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The Sony Alpha A5000 is an upper entry-level mirrorless camera that’s compatible with Sony’s range of E-mount lenses. Announced in January 2014 it’s the successor to the NEX 3N, and becomes the second E-mount camera to abandon the NEX branding in favour of the Alpha name only. It also has the distinction of being, according to Sony, ‘the world’s smallest and lightest interchangeable lens camera to feature the convenience of Wi-Fi connectivity’, though here Sony is restricting the field to cameras with an APS-C sensor. Where last year’s A3000 employed DSLR-styling, the new A5000 unmistakably shares the compact style of earlier NEX models, in particular the 3N which it replaces. There is no viewfinder on the A5000, but the 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD screen is a tilting unit that can be tipped up through 180 degrees to help when shooting selfies. It's worth noting that there is also no hotshoe or accessories port, so you can't add any external accessories to the camera. This shows the A5000 with the disc drives and memory upgrade removed. In the top left you can see the blanking plate where a second floppy disc can be installed and see the 2 floppy disc connectors on the motherboard. The disc drives are on a metal tray which has double hooks on either side which fit into the double slots on the case half way along on the left and right sides. There is also a tab which fits over the tab above the floppy disc connectors with a single screw to hold it all in place. The D-R menu is where you’ll find the Dynamic Range Optimiser (DRO) and in-camera HDR options, the former available in Auto or set Levels of one to five, and the latter available as Auto or in increments of one to six EV. The HDR mode takes three images at the desired interval and combines them in-camera into a single JPEG file, and you can trigger it with a single shutter press or a self-timer. If you have RAW or RAW+JPEG selected, the HDR options are greyed-out. The new 12 GB ‘consumer’ GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, for example, might have half the memory of the Nvidia RTX A5000, but offers more performance on paper for half the price. Nvidia even has a GeForce Studio driver for applications including Enscape, Unreal Engine and V-Ray.
Prices valid in stores (all including VAT) until close of business on 28th November 2023. (Some of these web prices are cheaper than in-store, so please mention that you've seen these offers online.) Sony (as far as I can tell) hasn’t gone into the exact specifics of the HT-A5000’s driver setup, but it has a sizeable 450W of power distributed in a 5.1.2 configuration made up of beam tweeters to bounce sounds of walls to expand the surround sound effect: two upfiring speakers, front-firing speakers, and a built-in subwoofer. All are based on Sony’s X-Balanced speaker unit that delivers less distortion. Sound Quality Furthermore, as the Nvidia RTX A4000 is a single slot GPU with a max power consumption of 140W delivered through a single 6-pin PCIe connector, it’s available in a wide range of desktop workstation form factors. This includes compact towers like the HP Z2 Tower G8 and Dell Precision 3650. The compact HP Z2 Tower can host the Nvidia RTX A4000 or Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU
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DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, PCIe 4.0 x16, 21.7 SP-FP TFLOPS Peak, 174 Tensor Performance Peak, up to 448 GB/s Memory Bandwidth, Resizable BAR, Support for Modern Standby Next, while the A5000 usually responds to and projects punchy impact sounds well, some that have a particularly wide dynamic range can make you wince just a little more than they should due to some slight compression in their treble registers. Sony’s X-Balanced speaker units differ from regular speakers in their unique, rectangular shape. This shape maximises the cone area, giving more punch per cm2. The design also reduces driver excursion, meaning you get less distortion and greater vocal clarity. Whether you’re playing music or movies, X-Balanced speakers deliver more.
The HT-A5000 is the step-down bar from the flagship version. It’s less expensive, with fewer channels of audio (9 compared to 11), fewer connections and less power at its disposal. Other more niche pro viz features include support for 3D Stereo, Nvidia Mosaic for professional multi-display solutions, and Quadro Sync II, an add-in card that can synchronise the display and image output from multiple GPUs within a single system, or across a cluster of systems. a PC standard 15 pin VGA monitor connection, instead of the 9 pin RGB connection used on the Archimedes and A3000 ranges. This meant that any PC monitor could easily be used with the A5000.
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For an even more immersive sound, add the optional SA-RS3S or SA-RS5 wireless rear speakers. These further enhance the impression of wrap-around sound, with the two-way speakers firmly pinpointing the special effects all around you, especially when used in conjunction with Sony’s revolutionary 360 Spatial Sound Mapping. For comparison, we used the last two generations of ‘4000’ class Nvidia pro GPUs – the 8 GB ‘Turing’ Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 (from 2019) and the 8 GB ‘Pascal’ Nvidia Quadro P4000 (from 2017). Three to four years is quite a typical upgrade cycle in workstations, so the intention here is to give a good idea of the performance increase one might expect from an older machine. There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q technologies (Dynamic Boost, Whispermode).
The Sony A5000 produced images of excellent quality during the review period. The Sony A5000 has an extensive and very usable ISO range of 100-16000. ISO 100-800 is noise-free, whilst ISO 1600-6400 produces more than acceptable results, and even ISO 12800 and the fastest setting of 16000 are OK for emergency use. The RAW samples illustrate just how much processing the camera does by default, though, as they're much noisier at all ISO values than their JPEG counterparts. Bass is, for the most part, also hard to reconcile with the A5000’s size. It drops deeper than you’d normally associate with a soundbar that isn’t equipped (as standard) with an external subwoofer, and it delivers its rumbles with enough power to never leave low frequencies sounding under-represented. Just as importantly, though, bass doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the soundstage. Set at the four points around this scroll wheel/pad are a means of adjusting the Display (top), ISO Speed (right) the Exposure Compensation / Picture Effects (bottom) and the Self-timer/Drive mode options. Note that all of the buttons around the navigation wheel and the center button too can optionally be assigned to a custom function of your choice. Looking and feeling very much like a compact camera, thanks to the combination of the finger-tip zoom lever and the 16-50mm power-zoom kit lens, the small and lightweight Sony A5000 is a great introduction to interchangeable lens cameras. Despite its diminutive size, the new A5000 still manages to retain its predecessor's built-in flash and 180-degree tilting LCD screen, although we're disappointed that the spec of the LCD hasn't been improved from 460K-dots. The new handgrip is a little easy to hold than on the NEX-3N, but not so much that you'd really notice. The built-in wi-fi and NFC connectivity, borrowed from the more expensive NEX-5T camera, make it straight-forward to share your photos and remotely control the A5000 itself, although there still aren't too many NFC-enabled devices around at the moment. The raw performance should be similar to the GeForce RTX 3080 for laptops at the same TGP level. Both GPUs depend heavily on good cooling and a high TGP for good performance. At a similar power consumption level the RTX A5000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro RTX 5000and 5000 Max-Q. The desktop variant of the A5000 however, is a lot faster.
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The board also features four DisplayPort 1.4a ports and is cooled by a single ‘blower’ type fan, but only draws in cool air from one side of the card. The A5000 has the same 3in, 460k-dot LCD screen – that can be flipped 180 degrees to face forward – which featured on the NEX-3N. Fit: I was very surprised by this IEM size and shape. It looks weird and has a shallow fit, but it works. I was able to wear it for the 2 hours I spent reviewing and a few hours getting used to it. These things are insanely light. The plastic shells feel like some good quality plastic with a nice texture to them. The cable is nice and light weight as well. Overall, if fit is an issue for you, this could be a winner. It’s not as good as the IEX00 series from Sennheisser, but it’s quite nice. 7/10 Enscape is a real-time viz and VR tool for architects that uses OpenGL and delivers very high-quality graphics in the viewport. Enscape has used elements of ray tracing in its software for some time. Version 3.0 is RTX-enabled, so full ray tracing can be toggled on and off. Later versions will use the more modern Vulkan API and support ray tracing on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Just like Olympus and Panasonic, the Sony A5000 offers an extensive range of eleven creative Picture Effects.
The A5000 is equipped with the f-Core DU driver, which was developed and designed entirely in-house, including parts and production equipment. The sound quality was designed based on final's unique evaluation method established during the development of the flagship earphone A8000. In addition to the so-called "transparent sound" that allows you to clearly hear sounds that are localized at a distance, you can hear even the finer sounds in the mid-low range, giving each sound a sense of depth. I can. In addition, a newly designed 2-Pin soft silver-coated cable developed for the A5000 is standard equipment. The braided cable makes it easy to handle, and you can feel the A5000's sound even more clearly. Although aimed at novices, the Alpha 5000 has advanced exposure modes (program, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual) in addition to iAuto, Superior Auto, Scene selection and Sweep panorama for less experienced photographers. This means that users have room to grow as they learn about the camera. Picture effects Bass: The bass feels very coherent and textured. I would say the bass is one of the main strengths of the A5000. It has some punch and even some slam when required to do so. I looked up the driver configuration after blind listening and was surprised. I would have assumed a 4BA or hybrid setup, but it’s just one DD. The bass texture through to the mids is the strength of this IEM. It helps acoustic music and male vocals come through clean and easy. The bass is surely a positive of this IEM overall, but for a budget single DD the IE200 is still my go to option. The IE200 can better separate bass texture and amount from the mids while also doing the other regions more justice. 6/10 All tests were carried out using the AMD Ryzen-based Scan 3XS GWP-ME A132R workstation at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution using the latest 462.59 Nvidia driver.
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All other products will be delivered via the fastest available method (excluding bank holidays and weekends) and generally within 3-5 days, depending on customer location. The new Sony A5000 is a rather modest refresh of last year's NEX-3N cameras, ditching the NEX branding, upgrading the image sensor and processor, and adding wi-fi and NFC connectivity, a better handgrip and the more intuitive Alpha menu system. Despite a slight price increase, the A5000 remains an excellent first "serious" camera for smartphone/compact camera upgraders.
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