DPReview posted this wish list for Sony in 2019:
Oh, Sony, we can’t keep up! At your current rate of product announcements, you’ll have released at least one new RX100-series compact, a GM lens or two and an a7 IV by the time we’ve finished writing this sentence. That’s fine, but in 2019 we’d like to see you taking a bit of a break, making some time to reflect, and maybe reprioritizing a little.
Sony – in 2019 we wish you would…
- • Create a Cyber-shot RX1R III (with a real battery, not that joke-shop one from last time).
• Throw your a6000-series customers a bone and make some new APS-C lenses.
• Make your video and stills AF experience consistent.
• Speaking of 35mm, make an FE 35mm F1.8. Your non-pro and pro customers will thank you.
• Focus on user experience, as well as technology. We get it, you’re smart!
Do you agree or have a list of you own? Let me know in the comments…
54 thoughts on “What’s on Your Wish List from Sony in 2019?”
I think only has other issues more important than these!
1) Better weather proofing their pro bodies
2) Make their AF brackets VISIBLE, hopefully colored in red like Canikon. I miss a lot of shots in darker environments because of this.
3) a7s III !
I agree with ” Focus on user experience, as well as technology.”
I’d like a medium format option. Sony makes amazing MF chips including a 100mpx chip currently used in PhaseOne cameras. I’d like an RX camera, maybe call it the MX a 50, 80 and a 110 like they used to do with Rollei TLRs back in the day, a wide, medium and tele version. Fixed lens. If it’s successful they can build a mount and glass for an ILC version later.
I’d also love 10-12bit video on the A7S3 and 16bit color in the A7RIV or A9R (or whatever the designation may be).
To me the Sony A7lll is a perfect camera. I shot Canon for over 20 years and the Sony mirrorless experience has been beyond my expectations. Phenomenal in so many ways. If I could change one thing about it I would have an option to make the focus point a bright green because in certain instances the current gray is difficult to see.
Brighter focus points. But what I really want is an eMount version of the sony Zeiss 135 1.8. Just be reasonable with the price please.
If by “reasonable” you mean comparable to the price of A-mount version, that’s a fair request.
I already sold, just a week ago my samyang 35 1.4 and zeiss 35 2.8 on the hope of the sony g 35 1.8!!! So better for you to bring it!!! Or I go to Nikon Z!!!
Focus bracketing please!!! And how about feet in the LCD MF focus scale?? Please do via firmware update rather than just making it in a new model…
Bring a 135mm on!
Bring a 135mm on!
A 21mm or wider prime would be welcome as well
Make that 200-600mm zoom, please. Need that extra reach.
I cannot afford a new camera every 2 years. Firmware updates, please! Brighter, colored focus points, Timelapse, Menus with touch operation are just a few that could be easily fixed with the current cameras
A less finicky hotshoe for the a6000 and a duo-synch cord that isn’t six feet long.
Focus on the user experience. Yup.
Sony could slow down the innovation and design planned obsolescence a bit and start making things easy to use, reliable, ergonomic, long lived/robust.
I switched to a9’s from Canon 5D3’s. So far, the 5D3’s are in pretty much every way more reliable and prone to function as designed. Like a loyal dog. The a9’s are more like cats… finicky, error prone hard to figure out, and delicate.
a9’s fail in any number of ways, including misfires of studio strobes, poorly thought out menus and many performance holes which Sony does not do a good job warning us about (HSS banding for example, that could have been an item in the manual, no real wired or wireless remote function that can be used easily…. the wireless doesn’t work any where near reliably, the wired doesn’t work tethered… uses the same one USB connector…)
And for a camera which is supposed to be a sports camera… the lag from shutter press to actuation is a long long pull and wait experience. Make the camera go click soon as when I press the shoot button please?
and yes, manual focus, no IS etc… still takes forever and a think about it to go click.
I wonder what is the actual lag of the shutter button in silent shutter mode? Who knows?
Please, please make better adapter for A lenses.
We need an AF-mode for group portraits in low light where the lens can be set to a shooting aperture down to f8 or so to get everyone in focus, but the AF should be done wide open in AF-C PDAF only (no CDAF refinement). Basically just copy the AF from any DSRL. The possible focus shift or possible miss measurement by the PDAF will be covered by the DOF. This is the biggest problem I have when shooting low light club events.
A 150-600 FE Mount Lens that can accept both 1.4 and 2.0 TCs.
Built-in Timelapse and Focus Stacking.
Olympus style “Live View Composite and Bulb”.
Olympus style “Pro Capture Mode” (especially the A9 would be wonderful with this).
Yes, please! A Sony RX1R III with the new Z battery and a decent grip. Small is good up to a certain point, and IMHO, RX1R II has gone ‘too small’ for what it is. With the bigger battery, I also expect this camera to have 4k video. The ZX1’s functions may not be needed for many, so there’s still room for a ‘purist’ version of the RX1R III.
135mm GM, hopefully around f/1.8
Auto shut off of EFCS above a certain setable shutter speed.
Everyone wants the A7SM3 for Video but Photographers want the low light M3 sensor for low light and astro Milky Way capture. Also the Playmemory apps for Mark 3 cameras (maybe not enough room)
This will be hard to ask and get but a 12-24 f/2.8. I do want to thank Sony for the SEL1224G an f/4 lens, it is the best super wide astro Milky Way lens the SEL1635 f/4 is also. I judge a lens by no dove stars in the corners even day shots will be great. And the Bright Monitoring (no one talks about) and ISO Invariance (may never have to shoot HDR again), zebras to photography to rid blinkies and manual focus with peaking.
And for such great cameras that most all lens makers now make lenses for e mount.
Change the locks on the dails to Olympus styled ones and put one on the exposure compensation as well. See here how it should work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnjqyJVmQYc
No locks on the EV Compensation Dial. Thank you. I use that all the time when shooting available light. It needs to be a simple one-handed operation. Maybe make the dial smaller or add a touch more drag but no locks!!!
@Brian look at the video I posten above how Olympus has solved it. You can have a dail fully free or locked in their way. It is brilliant.
Another thing that is long overdue to fix is the so called “Star Eater” which is a sort of noise reduction that kicks in in exposures longer than 4 seconds. It also takes out some faint stars. It would be nice if this noise reduction could be turned off.
And here is another fix we need, either in camera or in a separate software from Sony. The PDAF striping that can occur in some situations when shooting towards the light with flare. The free program RawTherepee can fix those RAW files so we are not left totally without a solution but it would be nice if there was an official way to deal with that.
I am not sure we need the apps back but some of the functions they had would be nice if they could be incorporated directly in camera. Especially those that can’t be made with any external hard- or software.
And also it would really benefit Sony if they could have an API to the camera that works via the USB cable connector and also wireless (even Canon just announced this).
For us that wears glasses it would be really nice if Sony could have a look at the Panasonic G9 and how the EVF modes works on that camera. One can with a setting make the image in the EVF smaller and by that easier see the full view when composing. Also the black border that then comes can be used to show info so it is not wasted.
When doing manual focus in magnify mode (zoomed in) I would like a setting to also inlude a small frame in the view showing the full sensor view. That would make it possible to magnify in and still see the composition and firing the shutter from that position. Basically copy how magnify in Play mode works.
If and when technology so permits it would be very nice with a LA-EA3.5 adapter that has the screw drive motor but not the mirror, and that it uses the normal sensor based AF.
The Astrotrace function that Pentax has which uses the IBIS for tracking the stars would be very nice if Sony could copy and also have the time lapse function for multiple long exposures (minutes) needed for astro work.
See more here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4353069
Illumination on/in the buttons and dails so they are easier to see in low light.
A mode for landscape shooting would be nice which can be set for up to five focus points in depth from foreground to background, and also that each focus point image can be made with alternative exposure bracketing. E-shutter would be enough and just burst it as quick as possible. Then it would be dead easy to choose which images to brush together in Photoshop afterwards.
Make the Sony Android app being able to move the AF focus box in remote control mode on the A9 (it works on my A7RII).
I wish that Sony starts to work more with functional features add ons in the firmware updates like many other brands do.
In this Sony interview at DPR:
https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/3509345300/photokina-2018-sony-interview-i-don-t-care-about-competitors-i-care-about-customers
Sony says: “We don’t care about competitors, we care about customers”.
I am a Sony customer. I would very much know how I can send in my feedback to Sony and get a reciept that it has reached the development team.
I do understand that they need to prioritize amoung many requests, what is technology wise possible and economical feasable but like it is now we users shot out our wishes for improvements on different forums and in different comments fields and it feels like they just blows by the target and never gets picked up and acted upon.
When Canon, Panasonic and Nikon now also are going mirrorless FF then Sony really needs to better in this regards to keep the users.
In about two-three years, the lenses I need will be available for the other brands.
If I shall stay with Sony then they obviously need to start listening for real and show that they are serious in this matter and how I can get my feedback to them, and that it is not just something hollow that sounds good that they throw out as quotes in interviews.
There are lots of ways that Sony engineers and product planner get feedback from users from focus groups, working with pro photographers at major sporting events, and soliciting suggestions from select users. Many of the most requested items from readers are included the feedback that I relay to Sony.
If you’re asking if there’s a “suggestion line” at Sony that will acknowledge your suggestion and give you a date when you can expect implementation, that would be a no.
It’s VERY IMPORTANT to narrow your focus to ONE THING that is most importtant. If thousands people request the same thing will have FAR MORE WEIGHT than one person making a thousand different suggestions…
I knew that the answer to the “suggestion line” was a no. Which makes interview statements like that somewhat hollow in my opinion.
So then a “suggestion line” is something that Sony should work on setting up and achieving, so they can harvest what the users actually need and want. That is how we do it where I work with hardware and software development.
As the photo gear climbs up in cost and down in volume listening to your customer gets even more important.
And of course the majority of people who wish for one particular thing needs to be weighted in over some crazy Swedes dreams.
The reason I shot in so many of them here is since no one else does it.
Some of the ones that I enter are my own wishes, but a lot of the wishes are from other users that I have picked up at forums where I can see and understand their need even if it doesn’t align with my own.
And I enter a new topic here when I remember about it for some reason, so I don’t sit and invent them on a daily basis. You can search for most of them in the forums and similar places and see that there are many that wishes these things over and over again.
The sole purpose I enter them here is since you are a Sony artisan and have some contact with Sony at a level we users never reach, and you did post the question about our 2019 wishes, so I was hoping that you bring these to Sony so they get to know them.
Their job is to then prioritize them and if they had/have a process for this set up then they would be able to see how many actually wanted what.
I don’t know how they drive their development process and if they use a “waterfall” (stepped) project model as their base for each hardware/software relase, or if they have gone to agile development with scrum or similar as their development model.
Also I don’t know how they have devided their teams and how free standing these teams work from each other and how they have choosen to interact.
If they would want to optimize the harvesting of user input then that process would need to be integrated and aligned into their development model so they get the request sorted to the right team and also have a standardized way of weighting the requests and a way of analyze over the team boarders how easy or hard it is to that thing technically, the risk (technical, economical, marketing wise etc), the cost and the gain (how many users they satisfy) and also if they want/can retrofit a function via software to existing users hardware (bodys/lenses etc) or if they need/want to first bring it out on the next hardware update (body/lens etc).
Since these are fundamentals in every development environment, I would guess that most of their development teams, no matter waterfall or agile development model, works with some sort of backlog lists containing found bugs and new features ideas and some sort of release planning in what version it is scheduled to arrive, and some things will just float and not have a planned release for whatever reason.
Since they seem to lack the user input in an organised way, I am sure Sony could improve.
Here is how Saab have setup their development with their fighter jet and they can release new versions of it on a three week basis (the video is maybe not the best video production ever made, but what it tells is really something to take in and follow): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1zrBU75hXA
Many of the new Sony features and updates stem directly from user requests. Once again the same request from thousands of users has far more weight than any request by a single user.
Fighter Jets are not a good analogy due to their multi-million dollar price tag. Ordering a fighter jet is like placing an order for a custom yacht. Almost anything is possible as long as money is no object.
Actually no. The fundamentals in development of hardware and software are the same no matter what you build and in how many copies. Fighter jets are very regulated in changes to the flight platform and also other systems since they are homologated for safety. And these parts are all working together. So the way they have invented a process that can push a change through in just three weeks in that environment is ground breaking.
And if it is a flying computer that shots stuff up, or one on the ground that shots images doesn’t really matter. The Scrum/agile development process with feedback loops is how most modern hardware and software development is made.
But that is not really the important thing I wanted to point at.
What I was really after is the feedback loops in how you collect the material for bug fixes and new features in your next release.
I understand very well that a request from thousands of users weights more than a request from one sole one. What I can’t see is how Sony collects these thousands of of users requests and draw conclusions on what needs to be addressed. You mentioned that they already work with focus groups etc, and that made me even more confused on this topic, since the result that that produces in fixes and new features, vs what the wast majority of requests on forums what actually are asked for by the users that pay for all this don’t align.
For instance, the focus box color which makes it hard to see, is one of the top topics people complain about and requests a better solution for. It affects all 3d generation bodys like the A9, A7RIII and A7III. Still 1.5 years later I still have a non fixed hard to see focus box on my A9. Even my old A7RII has a better visibility, so they changed it to worse on the 3d generation. Here obviously the feedback loop has not worked.
I have been shooting images since 1980 and sold my first images in 1982. I have used many different cameras over the years and I know none is perfect and I know one have to live with that.
I went to the m4/3 system ten years ago with the Panasonic G1 since it was the first system camera ever that I felt was made for the digital world (DSLRs are like old cameras with bolted on digital film in my view so not interesting).
I invested in the m4/3 system over the coming years and had a mixed Panasonic/Olympus system. My main problem with it was DR and noise, otherwise I was pretty happy.
When Sony came with FF mirrorless in 2013, the sensor size and the performance of it was interesting from day one. But the cameras as cameras felt less good to what the m4/3 system had at the time in speed, features and usability.
In 2015 with the A7RII I felt that I still would take a step back with it as a camera vs my m4/3 ones, but the sensor gain was so high that it was worth it and also the lens lineup had grown enough for me to start to switch over.
I knew buying in to Sony that they weren’t really good with updates but there was no other mirrorless FF choice then so one had to take that.
But since September 2018 there suddenly are three competitors. It will off course take some time until they get their things sorted and get an okey enough lens lineup to be interesting to look at.
So I will continue with Sony for some years to come before really looking at any other systems. And with two bodys, 15 lenses/adapters and a flash it hurts the wallet to switch again, so I ain’t going to do that in the first place. But I really hope they start to improve on the updates and user feedback harvesting so I don’t need to switch one day when the competitors have caught up and surpassed them in the areas that I value.
There is a saying here in Sweden: Good tools does half the job. So I always strive for having the for me best available tools. And I continue to invest in the tools/system I have if I feel like there is a most likely possibility that I will continue with it. At the moment I am more on a standby level for the future with Sony, I need to see how it goes from here.
To conclude, the only thing I wish is that you bring the above wishes for functions and improvements to Sony so that they can judge what they want to act on or not.
I hope Sony finds a way to listen to their users in an optimized way and that they continue to invent. The foundation is really good.
Maybe there’s language barrier here, because fighter jets that are sold only by custom order are in no way the same as a mass-produced electronics product.
If the military purchasing a fleet of jets requests a feature that adds another $100 Million to the price tag of each jet – they can be built to those specs as long as the government is willing to foot the bill.
If a camera feature adds $100 to the design cost of the camera – but only a handful of buyers will actually use that feature – those who don’t want it will not be happy paying extra for the few that do.
This is why not all updates and feature requests carry the same weight. Requests made by the majority of users have far more weight than those aimed at just a handful of users.
Yes, we seem to talk pass each other. English is not my native language as you know, but you probably would understand even less if I went to Swedish. 🙂
I work full time since 25 years with hardware and software development. During these years photography has been a side business, where working in the media business used to be my full time work before that. It seems hard for me to get the points regarding development processes that I wanted to make trough though, and they are not really important, so lets drop that part of the conversation.
It did make me happy to see at the press conference that Sony now ramps up the firmware upgrades. And also addresses some areas I have requested improvements in: AI, object tracking and connectivity.
So the future looks already better.
Fix the two-stop restriction on exposure compensation in video mode.
When I am filming school plays, I set my aperture and shutter speed, and use Auto-ISO to get the exposure. Theater lighting requires lots of compensation adjustments, and I love that my Sony cameras have physical dials for this.
But the dials go to +3/-3 stops, and for some reason in video mode, the camera limits the actual compensation to +2/-2 stops.
If there is a sound technical reason for that, I’d like to hear it.
Then I’d like to ignore it and ask for the ability to go to the full +3/-3 stops anyway.
Thanks.
Need some in camera apps for a7r3 for macro, gradiant filters, etc
Macro app???
Allow me to touch focus with Play app and also show zebras. thx
I want focus stacking built in to the Sony A6xxx series.
I was terribly disappointed that the a7riv did not include the focus stacking feature of the D850. For landscape photographers, this is an amazing convenience and feature. What’s most irksome is that it requires no changes to hardware. It can be completely accomplished in firmware. What are you thinking Sony?
Seriously thinking of going back to Nikon after years with Sony.
I received a handful of requests for focus stacking – but not nearly as many requests as I did for changes like colored focus point, aspect ratio, lockable EV Dial and more megapixels.
Now that all of those things have been checked off the list, focus stacking has certainly moved up to become the most requested feature and that’s been passed along to Sony.
Another vote for focus-stacking.
I don’t think Nikon’s solution would be very useful to me. You set the (maximum) number of shots, the focus delta and sequential exposure delay. Those variables may suffice for (most) landscapes, but not really for macro where the composition can change dramatically with the focus setting.
I’d love to see Sony make a smarter choice that would work for landscape and macro as well. In addition to the focus delta and delay, if they allow one to set the near and far focus limits we’d have greater control. Once the focus limits and delta are set, the camera would indicate the number images required before shooting.