It’s hard to imagine a company with a greater influence on consumer electronics than Sony. You can trace a direct line from the Walkman -- the first portable media player -- to the smartphone. Today Sony is a massive force in gaming, making the PlayStation and publishing games for it and other platforms. Sony image sensors are in iPhones as well as its own mirrorless cameras. Not to mention the OLED TVs; smartphones; noise-canceling headphones; music, tv, and film publishing; and, yes, robot dogs.
Nikkei Asia reported that Sony’s fast new camera is coming to the US on February 21st, which is consistent with estimated deliveries for pre-orders.
The A9 III’s selling point is its global shutter that enables uncropped 120fps 4K video. The A9 also captures 120 frames before the shutter is pressed (with optional shutter sound for emphasis). It’s also expected to get in-camera authenticity to weed its shots out from AI fakes.
For several hours on Friday, PS5 owners have been reporting a “CE-107928-7” corruption error when they try to download or update games. It was bad enough that at least one developer acknowledged the issue, and we saw it on our systems, too.
As of about noon ET, some say it’s resolved, and downloads are working again after a console restart. However, just like the issues earlier this week where players were “permanently banned” for a little while, Sony’s status page indicates all is well, its social media accounts are silent, and PR hasn’t responded to questions.
And wow, I do not have them. So I flew to Berlin to learn from a “Promptographer,” and I came home with more generated pancakes than I know what to do with.
The Access controller, which is designed to offer a more accommodating way for people with disabilities to play PS5 games, is now widely available to buy for $89.99 / €89.99. To mark the occasion, Sony has put out a video featuring some of the people it consulted with on the project, showing the different configurations the controller can be used in.
Kotaku wrote yesterday that PlayStation owners will lose “previously purchased Discovery content” on December 31st after a change in Sony’s licensing agreements.
There’s almost nothing to mourn in Sony’s list of disappearing shows (apart from 20 seasons of Mythbusters, that is), but it’s an annoying reminder of the woefully ethereal nature of online digital entertainment.
Sony has an upcoming gridline tool for its Alpha cameras that seems helpful for commercial photographers. But unlike free firmware updates, this one will cost $149 when it launches in March — just to add four custom grid overlays to their cameras.
It seems nifty for pros doing school pictures, but dang, I don’t look forward to more paywalled camera features that squeeze pros.
[Sony Digital Imaging News via PixelShift Studio]
Too bad it was “damn near useless,” as Colin from the This Does Not Compute YouTube channel put it in his look back on the P series and some other Weird Sony laptops from the early 2000s.
This noise is the price you’ll pay for the uncropped 4K 120fps shots of the Sony A9 III’s global shutter that’s supposed to fix the distortion caused by the usual rolling shutter. (Well, really the price is $5,999)
Okay, so you don’t actually have to hear the sound of an early PC crashing — there’s no mechanical shutter. But this is an awful noise, and I love that it’s there.
The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.
The company says it now expects to release six live service titles by March 2026, half what it previously planned. Bloomberg has said Sony’s teams are having “mixed levels of success” with the live services push, and that it has cut back the team working on its Last of Us multiplayer title. Even Sony-owned Destiny 2 developer Bungie has been hit with layoffs and delays.
[Video Games Chronicle]
Check out this slick map-to-gameplay fast travel transition in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Thursday’s new trailer for the game, but I think that’s the point; it happens really fast!
