Sony A9 - how significant is it?

Posted by Top Teks on 5th May 2017

Sony A9 - how significant is it?

The new Sony A9 - why it might be more significant than you think. By Mike Thomas, Top-Teks Commercial Director Sony’s launch of the Alpha 9 just before NAB this year saw the first use of their "Stacked CMOS Image Sensor". Sony announced this technology first in February this year. The aim of the new Sensor is to speed up signal processing which achieves various benefits. First the tech but. The A to D conversion (Analogue Video of the pixels to Digital Video Signal) has been increased from a two tier construction to a four tier to increase the speed; there are limitations but the three layer stack incorporates a DRAM layer between the Pixel Section and the Circuit Layer to temporarily store the high speed signal all culminating in a faster readout.   But what does this all mean? Using a 19.3M Pixel Sensor the read speed is increased by a factor of 4x, ( Stills  1/120 sec). Shooting in HD 1080 x 1920 Frame Rates of 1000fps are Possible! Reading of the sensor quicker drastically reduces Rolling Shutter caused by the slow readout of a fast moving image. So, that’s all great but I use Video Cameras! If your next Video camera had a 3 Layer Stacked CMOS Sensor it could be possible to shoot 1000fps in HD. Then it might be able to shoot 4K at 250fps. It’s a CMOS sensor so low power and not that big. It wouldn’t have rolling shutter. And………………………..  Looking forward to IBC ? All speculation on my part, but just maybe ? For full specs click HERE