Sony used the photography trade show this month to confirm it is building two more Alpha bodies including one aimed at professionals, which is a considerably more aggressive statement than it sounds.
A year ago Sony was not in this market. It bought its way in through Konica Minolta, inherited a lens mount with real history and a catalogue of glass sitting in cupboards, and shipped one competent entry-level body. The reasonable expectation was that Sony would spend three or four years selling to enthusiasts before attempting anything serious. Announcing a professional body this early says the company intends to compete at the top rather than accumulate share from the bottom.
That is the hard direction. Professional camera sales are not won on specifications. They are won on the lens catalogue, on service networks that will replace a body in a day when somebody is on assignment, and on twenty years of a photographer’s accumulated investment in one system. Canon and Nikon have all three. Sony has the beginnings of the first and none of the other two.
What Sony does have is the sensor, and that is the argument for taking this seriously. The component business is the real business, and a company that manufactures the imaging sensor can iterate on the part that most determines image quality without negotiating with a supplier. Nikon buys sensors. Some of them, historically, from Sony. That is an uncomfortable dependency to discover your competitor controls.
The compact end of the range is where I would be more worried on Sony’s behalf, and the story there has not changed since last summer. Megapixel counts keep climbing on sensors too small to use them, image stabilisation is the only genuinely useful addition of the last two cycles, and the entire mid-tier is exposed to phones getting slowly less terrible. Samsung is in the same position and hedged the same way, by being a component supplier first and a brand second.
The difference is that Sony has committed to the part of the market where physics still protects you. A large sensor behind good glass does things a phone cannot do and will not be able to do, because the constraint is the diameter of the front element and there is no software fix for a small hole. Everything above that line is defensible. Everything below it is renting time.
So the professional body is not vanity. It is Sony placing itself on the correct side of a shift the whole industry can see coming and mostly refuses to discuss, and doing it with the one structural advantage nobody else in the segment has.
Whether the cameras are any good is a separate question and one nobody can answer from a trade show announcement. Sony has a long history of building technically impressive products with interfaces designed by somebody who has never used the category. I would like to be surprised. I am not yet expecting to be.