camera testing
Coming at you from the brand new soft long sleeve along with the rest of our lineup that's available. Shipping in time for the holidays, so definitely make sure to get it 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 is out right now. But there is a catch. So this is a 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 the enterprise that a consumer phone doesn't really move the needle for them,
whether it succeeds or not. And the 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 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 nine 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 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 iii, with I's representing the three.
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 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. 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 Ultra 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 of 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 1/2.55-inch sensor last year to a 1/1.9-inch bigger sensor this year.
The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro with their headline-making new sensor, it's 1/1.3 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 one 1/1.1-inch sensor.
This Sony Xperia I, It stands for imaging, turns out, is all about this massive new barrier being broken off 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 VII has a one-inch sensor. And I know that's true because this is the sensor from the RX100 Mark VII. Those two devices have the same one-inch CMOS sensor inside for taking photos and videos.
That is pretty incredible for a smartphone. It kinda 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 spherical 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, we've seen some big sensor smartphones before, and what's my first complaint always? When I take a close-up photo with a shallow background, there's often a lot of fringing around that main subject. And so, that Samsung features from a couple of years ago, the variable aperture would have been kinda 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 F2.0 to F4.0. So in broad daylight or in well-lit conditions, with a closeup 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 love to see it.
On top of all of that, this phone also has its own dedicated Sony-built BIONZ 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? The 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, fewer HDR-y, possibly more true-to-life photo, technically, but often one that looks a bit duller 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 RX100 earlier, yes, these two things have the same sensor, but clearly, the pocket camera is a lot thicker. 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, is pushed up much closer to the sensor. And unfortunately, they are 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 1/1.3-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 F1.5, F1.6, 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 S21 Ultra, or Pixel 6.
What a wild quirk, 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 cut out on the back. I don't know exactly what fixes this, but yeah, that's one of the most interesting things
I've seen it on a phone for 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 $1,800, and when it's got a one of a kind sensor, that's kind of what you're looking at.
So yeah, 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 1 Mark iii, still amazing. All the manual control with videos, to the focus slider, everything built-in, much, it's great.
But you've gotta really know what you're getting yourself into, and this is not daily for most people. But that being said, I am really glad this exists, just because it does not like it's some specialty crazy one-inch sensor one-of-a-kind thing, but really smart phone' 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.
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