Sony's 4K security camera can spot intruders in the dark
Finally, your surveillance video will have great bokeh.
What do you give to the person who has everything? The world's best security camera to watch over it, we guess. Sony's latest Alpha product, the 850,000 yen ($7,500) SNC-VB770, may fit the bill. It's a 4K mirrorless, E-mount network camera that can capture "clear color video at 30fps, even when the subject is almost invisible to the naked eye," according to Sony. It features a full-frame 12.2-megapixel sensor that sounds a lot like the one Sony uses in its crazy Alpha A7S II mirrorless camera. As such, it can capture 4K in dark night conditions as low as .004 lux.
Sony sees a variety of low-light uses for the device, including road ice detection, rail tunnel surveillance, after-hours museum monitoring and nighttime wildlife monitoring. With all that resolution, you can also crop out specific parts of the image and display them as four separate VGA (640 x 480) images, as shown below. It can be controlled over WiFi by a smartphone and video and JPEG images can be sent directly to a LAN via an RJ-45 connector.
Thieves would be proud to be caught on the 35mm f/1.4 Zeiss lens shown above, which runs another $1,600 or so. The point is that you can add high-end glass from wide-angle to telephoto lenses to capture your target in pristine 4K. With a full-frame sensor and fast lens, you'd certainly get lovely images and bokeh, and Sony implied that the camera could even be used for production. With a razor-thin focus plane in low-light, however, we wonder if the cinematic qualities of the camera might clash with its intended use as a security device.
