Rent the Sony F65 today!

The new Sony F65 now offers affordable 4k motion picture production with the very best image quality. The Sony F65 actually approaches the quality of 65mm film at a price point normally associated with HD video production. The extreme low-light sensitivity and latitude of the Sony F65 also significantly reduces the amount of lighting and grip equipment needed for 4k motion picture production which also helps reduce the cost and complexity for the vast majority of shoots. The net effect is Hollywood quality is now within the reach of spot production, documentary films and low budget features. Even if your production is not destined for a 4k deliverable, the Sony F65 provides vastly superior 2K and HD video performance, so you owe it to yourself to see what the Sony F65 can do for you.

Jena Communications offers the Sony F65 as a basic camera rental or as part of various film production packages that include HMI lighting, a track and dolly system, small camera crane and stabilization systems. We are currently renting the Sony F65 with an ARRI Alura 18-85 zoom lens which will give you the quality of a prime lens which the flexibility of a zoom. Other lens packages including primes will be available as well.

More Details from Sony are below.

4K is just the beginning

The F65 exceeds the resolution of any previous digital motion picture camera (as of August 2011), the result of a remarkable Sony Super 35 image sensor. Sony has been developing semiconductor image sensors since 1973 and manufacturing commercial quantities since 1985. Through all the decades, our design goal has always been to match the photographic quality of 35mm film. But now we're setting our sights even higher: to surpass the limits of human vision. The F65 image sensor is the first of this new breed.

In its ability to resolve detail, to handle lighting extremes, to see into the darkness and still come up with a clear image, the F65 is blowing away veteran cinematographers and colorists. The Sony F65 is a stand-out in every one of these areas largely because the sensor incorporates technology that cannot be found anywhere else.

The F65 employs a unique Sony CMOS sensor which achieves higher resolution than any previous digital motion picture camera (as of August 2011) while delivering superb exposure latitude and sensitivity.
A study in superlatives, the F65 image sensor boasts the most photosites of any digital motion picture camera (20 million) and is the world's first to offer a dedicated green photosite for every pixel in the 4K output image. The F65 can provide exquisite images of supersampling 1080p high definition, perfect for the time-is-money pressures of episodic television. The F65 can also output 16-bit linear RAW, which preserves all the information obtained from every photosite on the image sensor—up to 8K of resolution. This gives you phenomenal ability to de mosaic, adjust grayscale, color correct, composite and even re-frame the image in post.The advantage here is ability to derive 4K, 2K, HD from 16-bit linear RAW.

Exquisite supersampling HD and 2KEven if your postproduction workflow and deliverable are currently high definition or 2K, the 20 million photosites of the F65 deliver a powerful imaging advantage. The difference is "supersampling." All cameras deliver high contrast on large image areas. But as the detail gets finer and finer, contrast suffers. We can draw up a chart of this loss with the vertical axis representing contrast from 0% to 100% and the horizontal axis representing picture definition, which can be measured either as line pairs per millimeter (LP/mm) in the optical domain or TV lines per Picture Height (TVL/ph) in video terms.

Conventional HD cameras start at near 100% contrast and begin to drop off as the picture details get progressively finer. Thanks to the new image sensor, the F65 contrast remains strong, even in fine details. So the picture is dramatically sharper.

20 million photosites versus "4K"Some camera manufacturers measure their sensor resolution on the basis of "K," a unit that equates to 1024 horizontal photosites. So a 4K sensor might have 4096 photosites on every row. Unfortunately, the actual resolution is less because these sensors use Bayer color filter arrays. This design leverages two facts. First, the human eye is more sensitive to black & white (luminance) detail than to color detail. Second, the largest component of luminance is Green. In the Bayer array, 50% of the photosites detect Green light only, 25% detect Blue only and the remaining 25% detect Red only.

The 4K Bayer array runs into challenges when you try to construct a 'true' 4K RGB output image from the compromised RGB Bayer components. This requires a de-Bayering process, an exercise in guesswork that must estimate two out of three color values for each pixel. For example, on a Red photosite, the de-Bayering algorithm must guess at Green and Blue values. However sophisticated the de-Bayering algorithms may be, they still cannot fully recreate image information that was never captured to begin with. For this reason, the final resolution falls, to various degrees, short of true 4K.

A typical 4K Bayer sensor with 4096 x 2160 photosites falls short of true 4K resolution.
As a leader in image sensor technology, Sony was able to develop an original image sensor of substantially higher pixel density. Compared to the 8.8 million photosites of the typical 4K sensor, the F65 sensor has 20 million photosites. Where the 4K sensor has half as many green photosites as there are 4K output pixels, the F65 sensor has a one-to-one ratio: one green photosite for each pixel of the 4K output image. This new "Zig-Zag" sampling structure results in best-in-class image sharpness, including full 4K resolution on the all-important Green channel. In this way, when an F65 RAW image is demosaicked to 4K, there's absolutely no guesswork required in the Green channel, and twice as much precision for the Blue and Red.

Conventionally, increased resolution comes at the sacrifice of other photographic qualities. But the F65 is no conventional camera. It takes advantage of Sony's expertise in creating ever smaller photosites with ever higher performance in sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks to Sony CMOS advances, the F65 empowers the cinematographer with prodigious exposure latitude, high sensitivity and extremely low noise.