Sony F65

Sony’s premium digital cinema camera and arguably the best one available to date. “True 4K” resolution, 14 stops of latitude, larger colour gamut than film. Quick start-up time and no need for constant rebooting. If you want 35mm film quality, this is the camera to go with.

The F65 exceeds the resolution of any previous digital motion picture camera (as of August 2011), the result of the Sony Super 35 image sensor. Conventionally, increased resolution comes at the sacrifice of other photographic qualities. But the F65 is no conventional camera. It takes advantage of Sony´s expertise in creating ever smaller photosites with ever higher performance in sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks to Sony CMOS advances, the F65 empowers the cinematographer with prodigious exposure latitude, high sensitivity and extremely low noise. In digital cinematography, you want the largest colour range possible. Many HD cameras are limited to the Rec.709 color space. While this produces broadcast-legal color for television productions, it still falls short of motion picture film. The Sony F65 transcends this limitation. The camera features a new Color Filter Array on the sensor, along with a 3D lookup table (LUT) and proprietary color management systems. In this way, the F65 can shoot in either Rec.709 or F65 Gamut, which actually exceeds the SMPTE specification for color negative film in every direction.

The F65 camera is designed to work with the docking SR-R4 SRMASTER field recorder, which captures your work to solid-state SRMemory^™ cards. This is file-based recording of phenomenal versatility, capacity and image quality. Best of all, the SR-R4 is just one part of a comprehensive, next-generation production system that includes field recorders, studio decks, a transfer station as well as the SRMemory^™ cards. The SRMASTER system represents a significant in advance in two distinct production styles: episodic TV and cinema.

The F65 adheres to the 1.9:1 aspect ratio of the DCI projection standard (4096 x 2160 or 2048 x 1080). This canvas enables a choice of picture composition as needed: 1.85:1, 1.78:1, 1.66:1, 1.33:1, 2.35 spherical, 1.3x anamorphic, or 2x anamorphic cropped.

To support slow motion and fast motion, the F65 provides over- and undercranking at frame rates of 1 to 60 frames per second (4Kx2K resolution), and up to 120 frames per second (4Kx1K resolution). In both modes, you get high-speed shots without "windowing," crop factor or change of effective focal length.

Typical CMOS sensor cameras are prone to "rolling" shutter defects, where the exposure timing of each row of pixels is slightly offset from the next. Row after row, these differences can trigger geometric distortion in moving objects or camera movements, particularly visible in the horizontal movement of objects with strong vertical lines. Rolling shutter artifacts are especially troublesome in 3D mirror rigs, where one camera is upside down. The artifacts in the left camera don´t match those in the right, causing unwanted disparities. Rolling shutter also incurs "flash banding" where a strobe light illuminates only a horizontal band across the frame. As with other Sony cameras, the F65 uses an advanced CMOS design to reduce rolling shutter artifacts to a bare minimum.