Sony FX5 delayed until September due to Quality Control issue

Sony's FX5 cinema camera now won't ship on its original August 18 date and has slipped to September as the company works to rectify an unspecified problem. 

The much-anticipated Sony FX5 was due to start shipping on August 18, but it is looking increasingly likely that it will not make that date as a series of problems have hit the new camera's launch schedule.

First, there was the widely reported availability problem. When Japanese preorders opened on July 28, the company said in an official notice that it had "received significantly more orders than we anticipated" and warned of delivery delays as a result. Fulfillment for late orders was pushed into September.

Then there was an earthquake. A significant 7.1 tremor hit the Kumamoto Prefecture on July 28, which is where the Kumamoto Technology Center of Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation is located. This is Sony’s largest image sensor plant and, as Digital Camera World reported, production was shut down for several days. It reportedly restarted on August 4, but that and the attendant infrastructure problems in the region will definitely have had a knock-on effect in some product lead times.

We don’t know for certain that this will have affected production of the new 16.6 MP Exmor RS CMOS sensor in the FX5, but there is definite potential for disruption.

QC issue ups the stakes

And over the weekend the first rumors regarding a Quality Control issue started coming out of Japan. Canon Rumors said it had heard from two sources that an unspecified QC issue needed to be sorted before any further units made it out of dealer stock rooms. There was no word on what the issue was, but a firmware fix would lead to a minimal delay, while a hardware fix would need a potential recall and a swap of inventory before further customers could take delivery.

To be honest, we sat on the story for a few days as we didn't have any corroboration. But overnight B&H has moved the expected ship date of the FX5 from August 18 to a bland 'September' on its pre-order page, while Adorama is more explicit with a September 15, 2026 date. And SonyAlphaRumors is now sharing emails to customers from German retail stating that "a final quality adjustment is being made prior to the shipment" and "availability is currently expected in early September."

So, the delay is now confirmed on both sides of the Atlantic, but the issue isn't yet 100% clear. Given the disruption though, we'd bet on a hardware issue of some sort.