Heads up, creators. There’s a new camera on the market aimed specifically at vloggers, courtesy of Sony.

The industry giant recently announced the ZV-E10, which will stand as Sony’s first Alpha series interchangeable lens vlog camera. Sony claims this fancy new shooter has been “designed from the ground up for vlogging and vloggers.” Better yet, the company armed the ZV-E10 with a $700 price tag that should make it accessible for many aspiring vloggers and content creators.

Some questions remain, however. Like, is this camera actually geared towards vlogging the way Sony says it is? And, is it worth replacing the trusty smartphone that many up-and-coming creators rely on for making content on a regular basis? Let’s dig into the details on the ZV-E10 to try and find out.

It does have several vlogging-centric features

Without regurgitating Sony’s spec sheet (besides, we’ve already put together a detailed overview of the camera here), the ZV-E10 has many features that are meant to help creators make content more easily. For starters, it’s light, at around 12 ounces. For reference, the iPhone 12 Pro Max weighs in at 8.04 ounces. The ZV-E10 is still heftier, of course, but it is certainly in the same ballpark of portability that makes today’s smartphones such accessible tools for content creation. 

Digging deeper, the ZV-E10 employs some impressive technology that should be particularly helpful when it is in the hands of creators. It has Sony’s stellar Autofocus technology that is built to keep subjects (vloggers) in focus on the camera by tracking their faces and eyes. It also offers an internal Directional 3-Capsule Mic that Sony says “enables the ZV-E10 to capture crystal clear sound recordings.” There’s obviously some bias on Sony’s part here, but if it can accurately record a subject’s voice while dampening intrusive noises in the background, then it’s a welcome addition to this vlogging-minded camera.

With more features in the mix, like a Face Priority Autoexposure algorithm that automatically makes corrections to guarantee that a subject’s face is properly exposed, it’s clear that Sony has tried its best to create a streamlined experience for creators that takes the guesswork out of dialing in a camera for vlogging purposes. We haven’t tried the camera yet, so we can’t verify that it has succeeded with those ambitions. But on paper, the ZV-E10 does look promising.

Promising enough to ditch your smartphone?

The ZV-E10 isn’t the cheapest camera on the market, but it is priced in such a way that it would be appealing to a creator intent on improving the quality of their content. It’s fair to assume, even, that the ZV-E10 is attempting to be the product that convinces many creators to stop recording with their smartphones.

Should you, though? After all, most folks’ smartphones travel with them everywhere out of necessity. Combined with the fact that camera capabilities and audio-recording functionality in smartphones have improved monumentally over the years, the modern smartphone is more often than not the most convenient tool that creators have.

That doesn’t mean it has to be the only tool, though. If you can afford it, the ZV-E10 might be an intriguing option to take a look at. Once again, we haven’t tested it ourselves, so we can’t make any outright recommendations here. But the spec sheet on Sony’s new camera is impressive enough to lead us to believe that it would offer an instant improvement in quality over most smartphones available today. Smartphones will always be the most accessible, but the ZV-E10 could very well be a reasonably cost-effective way to boost the production quality of your vlogs and online content. For many, that’s worth the investment.