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AUSTRALIAN DRONE LICENCE
SCHEME DELAYEDT
HE Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has delayed the
roll out of a nationwide drone registration scheme, with
recreational users not expected to need to register for the
scheme until mid to late 2020.
Peter Gibson, Manager Corporate Communications at
CASA, said the initial rollout will begin later this year.
“Commercial operators [will be] first [to register], then recreation-
al,” he said. “Recreational users are likely to start in mid to late 2020.”
Reports in March suggested drone registration for recreational us-
ers is expected to cost $20 a year for recreational drones, while com-
mercial drone users will be charged anywhere from $100 to $160.
According to the CASA website, commercial and recreational us-
ers will need to also complete an online training course, with Gibson
confirming users will need to supply the serial number of any drones
in their possession to the Authority as part of registration. Speaking to 7 News earlier this month, Gibson said the
changes are part of a shift towards safer skies.
“We’re going to be toughening up the drone safety rules,” he said.
This is expected to include a national database of drones, and
increased monitoring, with major events including Sydney’s
Vivid festival already being monitored by CASA with technol-
ogy that can detect a drone from the signal between the control-
ler and drone.
“In some instances this technology can show the location of
both the drone and the controller, and in some cases the serial
number of the drone as well,” Gibson said.
A combination of covert and publicly notified monitoring will
be conducted by the Authority, with users caught f lying illegal-
ly expected to be fined around $1,000, although no fines have
been issued yet.SONY ANNOUNCE RX100 VII
SONY have announced the seventh-edition of the company’s
mirrorless RX100.
The new camera sports a newly designed 1-inch stacked
20.1-megapixel CMOS sensor with DRAM chip, and features
the same 24–200mm f/2.8–4.5 Zeiss Vario Sonnar T* lens as
found on last year’s RX100 VI.There’s 357 phase-detect and 425 contrast-detect autofocus
points that cover 68 percent of the frame, with Sony saying the
camera can autofocus up to 0.02 seconds and perform 60 auto-
focus and autoexposure calculations per second.
Like the Sony a9, the RX100 VII can shoot 20 frames per sec-
ond blackout-free silent shooting, and also gains a host of Sony’s
latest autofocus features, including Real-time Tracking, Real-
time Eye AF and Real-time animal Eye AF.
On the backside, there’s a 3-inch, 921.6k-dot touchscreen
LCD that’s tiltable 180-degrees up and 90-degrees down. The
EVF is 0.39-inch and has 2.36 million dots.
A new feature called Single Burst Drive Mode alllows capture of
seven RAW or JPEGs at up to 90fps (or 60 or 30 if you so wish) per sin-
gle shutter press. Focus and exposure will be fixed at the first shot fired.
There’s a host of video features too, including 4K in-body mov-
ie recording with full pixel readout and no pixel binning,Real-
time Tracking and Real-time Eye AF for video, interval shoot-
ing, super slow mo at 1000fps, a microphone jack and 180
degree f lip screen LCD.
The RX100 VII will be available in Australia from August
2019 for SRP $1,999.
Find out more at Sony.com.au.QUICK SNAPS