Sony will finally set PlayMemories out to pasture this month. The company stopped new uploads to the service last September but on February 29 -- nearly 12 years after it launched -- Sony will terminate the service entirely.
Sony has just released an interesting new app for its mirrorless and high-end compact cameras. The app, called "Digital Filter," lets you divide your sensor into up to 3 sections and capture each of those parts differently. It's like a graduated ND filter built right into your camera's software.
Sony just launched a new PlayMemories app called Sky HDR. It's designed to replace the graduated neutral density filters in Sony photographers' camera bags by making it easy to capture correct exposures for a bright sky in the background and a darker landscape in the foreground, all in one shot.
Sony has released a new app called Touchless Shutter that lets you trigger cameras without touching them, or anything else, at all. Instead of pressing the shutter button, you can instead hold your hand over the camera's eye sensor to expose a shot.
We're in the year of the camera's app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera's app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren't easily available in the old age of cameras.
While Android is one of the big operating systems manufacturers have gravitated towards, Sony has decided to go the Sony way and make its system proprietary. Instead of running Android, the Sony NEX-5R and the NEX-6 will offer apps through the PlayMemories ecosystem.
Now that online sharing of images and video has become so commonplace, Sony has decided that they too want a piece of the pie. And their new storage service, dubbed PlayMemories Online, is how they intend to claim that piece. Launched only a couple of days ago, the service is now available in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Canada and offers 5GB of storage for free.