Sony Revives Hope Among Alpha Mount Owners

2015.11.05

Today, Sony Europe unveiled a new Alpha-Mount interchangeable lens digital camera, almost 18 months after the last one. This gap, combined with the immense success of their E-Mount mirrorless cameras, caused many to speculate that Sony would discontinue with Alpha mount.

The new Sony A68 is an advanced ILC which uses a translucent mirror to simultaneously capture images from its 24 megapixels APS-C CMOS sensor and perform Phase-Detect autofocus with a dedicated 79-point sensor, including 15 cross-type points sensitive to -2 EV. A true Live-View is read from the sensor and displayed on a built-in 0.39" EVF with 1.4 megapixels, 100% coverage, 0.57X magnification and an Eye-Start sensor or a 2.7" tilting LCD with 460K pixels.

This camera offers much of the same feature set as the professional Sony Alpha SLT-A77 II except for weather-sealing which slots the A68 directly below. The A68 body still features dual control-dials, a traditional mode-dial and top status LCD plus 8 configurable function buttons. It is compatible with all Alpha-Mount lenses and incorporates a built-in sensor-shift image-stabilization system. The strengths of the SLT system are all kept with an 8 FPS continuous drive with continuous autofocus and full 1080p HD video capture, also with continuous Phase-Detect AF.

The Sony A68 is expected in Europe around March 2016. No word on availability elsewhere was given yet.

• Digital Camera