Sony reveals the A6500, its new E-mount mirrorless flagship

It doesn’t seem like that long ago that Sony launched the its top-of-the-line A6300 mirrorless E-mount camera, but guess what! That model, which we found mighty impressive, has now been displaced by a new flagship, the 24.2-megapixel A6500. While sharing many of the features of the last model, including 4K video and an 11fps shooting mode with continuous autofocus, it’s Sony’s first E-mount APS-C model to have 5-axis image stabilization

Now, however, the A6500 can shoot 11 fps for up to 307 frames in RAW mode, meaning you can shoot like that for around 30 seconds. For video, the A6500 can read out the entire 6K sensor and scale it down to 4K without any pixel binning. It also supports a new function called “Slow and Quick” mode, letting you shoot at frame rates from one to 100fps. As before, you can shoot 4K at up to 100 Mbps, and view 4x slow mo in real time.

The A6500 now has not only a touch screen, but a touch pad. That lets you shift the focus point just by dragging your finger across the screen. Other features include a 2.4 million dot XGA OLED electronic viewfinder, the ability to extract stills from movie footage directly (8-megapixel stills from 4K and 2-megapixel stills from HD modes), and the usual connectivity features including WiFi, QR and NFC.

The A6500 won’t come cheap — it’s coming to Europe in December for $1,400 (€1,700 in Europe) with body only, or €2,800 with SEL1670Z lens. We’ll have US pricing and more photos and hands-on impressions of the new A6500 shortly.