New Sony Alpha a6400 Review [A Camera for YouTubers?]

Key Takeaways

what's going on guys I'm Mike O'Brien and this channel is normally all about how to grow your online influence on YouTube or Instagram or whatever it might be and this video right here is going to be a gear review about a camera that I like and I'm recommending this but only for specific people so one of the most important decisions you can make when you're starting off on YouTube for example or Instagram whatever videos you're making is which camera is the right one for you so it's really important that you don't just go on buy the most expensive one that doesn't work for your needs or the cheapest one or just a GoPro or whatever it might be you really have to consider what your style is and what you're trying to do and then choose the camera based on that and remember your camera is going to be your best friend for a very long time as you're growing your YouTube channel or your Instagram account or whatever it might be so it's really really important that you choose the right camera the Sony a 64 hundred is one that I really like it may not be the best one for every single channel out there so really the objective of this video is to break down who would like this camera who would not like this camera as well as the pros and the cons what I like and what I don't like about this brand new Sony camera so the Sony a sixty-four hundred came out in March of 2019 it's a very new camera as you can see I have quite a few accessories on this one right here but it's a full-frame camera shoots 4k 60 has some very very impressive specs and there's a lot more to talk about with this camera but before we get too far into this video if you are new here and you're starting your online channel whether that's on Instagram or YouTube like I said start now by going down and clicking the subscribe button my brother and I have been on YouTube for a long time and we're trying to share our experience and our advice and our tech reviews and everything of that sort with you guys to help you grow your online influence this camera right here if you watch other reviews people get so excited over the same few things I'm gonna try not to cover those too much people get so excited over the little flip up the little flip up screen right here I'll zoom in and show you guys that right there a little flip up free screen people flip it up and they get so excited that they can vlog but guess what the canons been doing that for a long time and then the next thing they talk about is how you know when you flip it up it's in the way of a shotgun mic and you have to buy a cage like this one actually link one down below it by the way if you want to buy this cage is pretty nice so it's kind of a little they get excited that you can vlog with this but then they say you can't vlog with this unless you buy a ton of accessories and make it really inconvenient so for that reason I don't know if I would recommend this specific camera for vlogging although it may be useful for a lot of other stuff so just to give you a little bit of an idea of what this looks like I shot a little bit of b-roll over I'll show you right now just like a quick sunset gold now our kind of shot it wasn't super advanced but it just gives you a quick idea of how easy the settings are to change and different things that you can do with this camera [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so starting off with the things I really like about this camera the first thing is the multiple white balances that you can have in here this is especially useful if you're shooting videos like this one that I'm doing right now and maybe I jump to other places maybe if I have two different studio walls or maybe if I have some different settings I want to film in it's great to have preset white balances so you can hop around between them and not have to reset your white balance every single time with a custom white balance you can just have custom white balance one two and you know whatever and make it much easier like that so big plus on that with this one the second thing that I really like is the ability to plug in and charge continuously while you're shooting you don't have to worry about like right now literally right now my camera is blinking a little battery symbol because the Canon camera the battery is dying and I can't charge it while I'm filming it's kind of annoying that's something that's really really nice about this camera so s and Q stands for slow and quick and I really like this for any type of b-roll especially for travel videos where they make it so easy on the top wheel if you just scroll over to s and Q right there you have slow-mo videos so it can shoot all the way up to 120 frames per second and you can choose a whole spectrum of frame rates all the way down to one frame per second which is essentially going to be like a time-lapse it's gonna be great for something that you can see moving but it's not gonna be like the type of the time-lapse you see we're like a plant grows or something it's not going to be quite like that but if you want to do that you want to use the intervalometer on here which takes a whole bunch of pictures now s and Q is really great because for both of those videos it doesn't just shoot it in 120 FPS it actually slows it down to whatever you want so say you want it in 30 frames per second you shoot it in 120 it'll automatically slow it down and when you take the SD card out it has that slow-mo video right on there now if you want to do something slower or sort of more time-lapse II than one frame per second there is an intervalometer on here and you can shoot whatever interval you want but with that you are have to use you know some secondary application or third-party application that is to edit those and splice those pictures all together into one clip so unlike some of the older Sony cameras if you're familiar with those this does not have the 29 minute limit which is a great thing if you're shooting videos like this and you screw up a lot as sometimes I do and my footage ends up being like 30 or 40 minutes long I'm not saying this one is this one's pretty good so far but you never know it's annoying when it cuts it and it making you have to start up over the new video and partially that is because it overheats so this one is very good at not overheating and I think a lot of that has to do with the internal components of course so this also has the ability to shoot an s log 2 and s log 3 if you don't know what that is don't worry about it if you do that's probably very exciting because it means you can do some excellent color grading with this footage now on top of that you also have the ability to mount a quick Sony shotgun mic right on the quick mount on the top there which is very convenient but of course it is going to be blocking your screen so let's get into what I don't like about this camera there's not a ton that I don't like about this camera but I think my biggest complaint as most people sort of complain is the screen but I think my complaints are a little bit different so I'm not gonna say that the full up screen is that exciting I think some people get too excited over that honestly I'm a little bit concerned about the mechanical design of it it seems like some very thin metal I'm sure it is strong enough but that's just me being very cautious I'd be very afraid of this and speaking of being afraid of damaging the camera I kind of don't like how when you fold it back in the screen is always pointing out now I know that's common for a lot of cameras but the Canon like the SL 2 right here I really like how you can fold it so the screen is in and you just have you know that plastic cover on the back so if I throw this in my bag real quick I don't have a cover for it I don't a case for it I don't don't worry about the screen getting damaged so that's one complaint about the screen maybe that's two actually but another complaint is actually you know it is a touchscreen which is very convenient but the touchscreen isn't really as much as I want so it's touched to focus maybe you can change the settings for what you're touching but it's not like a really great way to you know for the Canon for example you can touch all your settings and change everything really quickly on the touch screen this you're gonna be changing most of your settings using dials using the buttons on actual camera so a little bit of a drawback I think they could have utilized the touchscreen a little bit better than that but again maybe I'm just missing a setting maybe there's a setting in the camera that allows me to change settings with the touch screen I don't know so comparing this to some of the older Sony cameras it might be confusing because the 63 and the 6500 both came out you know about two years ago so it's kind of weird that this one right now is in between those two I'm not sure how the numbering system works or Sony but just to give you an idea the 6500 had something called Ibis so IB is which sort of a way that you could stabilize your footage so when you're taking a picture in low light you can have a slower shutter speed and have less blood now they took that out on this camera so unfortunately there's gonna be a little bit more jiggle with this there's gonna be a little more shakiness in your videos and for that reason again I'm not really recommending this one quite as the number-one vlogging camera out on the market my final complaint is the lack of a headphone jack because there's literally nothing worse when you're making a youtube video than filming the entire video only to find out when you go into editing that the shotgun mic was not plugged in all the way or that the shotgun mic was hissing the whole time or that any other way the audio might be screwed up so it's just really really nice to plug in headphones into a camera and just listen to it and make sure the audio is what you expect this one you can't do that which is a little bit of a drawback but you can always take the you know SD card out and plug it into a laptop and check it like that if you want but overall this is definitely a very very very impressive camera so who is this camera actually ideal for so I have a couple groups of people that I think this camera would be perfect for one of them is gonna be anyone traveling and looking for that really high-quality cinematic b-roll or that high-quality footage for any kind of travel videos or any outdoor shots or literally any shots that you want either fast or slow motion and you want some really nice crispy 4k and you want to set this on a tripod those are gonna be ideal so moving around with this vlogging maybe not the best camera for you but definitely for that b-roll for anything of that sort where you're just looking to go the next level up so maybe not a super entry-level maybe you have you know this like I said it's gonna be $1300 when you're buying the lens with the camera so a little bit pricier maybe not my first camera but if you can afford it I definitely recommend this camera so who is it not good for it's not really the best if you're doing a simple studio just like this where you have a tripod one background the whole time you can probably get by with the cheaper camera than this one if you are looking to get into photography and you also want to do videography this is a great camera to get started with so you can definitely tackle both of those with just one camera right here now another user who would really like this would be anybody who has a studio with multiple backdrops multiple lighting situations and overall multiple white bounces which this really excels with I love how you have the multiple custom white balances so you can switch between different parts of your studio with no problem at all so now we're going to do a quick test with this camera check out what the audio sounds like what the shake looks like what the auto focus is like and a couple other things of that sort but here's kind of a vlogging mode and I have the shotgun mic right up there it's pretty easy to walk around this is not really that heavy of a camera I do have a pretty big metal frame on it right now though and of course like I said a shotgun mic so this is what it sounds like this is what it looks like it's definitely a decent camera definitely very doable to vlog with this you just have to get the cage like I said before okay so here is the internal microphone this is what it sounds like and again I took the cage off now so we don't have any interference with the microphone this is actually what it sounds like if you're vlogging just with this mic now another thing I really like about this is on the screen I just noticed this now they have the audio levels right there so you can tell if your microphone is off or if you're too quiet and the audio levels are incorrect you can quickly adjust that without having to film the whole thing and then later come back only to find out that your audio is not what you wanted it to be [Music] [Applause] [Music]