Sony's RX10 V Is the First New Superzoom in 9 Years. Here's the Storage Problem It Creates.

Sony announced the RX10 V on July 9 — the first new entry in its all-in-one superzoom line since the RX10 IV shipped in 2017, nine years ago. The pitch hasn't changed: one body, one lens, 24-600mm covered without a lens change, built for travel and wildlife shooters who'd rather carry a single camera than a bag full of glass. What has changed is what that camera can now do in a burst — 30fps blackout-free shooting and 4K120 slow motion — and neither of those numbers gets mentioned in the spec sheet as a storage problem, even though that's exactly what they are for anyone who actually uses this camera the way it's designed to be used.

Same Sensor, New Processing — And That's the Real Story

The RX10 V's headline spec isn't a new sensor. It's the same 20.1MP 1.0-type stacked Exmor RS CMOS sensor generation Sony used in the RX10 IV back in 2017, paired with a ZEISS Vario-Sonnar T* 24-600mm f/2.4-4.0 lens with optical stabilization — also familiar territory for anyone who's used the line before. What's actually new sits behind the sensor: a BIONZ XR processor with a dedicated AI processing unit for subject recognition and tracking autofocus, blackout-free continuous shooting up to 30fps, 4K video up to 120p for up to 5x slow motion, and a sharper 0.5-type Quad-VGA OLED viewfinder at roughly 3.68 million dots and 0.78x magnification.

That's a meaningful upgrade, but it's an upgrade in throughput, not resolution — and throughput is exactly what fills storage fast. A camera that can rip 30 frames per second without the viewfinder blacking out invites you to hold the shutter down through an entire moment rather than timing a single frame, which is a great way to catch a bird taking flight and a fast way to end up with 60 nearly identical RAW files from two seconds of shooting.

Why One Lens Means Constant Use

The whole reason someone buys a 24-600mm superzoom instead of a mirrorless body with a bag of primes is to avoid swapping lenses in the field — at a wildlife blind, on a hiking trail, courtside at a kid's soccer game. That convenience has a side effect: the camera comes out more often and stays out longer, because there's no friction stopping a shooter from going from a wide establishing shot to a 600mm tight crop and back again in the same five minutes. More shooting time, at 30fps burst rates, on a sensor that also shoots RAW, adds up to card-filling speed that a lens-swapping kit rarely matches.

The Culling Problem Nobody Mentions in a Launch Spec Sheet

Two seconds of shutter-down at 30fps is 60 frames. Do that a dozen times in an afternoon of wildlife or sports shooting and you're sorting through 700+ nearly identical RAW files by evening, most of them separated from their neighbors by a blink, a slightly different wing position, or nothing meaningfully different at all. This is the tradeoff burst shooting has always carried, but 30fps blackout-free shooting on a stacked sensor makes it worse than older cameras did, simply because it's easier to hold the trigger longer without losing the viewfinder image and losing track of the moment.

RAW compounds it further. Casual shooters moving up to a camera like this from a phone are used to JPEG-only file sizes — a few megabytes each, forgettable. A RAW file off a 1-inch stacked sensor runs several times larger than that, and at 30fps, a two-second burst in RAW can produce a gigabyte or more of data before you've even reviewed a single frame.

1. Cull same-day, not at the end of the trip. Reviewing a burst while the moment is still fresh in memory makes it far easier to pick the two or three frames worth keeping and delete the rest — waiting a week turns 700 unsorted files into a chore nobody wants to start.
2. Shoot RAW selectively, not by default. Reserve it for shots you know you'll want to edit or print large; let everyday shooting run in a compressed RAW or JPEG mode instead.
3. Compress your keepers before cloud backup. A backup service that syncs full-size RAW files from every burst will burn through storage quotas and upload bandwidth fast, especially on a trip with spotty connectivity.
4. Don't let bursts sit un-culled on the card. An unreviewed 700-frame folder tends to just get copied wholesale to a laptop or drive "to deal with later" — and later rarely comes.

The 4K120 Footage Is the Bigger Storage Problem

Burst photos are a known quantity — most photographers have dealt with card-filling bursts before. 4K video at 120 frames per second is a newer problem for this class of camera, and it's arguably the bigger one. High-frame-rate 4K is inherently data-heavy: four times the resolution of 1080p and four times the frame count of standard 30fps video, recorded uncropped. A few minutes of 4K120 footage can outweigh an entire day's worth of stills.

The other issue is that almost none of that footage needs to stay at 120fps. Nobody's watching a 5x slow-motion clip on social media at full frame rate — it gets downsampled to a normal playback speed as part of the slow-motion effect itself, which means the extra frames exist purely to be blended down in post, not to be shared as-is. Shooting 4K120 and then uploading the raw high-frame-rate file directly is the single most common way this kind of footage clogs a phone or laptop: transcode it down to the slow-motion output you actually want, or compress it, before it becomes a permanent multi-gigabyte resident of your storage.

If you've just picked up an RX10 V or you're planning to when it ships in early August, the workflow that keeps it usable is the same one that keeps any high-throughput camera usable: cull aggressively, shoot RAW with intent, and compress before anything leaves the card for good. Optimage's video compressor handles the 4K120 footage specifically — built for exactly this kind of high-frame-rate file that's too heavy to share or store as-shot.

Related reading:

• Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 Has a 200MP Camera. Here's What That Means for Your Files. — a phone-side version of the same resolution-versus-file-size tradeoff
• Sony Xperia 1 VIII Camera File Size Guide — another Sony camera system worth understanding before you shoot
• Oppo Is Selling the Reno 16 as a Camera Phone. Here's What Its Specs Actually Mean for Your File Sizes. — the pixel-binning story on the phone side of this same problem