Sony reveals the A6500, its E-mount mirrorless flagship

It doesn't seem like that long ago that Sony launched the its top-of-the-line A6300 mirrorless E-mount camera, but guess what! That model, which we found to be impressive, has now been displaced by a new flagship, the 24.2-megapixel A6500. While sharing many of the features of the last model, including 4K video and an 11fps shooting mode with continuous autofocus, it's Sony's first E-mount APS-C model to have 5-axis in-body image stabilization

Now, however, the A6500 can shoot 11 fps for up to 307 frames in RAW mode, giving you 30 full seconds of shooting time. For video, it can read out the entire 6K sensor and scale it down to 4K without any pixel binning. It also supports a new function called "Slow and Quick" mode, letting you shoot at frame rates from one to 100fps. As before, you can shoot 4K at up to 100 Mbps, and view 4x slow mo in real time. As with the A6300, videographers get a 3.5mm microphone input but, alas, no headphone output.

The A6500 not only has new touch screen operation, but a touch pad, letting you shift the focus point just by dragging your finger across the screen. That feature is particularly handy in video mode, as it lets you "pull" focus from one subject to another just by touching them on the screen. Other features include a 2.4 million dot XGA OLED electronic viewfinder, the ability to extract stills from movie footage directly (8-megapixel stills from 4K and 2-megapixel stills from HD modes), and the usual connectivity features including WiFi, QR and NFC.

The A6500 won't come cheap -- it's coming to Europe in December for $1,400 (€1,700 in Europe) with body only. We'll have more photos and hands-on impressions shortly.