You get 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks plus a full-size HDMI port that’s far more robust than the micro-HDMI port on the R5. Sony crammed a lot of useful ports onto the A1, too. However, with no other camera makers supporting CFexpress type A yet, the cards are still hard to find and very expensive - currently around $400 for the 160GB model. The latter offers read and write speeds of 800MB/s and 700 MB/s, compared to 300 MB/s speeds on SD UHS II cards. Like the A7S III, the A1 has Sony’s unique dual-slot system that accepts both SD cards and faster CFexpress Type A cards. That makes it a hard sell for vloggers and one-person crews, in case the high price tag hadn’t already discouraged them.

That seems an odd decision, as the A7S III has a fully articulating display and the A1 is a more powerful video camera. The main downside of the A1 is that unlike the R5, its screen only tilts and doesn’t flip around.

Unlike the Canon R5, however, you can’t touch a displayed setting to change it. You can also use the touchscreen with the menus and not just set focus like before. As with the A7S III, folders cascade into categories so most of the settings are easy to find. Sony ditched its old menu system and the new one is far more intuitive. With the A1, Sony has made small but noticeable improvements to the dials and buttons, and they now have nearly perfect feel, travel and resistance. I wish all the top dials were push-to-lock like the exposure compensation dial, rather than the awkward push-and-hold to unlock system on the other dials. Controls include shutter and aperture dials, a joystick, control wheel, mode dial, exposure compensation dial and three programmable buttons.

Sony mirrorless cameras