No clean hdmi out on the Sony A77

by Sebastian WöberSeptember 14^th, 2011

There’s a rumor that the Sony A77 offers clean hdmi out. It would be nice because this camera has some important advantages over other hdslrs like no moire, higher framerates and a nice screen. Only the bad compression Sony uses is what really bugs us all, so we would like to record via hdmi to a disk recorder.

Unfortunately in the 30 minutes I spent with the Sony rep on the camera menu we couldn’t get rid of the tiny square in the middle of the picture. Maybe there’s a workaround I didn’t find, but taking into consideration that crippling the hdmi outs on these cameras has become a standard procedure I suppose the facts are quite obvious.

We had even worse issues with the new Sony NEX-5N. The camera menu is constantly displayed on the right hand side of the feed. It seems like a camera has to be as “shitty” as the Sony HX9v in order to be allowed with clean hdmi out. Find an hdmi grab of this camera I recently posted here.

Only the new and yet unreleased Sony VG-20 offers a clean hdmi output. I will post a detailed report and test results in the next days.