Sony Alpha 1 Mirrorless Digital Camera

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50MP 'stacked' full-frame CMOS sensor

30 fps burst shooting with electronic shutter (lossy compressed Raw/JPEG only)

8K/30p video recording with Log and 4K Raw video out over HDMI

1/400 sec flash sync with the mechanical shutter (1/200 sec with electronic shutter)

9.44M-dot OLED electronic viewfinder with 0.9x magnification

3.0" tilting touchscreen with 1.44M-dot resolution

Full-size HDMI port, headphone/mic ports, USB-C port with 10 Gb/s transfer speeds, ethernet port

Dual UHS-II / CFexpress Type A card slots

CIPA rated to 530 shots with rear LCD (430 through the viewfinder)

Weather-sealed body

737g (1.62 lb)

but usually, when a camera claims it can do everything, there are often some noteworthy caveats. So, today we're going to put it through some tests to see if we can find those weaknesses. Let's get Undone!

Sony Alpha 1 Mirrorless Digital Camera does the 8K overheat?

I was impressed by two things. One, how long it took it to overheat, and two, the recovery times. I ran the 8K test five times and averaged

1 hour and 19 minutes before shutting down due to heat during the 8K recording.

This was in a 23°C environment,

which is about 74°F, and with the camera temperature shut off setting is set to High. I've already seen some tests floating around out there with the shutoff temp set to Standard,

and in my opinion, those tests are irrelevant. I tested it with both bit rate options, the 200mbps, and the 400mbps, at 30p and at 24p, and with and without USB power delivery supplied. And that's the only thing that seemed to shorten the runtime significantly was the USB charging. I only got 58 minutes when doing that, but for every other test, I got about an hour and 20 minutes of 8K recording. Which is a fantastic result. And best of all it doesn't seem to be affected by general camera use prior to the recording like the Canon R5 was when it first launched. But more importantly, the recovery times are outstanding. For example, I was able to record in bursts of 20 minutes on, one minute off for roughly three hours before I killed two batteries and it just stopped, and there wasn't a single

heat warning during that time.

And it actually cools down while being on as well, so after the initial shut-off, you can immediately turn the camera back on and set up your next shot and the camera will still continue to cool down. In fact, after recording for an hour and 15 minutes, I stopped recording, and very quickly did a card swap and a battery swap and started recording again in less than 90 seconds, and I was able to record for another 24 minutes before the heat warning started again and I found that if you turn the camera off and remove the cards and battery, you get your full 80-minute record time back in just five minutes of rest. So, it's still not going to be the solution if you want to record a three-hour podcast,

but for anything up to an hour, hour and a half, you should be good assuming you're in

a temperature-controlled environment. Unless you use a dummy battery. So, I did a test here with a V-Mount battery connected to a dummy battery inside the Sony Alpha 1.

And unlike USB charging which made it overheat faster, using a dummy battery significantly reduced the heat generated. Not only was the camera much cooler to the touch, but I recorded for over three hours of 8K before eventually stopping due to time constraints. I think I'm going to stop here because I've been recording for three hours and 12 minutes at 8K 24p and there's not even a heat warning, and that's recording using a dummy battery. So, I think this is sufficient to say that with the dummy battery you can record pretty much indefinitely with 8K. Make sure you follow me on Twitter and Instagram, by the way, if you want to see little updates like that ahead of time.

I tend to post some work in progress on there. Now obviously, environmental factors are going to be at play here. I wouldn't expect to get 80-minutes of 8K recording on a trampoline in the hot Florida sun for example. But I can't really test that kinda stuff for you at this time because it's winter here in Canada. I also checked the 4K modes as well to see if the pixel binning in full frame, or the oversampled APS-C modes have any impact on overheating and the results were pretty much identical to the a7S III.

I was able to record 4K60 in either mode for just over two hours before the battery died

with no overheating warning. So, no issues there. You should also know that the 80-90  minutes of 8K recording you can get before overheating is actually very similar to the battery life in that mode as well. The 8K eats up the battery about 30% faster than the 4K, so this made the overheating not seem like that big of a deal, because you can just take that cool-down time as a five-minute break to pop in a new battery and card and then likely be able to roll for at least another hour after that. And even though the USB power delivery did seem to have a negative impact on overheating, it is worth noting that this camera has the same charging capability as the a7S III where you only lose a couple of percent per hour

while providing USB power delivery,

so that's fantastic if you need to record for very long sessions in 4K. And it's using the same FZ-100 battery as all the other recent Sony cameras and I'm quite happy with the battery life. So overall this section was impressive. I gave the Canon R5 a really hard time because of the absurd recovery times and the fact that it had that bogus 30-minute time limit even when it wasn't overheating. And I wished they would have focused

the marketing more on the excellent photo features of that camera. Well, here Sony's doing something somewhat similar. They have an amazing photo camera, but 8K shows up in all the headlines. However, in this case, the 8K actually feels like a real, usable feature at launch. And there's no 29-minute 59-second record limit. So, I have no complaints other than the fact that it costs something like $2,600 more than the R5, but more on that later. Alright, now let's talk about that resolution. So, you've got the 8K, but then in 4K, you've got two modes. You can put it in an APS-C crop mode, which gives you an oversampled 5.8K image, or you can record full frame 4K, but using pixel binning. So, the question I had was how these modes stack up against the a7S III. So, obviously, the 8K is a lot better. In fact, the 8K looks a little better at 200% than the a7S III's 4K looks at 100%, which is impressive. And the 5.8K oversampled mode looks sharper than the a7S III and has fewer artifacts as well, but it does have more obvious noise and comes at the cost of a 1.5X crop. So, what about the pixel-binned, full-frame 4K? Surprisingly to my eyes, it looks very similar to the a7S III, but with better noise performance. But the binning algorithm they used managed to keep the aliasing, moire, and color artifacts to a level that's not any worse than what we're seeing on the a7S III. So, honestly, it's basically an a7S III but now with an 8K mode. And that's amazing. The 4K modes are identical between the a1 and the a7S III when it comes to codecs, bit depth, bit rate, power consumption, etc.

And so, the storage and media requirements are the same as well. The 8K is a bit different though. It's only H.265 and only has 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, but it does offer both 24p and 30p variants, as well as 10-bit color. And there are two bitrate options

of 200mbps and 400mbps. Both of which can be recorded with just a V60 card. So you don't need CFexpress Type-A or even V90 cards to record 8K on this camera, which is crazy. And I also had a hard time telling the difference between the 200mbps and the 400mbps files. So overall I'm really impressed with the 8K recording. And the 4K  recording is the same whether recording internally or externally. So, it's not like you get an unbinned image over HDMI or anything. They're identical. But it does have the same HDMI raw output options that we've been seeing from Sony cameras lately. The biggest benefit I'd say it has over the a7S III, whether recording in 8K or the binned 4K from that 8K, is the noise improvement at lower ISOs. Alpha 1 beats the a7S III in noise performance in S-Log at every step until ISO 12,800, which is when the a7S III takes over. But even at 12,800, the a1 does an impressive job and is better than almost any other camera I've tested other than the Sony S series. But there's a benefit here if you don't need extreme low light but do tend to shoot in that 5000 to 10000 ISO range.

On the a7S III the image cleans up at ISO 12,800 in S-Log3, but on the Alpha 1, it cleans up at ISO 4000, which might be a more useful value for some shooters. This is similar to the way that the a7 III performs but just better and cleaner. And similarly, the Alpha 1 has a base ISO of 800 in S-Log3, whereas it's ISO 640 on the a7S III. I also compared it to the a7R IV to show you how it stacks up against another high-resolution sensor, and it demolishes the R IV at pretty much every stage. Especially when it comes to the color shifts that accompany these high ISOs. And in the color department, the Alpha 1 is Sony's best camera to date. If you've followed my channel for a while, you probably remember me saying that the a7S III is extremely accurate but can lean a little green and you might want to shift your skin tones a touch more magenta. Then, the FX6 came along and did that shifting for you, maybe a tad overcorrected though, and didn't give you an accurate white balance. Well, Alpha 1 is the perfect in-between. 

It has the excellent white balance tool that you get from the a7S III, with almost exactly the same color science, except it has that slightly shifted skin tone toward the red/magenta and away from the yellow/green. It's subtle, which means it will mix nicely with the a7S III, but it's better. And I'd say at this point it's damn near perfect.

And the Alpha 1 also comes with S-Cinetone, which is the new Picture Profile 11 on this camera. And this is a great inclusion that I'm very happy about. And would obviously be my suggestion for people who want a great straight-out-of-camera image

instead of fussing with different Cine4 or HLG settings like we had to on the previous bodies. This also suggests that there's nothing stopping the a7S III from having S-Cinetone either. Now we know it can easily fit within the new framework and the software doesn't necessarily require a cine camera. So, I urge Sony to add this via a firmware update to the a7S III. As someone who raved about the a7S III and own multiple bodies of it, I feel a bit cheated now and would like that added, please. I think it's fair game to make hardware features exclusive to more expensive premium bodies, 

but software features like S-Cinetone should not be the type of thing that requires you to spend an additional $6,500 to get. Thanks for listening. Because yes, other than little aspects like that, the new Alpha 1 is essentially the same as the a7S III when it comes to the menu and interface. I do like some of the new inclusions though. Like the option to have the shutter closed when the camera is powered off. I like that it's there and user controllable. Something I've been wanting for a while since these sensors can be dust magnets. There are a couple of software things that weren't improved, however, like the issue where if you enable

HDMI on-screen display on an external monitor

that the screen on the camera goes black. That's still a thing. Or how you can't set a custom white balance while in a memory recall mode. Those are two features that I'd still like to see fixed. Okay, now let's jump into rolling shutter and dynamic range. The rolling shutter performance on this camera is impressively good considering what it is, and when you record in similar modes to the a7S III,

you'll find it very similar to the a7S III. However, it is a bit worse when recording 8K. I would say that it's still fast enough to be in that passable zone, but the a7S III in 4K is a bit better than the Alpha 1 in 8K. But the impressive part is that the Alpha 1 is better in 8K than most of Sony's previous cameras or even many of the competing brands

in any of their modes. And somehow the dynamic range is better too. I went on and on about how impressed I was with the dynamic range of the a7S III. I was getting 13 stops in S-Log3 and that was rivaling the cine cameras I was testing at that time. Well, I busted out the Xyla 21 again. Thanks again to DSC Labs for supplying this amazing tool as well as the color charts I use. Love these things. Anyway, I was consistently getting 1/5 to a 1/3 of a stop better on the Alpha 1 when compared to the a7S III, setting a new Imatest record for me of 13.2 stops with a signal-to-noise ratio of 2. I was honestly shocked at this result and ran it two more times to be sure it wasn't a fluke. I also did some brief autofocus testing, just to see if there were any quirks in 8K or any limitations to the autofocus, but no it performs essentially the same as the a7S III. They claim it might be a bit better, but we're splitting hairs at this point-- it's sticky, reliable, and smooth. And just like the a7S III, it features the new refined controls for speed and responsiveness. I also don't have a lot to say about the body. It's very similar to the a7S III, but without a flip screen, just your basic tilty one, and it has an a9 style stop dial on the left shoulder. It's great. Good buttons, nicely sized, good grip. No complaints. It's got all the ports you need. Mic, headphones, USB-C, full-sized HDMI. The only consideration to make is that a cage from the a7S III won't work from a port's perspective because they aren't in the same location on this camera. Lastly, I noticed the internal audio sounded a bit different between the two cameras. Here, have a listen to the built-in mic on the Alpha 1 vs the a7S III while I tell you about today's sponsor,                                                       Storyblocks:

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Alright, so that's all the tests that I had time for. I know there's still a whole photo side to this camera to explore, and I'm hoping to get some more time with the camera to do that in the future. But for now, I hope this look at the nerdy video details was helpful.

It's one of those rare cases where the jack of all trades is somehow also better than the specified masters.  But where it gets complicated is that it costs nearly as much as an a7R IV and an a7S III combined. And I think for the money, I'd rather have those two separate cameras than this one camera by itself. So, as much as I love it, I'm probably not going to rush out and buy it, because I'm happy with my cameras currently. But I also feel comfortable saying that if there ever was a mirrorless camera deserving of a $6,500 price tag. The Sony Alpha 1 is it. It's funny, I just had a thought that's not in the original script of the video, but I remember not that many months ago

when I was reviewing the cine cameras and we were looking at $6,000 cameras, $10,000 cameras, $13,000 cameras that couldn't actually do what this camera does. And then, you know, when 8K with the Canon R5 came out we got all, sort of, you know, muddied up with that whole topic of, like, "Will it overheat," and all that. But if you take that all away, this is actually a usable 8K camera, in my opinion. It doesn't have some of the advantages of a cine camera, but if you look at the price from that perspective maybe I'm a bit too hard on the $6,500 price tag

because you wouldn't hesitate to buy a camera of a similar spec in a cine camera. Like, if-- Think about it, if the FX6 could do everything that it does but also do 8K at 30p with no issues, and if you rig this camera out with, like, a V-Mount battery, you know, like a whole camera rig, then you probably will be using a dummy battery anyway, which means that you can do pretty much limitless 8K recording on this. That's crazy. That's crazy good for $6,500. I am dunno. But I think for what I do I'd still rather have,