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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my first look and overview of the new Sony
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A6400. This is an APS-C censored mirrorless camera and of course in some ways it's a replacement for
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the a6300 and I've got an a6500 here. We're going to see as I compare these two cameras that
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there is a bit of give and take and kind of where the strengths fall out will help to decide which
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camera is going to work better for you. At the moment because of a discount on the a6500 there's
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about a $200 difference between these two cameras and so we're going to take a look today at both an
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overview of the physical design, some of the characteristics, what's underneath the hood
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in the new a6400, but also at the same time, I'm going to do a little of comparing and contrasting
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with the a6500 to see what's different, what's the same, what should be different and isn't
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We'll look at all of those things together. We're going to jump in and do a hands-on comparison here
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right now. Let's take a look. So as you can see, taking a quick look at the cameras themselves
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you can see that the grip is a little bit wider, a little chunkier on the a6400 as compared to the
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a6500. And while it's not a huge thing, it does make a difference in that it feels like you can
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grip the camera a little bit more robustly. Here I feel like there's more on my a6500
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feel like there's more kind of empty space. And the native grip of the a6400 is a little bit more
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pleasing to me. Now looking at the top facade of this, you can see that once again, they look more
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similar than different. The, you know, there's really a primary difference is there's a different
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C1 button placement, which is moved up here near to the actual on, off, and shutter button
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And there is one less custom button on the a6400. You know, in my case, it's the C2 button that I
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actually have mapped to the steady shot. And so obviously that's not there on the a6400. And so
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in some ways it's, it's something that I need a little bit less on that in terms of the actual
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mode dial itself, it's structured a little bit differently, as you can see on the a6400
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And so what you've got here is that just you don't have the, the same kind of custom mode
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setups and so that's one thing that I think that some photographers will miss. What you do get
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added on here is the you know kind of the either slow motion or fast motion options built right
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into the mode dial but I think that you know in terms of stills photographers they will miss the
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more advanced technique of having the custom modes on the dial itself. Both of these feature a pop-up
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built-in flash unit and you know these have limited usefulness one thing I do like however
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is that because of the design you can and I will do this sometimes you can do a little bit of a
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tweaking to where you do a little bit of a bounce and so that's useful obviously because of the flip
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up screen nature which we'll look at in a moment the major physical difference as you look at it
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from the top is the difference in the actual eye cup. You have a much more abbreviated eye cup here
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And so in some ways it's not gonna be as comfortable as that on the A6500
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It works fine however although it doesn shield quite as much light out But our biggest difference here is that we have a physical redesign And so rather than in the case of the A6500 you can tilt up
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but this is your limit to how far you can tilt. With the A6400, you have the ability to tilt all the way up
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and then to extend the screen up a little bit higher. And the byproduct of that is that you now have a selfie mode
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where you can view the screen from the front of the camera
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Now, there are inherent limitations of this, of course. It does help if you have nothing put on the top of the camera
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However, if you've added an external microphone, which a lot of vloggers do
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it's going to obstruct much of the screen anyway. Also, it's been noted that there still isn't a headphone monitoring jack here
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And so once again, if you're doing any kind of headphone monitoring and you're through an add-on accessory, you're going to block a lot of that screen
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So I would say that it's still not ideal, but if you're working within those limitations, it certainly is preferable
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It's of some value to me. Looking at the back of the cameras, we can see that we have quite a similar design here
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Both of them have similar LCD screens with similar resolutions. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to detect any added functionality to the touchscreen on the A6400
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And so, unfortunately here, there's still no navigating the menus via touch
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It requires you to still use this control wheel. I would love to see this A6000 series bodies to get a little bit better ergonomic controls
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something beyond just this wheel here would be useful and and so I would love to see that happen
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just to add maybe an additional dial or you know a little thumb stick you know the Fuji X-T3 has a
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little tiny thumb stick right here that does help with navigation and so I think that there's room
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to add something like that but unfortunately none of that has changed the one thing that
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has improved here is there's a little bit more functionality in the menu compared to the a60 the
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a6500 which has a little bit older an order of the menu here we've gotten more of the a7 series
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menu and the biggest thing that's been added is my menu setting which i really do like on sony
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cameras where you can actually store you know often used settings in there and and so it's just
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a useful extra organization tool in the menus itself. I have noted that I, you know, and this
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is just, you know, kind of more of a feel observation. It feels like there's a little
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bit less delay in using the a6400 when doing certain things. Maybe it clears the buffer
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at least shifts modes a little bit faster. And so that is certainly a positive. On a negative
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however the a6400 while it you know sony does tout that it has better sensor coverage in terms
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the autofocus system whereas both of these cameras have 425 phase detect points the um a6500 older
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camera has only by comparison 169 contrast autofocus points whereas the a6400 now has 425
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contrast focus points. And so it covers the entire sensor. And so they are claiming a faster autofocus performance And so we examine that more and see if that actually plays out So you get a little bit more robust AF system potentially
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and I will definitely note that IAF and face detect is a little bit more intuitive
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due to newer algorithms on the A6400 compared to the A6500. But what you lose, unfortunately, from the A6500 is the depth of the buffer
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So the A6400 is not quite as good for sports. For example, you still have 11 frames per second as a peak speed, which is incredibly fast
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But the buffer here on the A6400 is only 46 RAW images compared to 107 RAW
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And so basically half the buffer. And the same is true also of JPEGs
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Whereas you have only 116 JPEG buffer, you have a 233 JPEG buffer on the A6500. And so, you know, you lose a little bit
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you gain a little bit in terms of the autofocus, you lose a little bit in terms of the buffer. And
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so once again, maybe cameras designed for two different audiences to some extent. Along on this
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side, you have a similar door with the basically exact same options. It's just on the A6500
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their direction has been reversed somewhat and so in the case of the micro HDMI and the micro
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USB ports there they are designed moving in different directions than before so just a
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little bit of a reordering when it comes to that. In terms of the physical characteristics you have
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a very slight change as you can see the cameras are very physically similar the biggest difference
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being that slightly more chunky grip, which does result in a little bit thicker, just minutely
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thicker body. So we're talking about the difference between 2.4 inches of depth versus 2.1
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or that's 59.7 millimeters of thickness versus 533 millimeters in thickness. Like both of them
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are 4.7 inches or 120 millimeters in width and in height they are both 2.6 inches or 6.9 millimeters
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Now due to not having the steady shot the a6400 is a little bit lighter. It comes in at 14.22 ounces
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or 403 grams compared to 453 grams or 15.98 ounces for the a6500. In real world shooting
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I really it's it's not enough for me to be able to perceive your mileage may vary but not a lot
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of physical difference one other internal addition in terms of the actual video functionality things
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are very very similar on the a6400 but they have added an HLG profile and that will allow you to do
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you know more high dynamic range footage within the camera but unfortunately no expansion in terms
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of our frame rates when it comes to either 4K or 1080p. And so 4K still tops out at 30 frames per
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second and 120, excuse me, or 1080p stops out at 120 frames per second. And so exact same identical
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specifications when it comes to that. So overall, we've got more similarities than differences
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and down at the bottom, bottom plate looks very, very similar. And I will highlight one last thing that I'm not crazy about
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and that is that we utilizing the same battery pack and so this is the NP battery pack which unfortunately particularly when you shooting 4K footage you burn through batteries really fast
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My least favorite, though, is the position of this memory card, which it's never easy to get at
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You can see there's not a lot of clearance for pinching and removing it. And so I hate that aspect
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Also, if you have the camera on a tripod and you want to pull the memory card out
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grab some footage off of it or stills off of it and then go back to shooting it's very hard to
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access this door as opposed to a side orientation it seems to me like they should be able to orient
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that to where they can make the card slot work there as most cameras do i just really don't like
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that placement and unfortunately we're still stuck with the same configuration as the a6500
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so other than the improved grip no real ergonomic improvements that i can point to
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but overall very similar if you're familiar with the a6300 or the a6500 the a6400 will feel
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instantly familiar so as you can see you know really and on a lot of levels on the physical
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design there's not a whole lot of difference here i do like the improved grip and of course
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if you're someone who is going to do likes a selfie type mode either for vlogging or for you
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know taking selfies or just you know monitoring if you're shooting video it certainly is handy to
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have that extra ability to flip up it's been noted of course that if you have anything in the hot
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shoe of course it limits the effectiveness of that but you know in certain applications it
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certainly is something that will make a difference we'll take a closer look at how the actual
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autofocus improvements how they actually bear out in real life so far autofocus seems to have done
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a great job. I've done a fair bit of shooting with the camera already. So some positives when
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it comes to that, but we'll see if it actually makes a difference. I do think that face tracking
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and eye detecting is a little bit improved due to improved algorithms, focus algorithms there
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I did also note that there is now built in and intervalometer and so that you can actually do
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time lapses. With the A6500, you are forced to download an app and run it that way and, you know
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it seems like Sony has kind of abandoned that app store and so on. Like the new A7 series
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you have basically no option except for an external intervalometer. And so, you know
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that's not great, but glad to see them adding some of that functionality into the actual menu
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system here. And I have utilized that. It does work and so good things there
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So we'll follow up with that episode. I'll take a little bit look of a sensor comparison
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not a whole lot different there, but there is a little bit different ISO range and we'll just see
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how those things all measure out. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you can take a look in
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the description down below. I do have a link to my image gallery. I've taken a lot of beautiful
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photos with this already. And so you can check out that gallery there. There's also buying links
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if you'd like to purchase one for yourself. And of course, those of you that buy through my links
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Thanks for watching. Have a great day
