Recipes Without the Cable: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and LAN in AlphaLuma 1.1.3
Dates: the international edition shipped this as AlphaLuma 1.1.3 on the App Store on 2026-10-03 at 17:15 UTC (01:15 on October 4, Beijing time); the China edition shipped the same features as 1.1.5 on 2026-09-29. We drafted this post on 2026-09-19 and published it on 2026-10-04 Beijing time (23:58 UTC on October 3), after the international release; until 2026-10-06 this page showed 2026-09-29, the China release date, as its publish date. The note on "first" below was last checked against other apps' public changelogs on 2026-10-05; the camera list follows our Supported cameras table, last checked 2026-10-06.
The cable was the last thing between you and the recipe
In August we shipped USB recipe import: pick a recipe on your phone, tap once, and it lands in the camera's Creative Look. Since then the most frequent message in our inbox has been one sentence long: can it do this without the cable?
As of 1.1.3, yes. The camera-side remote channel that Sony bodies expose over Wi-Fi is now wired into the same flow as USB, and the phone reaches it three ways.
Three ways in, one card
Everything starts from the new Connect Camera card on the home screen.
- Bluetooth. Put the camera on its smartphone-connection screen, pair once, and from then on the app turns the camera's hotspot on and joins it for you. Second time out: zero input.
- Wi-Fi. Scan the QR code on the camera's Wi-Fi Direct screen — or type the hotspot name and password by hand. The first time, the app asks once for the camera's access-authentication user name and password and remembers them for that body.
- Same network. Camera and iPhone on the same router: the app lists the cameras it finds; tap yours. Your phone keeps its internet.
Each path comes with an illustrated on-screen guide for the camera side, and when something fails the app says why and offers the other paths. USB is still there, unchanged.
What travels over the air
The whole recipe: Creative Look, the eight adjustments and white balance, written onto the current settings in one pass, or saved into a Custom Look slot (a slot holds the look and its eight adjustments; white balance is a global camera setting, so the app leaves it unchanged when writing a slot and says so before you confirm). Wireless and USB share the same write flow, so the rule you already know still holds — the look and its adjustments are shown first, and nothing is sent until you confirm.
One small thing shipped alongside: white-balance shift is now clamped to the ±7 steps the camera actually accepts before it is sent, so an old recipe with an out-of-range value no longer lands in the body.
Monitor and Recipe Lab, no cable required
The Camera Monitor no longer asks for USB. If a connection exists — any kind — you go straight in; over USB it behaves exactly as before.
New in this version is the Recipe Lab: the camera's live view as your negative. Switch Creative Look, pull the eight sliders, or tap a recipe card and apply the whole thing to the camera while you watch the frame change. It uses the same session as the monitor, so you can hop between them without reconnecting.
Why USB first, and why wireless now
We shipped the cable first because it behaves the same on every body. Sony's wireless remote does not: the camera only exposes it through its own remote channel, and how that channel is reached differs by generation. Rather than ship a wireless path that works on one camera and mystifies people on the next, we waited until the app could tell the generations apart and guide each one.
That is also why the compatibility list below is narrower than the USB one. It will widen as we verify bodies — and only then.
Where each body stands
- α7 V — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and same-network all verified on our own bodies.
- α7R V — Bluetooth, QR and same-network all verified (at launch only the same network was; updated 2026-10-06).
- α7C II, α7CR — same generation as the α7R V; not yet verified wirelessly.
- α7 IV, α7R VI, ZV-E1 — not yet verified wirelessly.
- USB — verified on all of the above, as before.
If your camera has Creative Look and isn't listed, try it: the app checks before writing and writes nothing when a body isn't supported. Tell us the model either way — that is what moves a line from "expected" to "verified".
Pairing is the fragile step
During the beta, four of the six failures the app reported to us were Bluetooth pairing — and none of them were bugs. The camera wasn't on its waiting screen, the pairing wasn't confirmed on the camera, or the iPhone and the camera disagreed about an old pairing. The fix is the same every time: forget the camera in iOS Bluetooth settings, pair again and press OK on the camera when the code appears — and only if it still fails, reset the camera's network settings. The wireless connection guide has the full troubleshooting list.
A note on "first"
The cable version was first among phone apps: AlphaLuma wrote Creative Look recipes from an iPhone into a Sony camera over USB in August 2026 (China edition 1.0.9 on the 4th, international 1.1.0 on the 6th), and we have not found an earlier phone app with a public changelog. (Desktop tools are a different thing: the open-source pysonycam library has included, since April 2026, a script for writing a recipe's base look and eight adjustments from a computer over USB.) Wireless is not a first for us. Lutaro, an independent iOS app, documented writing Creative Looks over Wi-Fi earlier (its site from 2026-08-27; App Store 1.1 notes, 2026-09-05), and Sony's own Creators' App delivers Sony's creator Looks wirelessly — a different thing. We do not claim a first for wireless monitoring either. If a phone app wrote recipes over USB before August 2026 with a public changelog, write to us and we will correct this post. Last checked 2026-10-05.
Get it
Update to 1.1.3 on the App Store, open the Connect Camera card, and pick a way in. Step-by-step walkthroughs: Send Creative Look recipes to your Sony wirelessly and AlphaLuma Recipe Lab. The wireless guide and the USB guide cover the camera-side menus in detail. Free recipe cards for hand entry stay on sonyfilmsimulations.com.
- Email: sonyalphainfo@126.com
- Reddit: r/SonyFilmRecipes
— The AlphaLuma Team