Sony a6600 New Features, Hands-On Reviews & Specs

if you want Sony’s steadily refined photo and movie quality coupled with industry-leading autofocus in the smallest body with the longest battery in the business, then the A6600 is for you.

If you’re looking for a small, durable camera that packs a lot of punch then the Sony A6600 is the camera for you. It’s a portable powerhouse, boasting many of specs you’d only find in a bigger and much more expensive models, like the Sony A7 or A9.

The Sony a6600 has an industry-leading autofocus system, is capable of excellent images and video, comes with very useful in-body image stabilization and has the best battery life of any mirrorless camera on the market at this time. However, its sensor is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, and competitors have caught up or surpassed it regarding video quality and features, resolution and handling. But for family photography and even some sports and action, it’s easily worth your consideration.

As Sony’s new flagship APS-C camera, the 24.2-megapixel A6600 has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor, the A6500, broke new ground, and the full-frame A7 series are the best mirrorless cameras on the market. The A6600 does have some nice features like real-time AF tracking, in-body stabilization and improved battery life. However, it’s held back by poor handling, an old sensor with bad rolling shutter and 4K video capabilities that are behind rivals. Overall, it’s not as good a camera as Fujifilm’s X-T3, and represents a rare camera misfire for Sony.

Sony brings its class-leading autofocus tech and big Z battery to its a6600 APS-C camera, but we wish there were improvements in other areas too.

In many ways, the Sony a6600 feels like a minor improvement. You’ve got a bigger battery, image stabilization (that this series of cameras should have had for years), and the autofocus system of another camera. Beyond that, you have the lack of a joystick, and a genuinely usable touchscreen, which limits the entire way that you can interact with and use the camera. This is unacceptable at this point, and this should have been fixed when Sony decided to update the a6000 series and bring out another update a few months later.

..the A6600’s combination of that new autofocus and its in-built image stabilisation make it a fantastic, compact street photography camera, while its advanced video skills should make it popular with YouTubers and vloggers too.

Having spent a small amount of time with both the a6100 and the a6600, we can already see that image quality looks very promising. Detail looks good, while colour rendition is warm, vibrant but remains realistic. Some good promises have been made to the quality of skin tone rendition, and again initial impressions seem very good on this front.