Ahead of NAB, Sony has announced new AXS media for the AXS-R5 Raw recorder, which is designed to work with the F5, F55, and the FS700. These new cards have been shrunk in size from the original AXS 512 GB card (AXS-512S24), and are now the size of standard SxS cards.

A little while ago, Sony released the latest firmware for the F5 & F55 cameras, as well as the AXS-R5 Raw recorder. Version 1.15 of the F5/F55 firmware has some small incremental updates, with mostly bug fixes included. However, some big changes include improved naming conventions on the AXS card, de-anamorphic function on the viewfinder, and a warning when you haven't black balanced in a while.

One of the big advantages of the Sony F55 is its ability to record both RAW and HD at the same time (this is true of the F5 as well). When paired with the Sony AXS-R5 recorder, the F5/F55 can record 16-bit RAW data to AXS media cards, and HD video (MPEG2 or XAVC) to SxS cards. This gives you an easy-to-use offline editing format as well as an extremely high quality online Raw format at the same time.

Sony stopped by recently to show us the FS700 with the RAW output option enabled. This upgrade has to be done at Sony for a cost of $400. However, if you buy their HXR-IFR5 and R5 recorder the fee is waived.

When the Sony FS700 was first released, Sony announced that a 4K Raw recording option would be forthcoming.