Trip to Sony: Where the sharp cameras live

Sony has its imaging headquarters in Yokohama. This is where they work on photo and video cameras with whimsical names such as Alpha A1 II and fast lenses.

Sony City Minatomirai: Where alpha energy is created.

(Image: Ben Schwan)

Feb 7, 2025 at 12:21 pm CET

10 min. read

By

Ben Schwan

As soon as I enter the room in the high-rise building in Sony City in Yokohama, where a dozen Sony Imaging employees are sitting, I reveal myself to be a friendly dilettante from Germany. No, I didn't own a Nikon at the age of twelve, at most I had enough for a compact camera with those self-destructing flash cells that my father gave me. And even today I still despair at the complex menus of my FX30 or A7 IV, confusing aperture with exposure, especially as I have everything set in English.

The fact that a lens that is larger in millimetres captures less image or why an "open aperture" means that the background of the image becomes blurrier is something I can't get my head around. And yet both cameras and lenses have an enormous appeal to me, especially in connection with video. It's all so wonderfully physical and to a certain extent decelerated when I compare it to the sterile image sensors of my iPhone, which many people use every few minutes to take completely unnecessary selfies when they're out and about in a new city.

Personal Sony story(s)

The Sony team, many of them from marketing, but also two engineers who have worked on famous products, are kindly lenient with me. When I briefly tell the extremely attentive men and women my personal Sony story, which began not with a Walkman but with an MSX computer from 1984, I have them on my side anyway. There is even a quiet, reverent murmur in the room: Yes, those were the days!

Videos by heise

Even the journey there was exciting. If you want to visit Sony's camera headquarters, you first need to know where it is located. It is not located in the center of the Japanese capital Tokyo in Chiyoda, Marunouchi or Nihonbashi. Instead, you have to take a little trip around the world to the neighboring province of Kanagawa, where the optics department is based in the Minato Mirai ("Port of the Future") district of Yokohama. It is effectively the second part of the Sony headquarters in Minato (also "harbor" in German, this time without the addition of "future") in Tokyo itself.

It took me 45 minutes to get there from Shinjuku, taking a single train, a through-train that crosses three different networks, from subway station to subway station. When you leave the station, you are surrounded by an impressive backdrop of high-rise buildings, but with plenty of green space between them. Not only is Sony Imaging located here with other departments, but Fujifilm (right next door) and Yamaha also have a presence, as do Nissan, the railroad company Keikyu and the cosmetics group Shiseido. Land has been reclaimed here and something completely new has been created that looks fresh and modern, a world of its own compared to the often densely built-up Tokyo. Yokohama, which was once Japan's most important gateway to the world, shows its best side here.

The second A1 and the F2 Superzoom

I'm here with my editorial assistant Maya to find out a bit more about Sony's approach to cameras. I also get to take a closer look at two products that were launched at the end of last year: the Alpha A1 Mark II and the FE 28 - 70 mm F2 GM zoom lens. Sony Germany kindly made the appointment possible for me at short notice during a longer planned stay in Tokyo.

Both devices are at the forefront of their field. If they were handed to me, I wouldn't know what to do with them at first. Okay, an A1 II is just an Alpha, I say to myself as I cradle the €7499 camera in my hands. And indeed, the operation is just as you would expect from Sony – only everything is a little better and richer. The 50.1 megapixel sensor is a dream. And when it comes to AI object recognition, Sony has packed in everything its research department currently has up its sleeve. As usual, the technology – including a 30 percent improvement in eye detection and an AF system that can recognize changes in the speed of a subject – should gradually find its way into the cheaper models. The A1 II is and remains the showcase, the Leica among the Alphas, even if, in my opinion, there are blinded critics who think that, apart from the four-way display, everything could have been implemented "in software".

For me, however, buying the A1 II would not make sense even if I had infinite money. I don't need the high resolution and speed, I'd rather wait until the trickle down of AI functions (perhaps) to an A7 V. The FE 28 - 70 mm F2 GM, current Sony price 3599 euros, on the other hand, could make me weak, should it ever be on offer. The fact that Sony has succeeded in equipping such a zoom lens with a f-number of 2 over the entire focal length range is a small miracle. And it only weighs 918 grams. The big competitor Canon does have a competitor at the start, but with its 1.43 kg weight and somewhat poorer sharpness, it looks like a prototype. The only thing that bothers me about the F2 GM is that Sony doesn't manufacture it in Japan, but in Thailand, like almost all of its camera technology, which is sourced from China.

Of course, the engineers like to take pictures themselves

The two engineers listening to our presentation talk about their own lives when asked. One of them primarily needs a lot of resolution, as he photographs his children almost every day. The other loves wildlife photography, specializes in birds and wants fast autofocus. And who says that people in Japan don't take their work home with them? Atsushi Ueda, Vice General Manager of Sony Imaging Marketing and our host today, emphasizes the differences between using a Sony and taking snapshots with a smartphone. "People use their cell phone as a kind of recording device. Our Alpha, on the other hand, is used to capture the moment, an emotion or an incisive experience." Here, too, the theme of deceleration meets technology.

Sony Imaging has benefited massively from the fact that the creator segment is booming. Actually, the many YouTubers, Instragram photographers and TikTok online creators could simply use the good-enough photo sensors in their iPhones or Android smartphones. But you grow with the tasks. And so people start out with a small Sony vlog camera, say Ueda and his colleagues, and then slowly move up to the full-frame Alpha via the affordable APS-C camera. It was exactly the same for me. In the meantime, I've even discovered the new 1-inch 4K camcorders.

What I also learn during my visit to Sony is the strategic approach of really going wide with the products. Of course, the company sometimes gets bogged down in the process. I share my frustration with the marketing team about the fact that cameras are updated too rarely (even older professional models) and that the iPhone and Mac apps such as Imaging Edge, which are supposed to make set-up, operation and further processing easier, are too confusing and difficult to use. To some extent, we are also dealing with Japanese function mania, where more and more is crammed into a device and feature lists have to be worked through. But at least things have improved recently. When I took my A7 IV out of the box and downloaded the iPhone app, everything went very quickly, including the first firmware update. The fact that I still only understand the controls 33.3% of the time has more to do with my low frustration tolerance, I admit.

Accessibility well hidden

Sony still has some work to do on its interfaces. For example, many cameras have accessibility features similar to those of Apple's iPhone. The problem is that they are so well hidden that they are rarely used. Sony is open to learning from its customers. New versions of the app are constantly being released and the transfer speed is also being improved. However, it won't be faster than CFexpress without faster WLAN. You forget a lot of the difficulties once you have practiced them. And the rest of the Japanese competition, from Canon to Nikon and Fujifilm through to OM, is not known for being child's play to use. That too is probably: slowing down. Take your time with the manual and watch webinars. There is enough material on YouTube for even the smallest alpha problems.

At the end of our visit, which ends with a short visit to Sony's small imaging showcase museum in the building, I ask a silly question: Why aren't there more good lenses with power zoom? Why not the F2 GM? Maybe there would have been room for a motor like that? The Sony people smile mischievously. Because somehow that wouldn't be traditional enough and an Alpha is also a photo camera. You like to sit between these chairs.