Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Best Camera in Any Phone… With a Catch!”.
Hey, what’s up mkbhd here coming at you from uh the brand new soft long sleeve available at shop.okaybhd.com, along with the rest of our lineup, that’s available shipping and time for the holidays. So definitely make sure you get in on that link below the like button. But i am holding in my hands right now: a sony smartphone, but not just any phone, i’m holding the phone with the most impressive hardware, camera setup of any smartphone out right now, but there is a catch. So this is the sony xperia pro i so we’ve been having some conversations around the studio about how some companies treat their smartphone lines, basically based on how much money it makes that company so like apple and samsung, spend a ton of energy on their phones, because A ton of their money comes from how good their phones are, but microsoft, for example, makes so much of their money in enterprise that a consumer phone doesn’t really move the needle for them.
Whether it succeeds or not, and same argument could be made for google who’s. Mostly an ads company, so the pixel doesn’t really have to be a world-class phone for google to be okay. So then, there’s sony and sony makes a lot of stuff. They make the playstation 5.. They make the sony alpha cameras, they run movie. Studios they’ve got a lot going on making them money and they also happen to make smartphones too sure, but the smartphones are not one of the high priority things, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a full year after we found ourselves wondering why people don’t buy sony’s Super interesting super niche smartphones they’re back at it again with another one with another ridiculous set of quirks and features. This phone has a 4k 120 hertz oled display i’ll, say that again, a 4k 120 hertz oled display and in that unconventionally tall 21 by 9 aspect ratio that makes the six and a half inch screen look narrow, but also still be easy to hold. It’S got all the buttons on the side, including a dedicated camera shutter button with the half press for auto focus and a second press for snapping a shot plus a second custom button alongside it that launches their custom-made built-in video pro app on this phone. It’S still got the underrated toolless sim card tray, which is back to back with the rare micro sd card slot for adding up to a terabyte of extra storage to the phone.
There is a high quality headphone jack up top too naturally, and this phone has an eyelet at the corner for a wrist strap because, of course it does and also in classic sony fashion. This phone is called the sony xperia pro i, but so they had the xperia 1 and then they had the xperia 1 mark 3 with eyes representing the 3, and so now this is the pro i it’s like they’re, trying to make it as confusing as possible, But the cherry on top of everything is this phone is 1 799 and launches in a month classic sony. But, like i said at the beginning this, this is what makes the phone the pro. I has an incredible hardware system.
That’S what i want to talk about in this article um. You would think with this incredible hardware. It takes the best photos and videos we’ll get to that in a second but yeah. This is really impressive, so sony xperia.
I has a ridiculous massive one inch sensor for that main camera. Now, it’s also flanked by a 12 megapixel ultrawide camera up top and then there’s also a depth sensor and a 2x telephoto camera below it. But let’s talk about that main camera, smartphone camera sensors have been getting larger and larger lately reaping all the benefits, all the light gathering all the shallow depth of field. As a result, this phone has the largest we’ve ever seen a full one-inch diagonal.
So, for some perspective, the iphone just moved from a one over two point: five five inch sensor last year to a one over one point: nine inch, bigger sensor this year, the pixel six and six pro with their headline making new sensor. It’S one over 1.3 inches, which is matching the samsung galaxy s21 ultra and xiaomi’s mi 11 ultra with one of the largest camera bumps of all time has a one over 1.1 inch sensor. This sony, xperia, i, the i stands for imaging turns out – is all about this massive new barrier being broken of a full one-inch diagonal sensor, that is the largest sensor ever fit into the back of a phone.
Now some of you who are in the photography world might recognize that’s the same size sensor, that’s in their world-class point-and-shoot cameras. The rx100 mark 7 has a one-inch sensor, and i know that’s true, because this is the sensor from the rx100 mark 7.. Those two devices have this same one-inch cmos sensor inside for taking photos and videos.
That is, that is pretty incredible for a smartphone. It kind of feels like a camera first that happens to have a phone attached to it. So it’s already really interesting for that, but wait, there’s more so most smartphone lens elements inside are typically plastic. A lot of people didn’t know that i actually learned that pretty recently up until the main outside lens, which is glass all plastic on the inside, but not the sony. The sony is using aspherical glass lens elements inside it’s very expensive to do that. But for the sake of optical quality, that’s what they wanted and that’s what they built in and on top of all of that, if you’ve been watching the videos.
We’Ve seen some big sensor smartphones before and what’s my first complaint, always when i take a close-up photo with the shallow background, there’s often a lot of fringing around that main subject, and so that samsung feature from a couple years ago. Variable aperture would have been kind of neat well, it’s back so sony has built back in the changing aperture feature from the galaxy s9 days, so there’s a toggle in the camera ui that can physically close down the aperture from f 2.0 to f 4.0. So in broad daylight or in well-lit conditions with a close-up subject, you can stop down like a real photographer and actually get more in focus and the difference is actually noticeable both in the sharpness of the subject and the blurriness level of the background.
You’Ll have to see it on top of all that this phone also has its own dedicated sony built bion’s image processor that allows for super fast 20 frames per second shooting with 315 autofocus points covering 90 of the frame and it’ll shoot 4k video up to 120 Frames per second, it’s incredible so sounds like the hardware of this camera is pretty incredible right i mean it. Is it’s not a trick question? It really is, but take a look at these two photos side by side, which one would you pick as better? Well, most people especially side by side would pick the one on the left. That’S the iphone 13 pro up against the sony.
Well, what about this picture same idea, there’s clearly a difference between them and there’s a reason that most people are picking the photo on the left. Obviously, the brighter photo catches, your eye, usually the most easily, but camera enthusiasts will probably also notice the better dynamic range on the left too. That’S because sony doesn’t really do all that much computational photography nearly as well as some of the most popular smartphones with the multi-frame hdr processing.
So the sony result is a more natural, less hdr-e, possibly more true-to-life photo technically, but often one that looks a bit more dull or more flat and then also, if you’re thinking wait. Why doesn’t the background blur look massively different from the iphone? I thought there was a huge one-inch sensor in there and you’d be right to think that, because we’ve arrived at the catch, which is that, yes, this phone does have a one-inch sensor inside physically pretty crazy, but this phone doesn’t actually use the entire one-inch sensor from Corner to corner so when i held up the phone next to the rx-100 earlier, yes, these two things have the same sensor, but clearly the pocket camera is a lot thicker. There’S there’s way more z-axis space to work with, for all that high-quality glass in front of the sensor, great on a smartphone the optics have to be, i mean you can see.
It’S super super small. It’S pushed up much closer to the sensor and unfortunately they’re so close to this one, that the image circle covered by the lens doesn’t actually cover the whole sensor. So you know, since lenses are circles when they let in light that light travels down the barrel and projects, an image circle onto the back of the camera and that’s picked up by the rectangular sensor back there. So our photos are all rectangles, but that’s because they’re cutting the rectangular image out of the entire circle, that’s being projected back there.
So in this phone’s case the image circle is actually smaller than the one-inch sensor. So the photos it’s spitting out are a subset of a subset of that silicon. It’S actually a 12 megapixel crop of that whole 20. Megapixel one-inch sensor in there to begin with effectively making it a one over 1.3 inch sensor, that’s actually being used and then dual aperture like i said, it’s really cool it’s great and all that to have with a big sensor but f2 as the maximum aperture is Actually not as wide as most of the other highest end.
Smartphone cameras out today, which are around f, 1.5 f, 1.6, letting in even more light than this. So when you combine these two realizations that the effective sensor size is smaller and that the max aperture is also smaller, it turns out the xperia. I is actually gathering less light and has less overall bokeh than phones like the iphone 13 pro or galaxy s. 21.
Ultra or pixel 6., what a wild quark slash feature to have that it’s got this crazy, huge sensor, but it’s unable to use all of it and you know maybe in a future version they were able to use more z, space or maybe a larger overall camera. Cutout on the back, i don’t know exactly what fixes this but yeah. That’S that’s one of the most interesting things. I’Ve seen in a phone a long time and there’s obviously more to a camera or more to a phone than just the camera.
But you know when it’s the xperia i for imaging and when it’s 1800 and when it’s got a one-of-a-kind sensor, that’s kind of what you’re looking at so yeah this this particular phone is one. I would probably only recommend to people who obviously have a lot of money to burn, but are really looking for the manual control offered by the apps that sony ships with these phones kind of the same way they did with the xperia one mark iii. Still. Amazing. All the manual control with videos, too, the focus slider everything built in it’s great, but you’ve got to really know what you’re getting yourself into, and this is not a daily for most people. But that being said, i am really glad this exists. Just because not like it’s some specialty, crazy, one-inch sensor, one-of-a-kind thing but really smartphone’s cameras are all sort of leveling up again and that’s something i like to see because it feels like one of the biggest things that still differentiates all these really good phones at the High end so yeah, let’s keep getting smartphone cameras better every year, love to see it either way. That’S been it thanks for watching catch.
You guys the next one peace .