a6400 gets the latest version which Sony is calling ‘Real-time Eye AF’. When activated, it searches for eyes in the scene and focuses on them. It manages to find eyes when they are very small in the frame and tracks them, keeping them sharp as they get closer to or further away from the camera. Sony has also announced that it will roll out an exciting new extension of this technology, Animal Eye AF, as a firmware upgrade. It’s set to be added in the summer and it should be a bonus for wildlife and pet photographers.
In addition, the a6400 has Real-time Tracking that uses artificial intelligence to recognise and track subjects after they’ve been selected with a tap on the screen. The camera uses colour, subject distance and brightness information to identify the subject
“Sony’s Eye AF system is incredibly useful for wedding, portrait and social photographers”