Sony just dropped the FX5, and I got my hands on one early at a demo event at TAV Academy in Cologno Monzese, alongside my Nikon ZR and the Blazar Talon 50mm anamorphic I’ve been using more and more lately.
The FX5 itself is a serious piece of kit: full-frame, 5K open gate straight out of the box, internal 16-bit X-OCN RAW, three base ISOs, and 4K up to 120fps genuinely closer to what you’d expect from the VENICE 2 or BURANO than a step up from the FX3. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the Blazar Talon working with the FX5 combo on the day (open gate 3:2 with that lens looked incredible through the viewfinder, for what it’s worth), so instead I shot some test footage in X-OCN LT and C2 with the FX5 paired with a 50mm Zeiss CP Cine lens. Nothing could read the RAW files yet at the time, so I transcoded everything to XAVC-S in Catalyst Sony’s already confirmed Catalyst Prepare 3.0 is coming to properly support those new C1/C2 formats, so that workflow gap should close soon.
Bottom line on the FX5: fantastic camera. Versatile, easy to work with, exactly what you’d expect from Sony’s ergonomics and menu logic.
But I’ll say it anyway I still love my Nikon ZR more. The image it produces, especially in RED RAW, is something else. Color, image quality, how forgiving the RAW is to grade: for me it still beats the competition on those fronts, and the autofocus has genuinely caught up to Sony-level reliability at this point. Pair it with the Blazar Talon and it starts looking like actual film.
On the firmware side, there’s a correction worth making here versus what I said in the video: the open gate and anamorphic desqueeze support I was excited about isn’t in the upcoming firmware 2.00 that update (landing later in 2026) brings Log3G10 and REDWideGamutRGB in H.265, selectable high-ISO noise reduction, and focus peaking in R3D NE. Open gate and in-camera anamorphic desqueeze are a separate firmware track Nikon has confirmed is targeted for 2027. Worth the wait, but further out than I’d assumed.
Big thanks to Daniele Amoroso of Alanet Computer in Varedo for the company at the event — if you’re in the area and need PC hardware or support, that’s his shop.