The announcement came via Alphauniverse, the official community site for Alpha users. It’s a paid for software upgrade key that will only apply to the A7 IV at first and won’t be available until March 2024.
Great. Three months to wait for a paid upgrade to a specific camera that surely could have been just a regular firmware update.
Sony’s angle on this seems to be that it’s an upgrade of definite commercial benefit so (I’m guessing what Sony would say) it’s perfectly reasonable to charge a commercial fee for it.
What does Sony’s new Custom Gridline License do?
It displays gridlines in your EVF and rear screen to match specific aspect ratios and formats that you need to work to. Sony sees this as being valuable to schools, photo studios, theme parks, malls, cruise ships and other locations where images need to be produced to fit specific proportions.
Frank Lombardo, National Photography Manager for Inter-State Studio and Publishing, agrees.
The ability to import customized gridlines into a mirrorless camera is an essential feature for all of our photographers to capture images consistently. These simple gridlines keep head sizes the same for all our products and improve our production time. They also allow us to know where the edge of print will be during capture.
You will be able to import your own custom gridlines, and they can also be used as partially-filled transparency masks. I’m not sure how that will work in third party software but no doubt Sony has worked it out.
So look, wait. I checked the aspect ratios available for the Sony A7 IV and they are 3:2, 16:9, 4:3 and 1:1. And we still need more options than that? Are none of those close enough for the specific applications?
Apparently not.
Is this how camera features are going to be now?
So even if we write this off as a bit of silliness and forget about it, it does have worrying implications for how Sony sees the camera market and its users. If this works out, does this mean lots more cameras with features we can’t use unless we pay extra?
Maybe Sony plans to stop using its cameras as complete, finished products, but as an extensible platform? Skylum does this already with its Luminar Neo photo editor, so maybe Sony has been taking notes?
Oh dear.