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5 budget must-have video accessories for your Sony A6300 and A6500 cameras

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The old cries of “If you want to shoot video, get a video camera!” are becoming fewer and fewer these days. Which makes sense given that DSLRs and mirrorless cameras basically are video cameras these days. And just like “real video cameras”, you need to bolt on extra bits to really get the most out of them.

Hybrid shooter and YouTuber Jason Vong talks about his 5 must-have budget accessories for the Sony A6300 and A6500 cameras in this recent video. It’s a good list of handy tools that many of us will need when shooting video.

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How to fix the Sony A6300 overheating issue

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For a long while now, we’ve been using the Sony a6300 as a second camera/frugal 4k camera. The quality is superb and really, we could not be happier. Well, that’s a lie, we could be happier if the darn thing did not overheat after 15 minutes of use. OK, skipping to another story: Over the last few weeks, we’ve moved from our old fleet of Sandisk Extreme Pro cards to Prograde V60 cards.

We noticed that after the move to the UHS-II cards, the a6300 is no longer overheating. At least in out controlled studio environment. For testing, we turned the AC off (as you can probably tell) and plugged the a6300 into a Tethered Tools case relay to get uninterrupted power. The SanDisk Extreme pro lasted about 15 minutes, while the Prograde lasted the entire 30 minutes.

Now, here is the interesting thing, the Prograde V60 are USH-II cards. (you’ll see that the cards have more contacts). Once we moved to those cards, the camera stopped overheating and we can reach the “imposed” 30 minutes recording that the camera provides, effectively doubling the recording time we get from it.

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Sony releases firmware to address the A9 overheating issue, and a bunch of other bugs

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Shortly after releasing a bunch of software updates for their cameras and lenses, Sony releases some more to fix some of the reported problems. There are now firmware updates for six of their cameras: A9, A7rII, A7sII, A7II, A6500, and A6300. They are aimed at fixing the overheating issue that was recently reported, as well as the so-called “Star Eater” issue.

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Should you stick with your kit lens or upgrade to something more expensive?

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Many interchangeable lens cameras these days come with some kind of kit lens. Something to get you up and running, shooting as quickly as possible, without having to immediately spend more money. Newer photographers who don’t already have a big stack of lenses often face a bit of a challenge. There are questions that can be difficult to answer. The biggest of which is whether or not the more expensive lenses are worth the price tag.

While not one of Sony’s highest end lenses, the 18-105mm f/4 G OSS lens is very popular. It covers almost all of the range of the 16-50mm kit lens that comes with their A6300, and goes much longer as well. But is there a massive difference in quality? In this video from YouTube channel, TechnologyMafia, we see the two lenses shot side by side for some real world comparisons.

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Sony a6500 vs. a6300 overheat test, looks like it’s fixed

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The Sony a6300 was one of the most promising cameras that Sony ever released. A 4K crop-sensor mirrorless for less than $1000. Promising, but not delivering if you tried to shoot 4K for over 13 minutes. Then the camera would overheat and shu itself down.

If there was one single issue that kept haunting this camera it was the 4k overheating issue. Sony did release a firmware for overheating, but it was not solving the issues that videographers were facing. But now the new a6500 is said to be solving that problem. If you ask me, that could be the only reason that Sony released a predecessor to the a6300 only 6 months after its launch.

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Sony’s new A6500 features five-axis in-camera stabilisation and RX100 V shoots stills up to 24fps

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Sony’s much anticipated A6300 was finally released in March this year. An eagerly awaited update to 2014’s A6000. Now, a mere 8 months later, Sony have announced the new Alpha A6500 at a Sony event in NYC. It contains a 24MP APS-C Exmor CMOS sensor and like its predecessor shoots 4K video. Let’s hope it doesn’t overheat like the A6300, too.

The big news with the A6500 is the new built in 5-axis in-camera stabilisation. If you wanted stabilisation with the A6300, you had to be using a lens that supported it. Now, with the A6500, it’s built into the camera, and can be used with any lens, offering up to 5 stops of stabilisation. The buffer has also been significantly increased, jumping from the A6300’s 44 RAW frames to 107 shots in the A6500.

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Sony A6300 v1.10 firmware update solves overheating issues, but not for video shooters

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Sony’s A6300 was pretty much an instant hit as soon as it was released. It’s small compact size makes it ideal for things like street for photography and family vacations. The flippy out screen has also made it an ideal video camera for vloggers. It does have a bit of a problem, though. It tens to get a bit hot.

Sony have now released a firmware update for the A6300 to resolve some of the overheating issues. Unfortunately, these overheating fixes only apply when shooting stills, not video.

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Here is how to register the bride and groom to have a Sony automatically focus on them in a crowd

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Wedding photographers, this the feature you’ve all been waiting for. The new cameras from Sony have a nifty feature that allows you to register a face and then tell the camera to look for a specific face and then try and find them in the frame and force focus on them.

This feature works by first shooting the persons you want to have priority with (say the bride and the groom), and then telling the camera to look for those faces. You can also set the priority in which the camera looks for each of the persons.

So you can, for example have the camera look for the bride, and if the bride is not found, to look for the groom, the mothers, fathers and so on, up to eight different face.

Gary Fong has a quick primer on how to set this on a Sony a6300, but I have done the same with my A7ii, and face registration is listed as a feature with many other new Sony mirrorless cameras which are becoming more popular with wedding photographers.

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