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Sony’s new F5 and F55 share the same body with slightly different functions and have very competitive pricing.

The Sony F55 and F5 both have:
- Super 35 4K CMOS sensor
- PL mount with PL/FZ adaptor
- A range of codecs:
MPEG2 422 8-bit, XAVC 422 10-bit, SR 444/422 10-bit
- 120P high-speed

The F55 also has:
- Global shutter
- Simultaneous recording of XAVC and Mpeg on SxS cards
- Up to 180P high-speed

Both cameras can also be fitted with a small RAW recorder that can capture 2K or 4K 16-bit lin files. This high-quality capability is very promising indeed. With a camera body under $30K, the F55′s pricing is well below the Arri Alexa, and slightly higher than an Epic. Of course you need to add pricy accessories to get a working system

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The right side of this F55 set-up shows the compact camera body’s HDMI and HD-SDI connectors, along with a small RAW recorder and battery on the back.

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The left side of the F5 camera with the menu screen, and on the right the R5 RAW recorder. The camera enables recording with S-Log gamma curves. The sensitivity is set to 1600 ISO. XAVC is a new codec that delivers 10-bit 422.

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The AXS-R5 RAW recorder for the F5 and F55. The lightweight unit will record 2 or 4K 16-bit lin files on to new AXS memory cards. It can record up to 60P in 4K and 240P in 2K.

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The R5 RAW recorder has a small fan.

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The F5 and F55 cameras will use 2 kinds of memory:
- SxS internal memory to record files in several codecs including the new XAVC 422 10-bit codec
- A new AXS memory card, which can record high bandwidth 2K or 4K 16-bit lin RAW files

Above the memory are 2 playback units shown in Paris with USB 3 connectors, which may be a little slow for 16-bit 4K files…

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DP Thomas Ozoux was hired by Sony to demo the camera at the SATIS expo.
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Our thanks to Thomas for his excellent demo.

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