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- Hey, what's up, MKBHD here.
Coming at you from the brand new
soft long sleeve available at shop.mkbhd.com,
along with the rest of our lineup that's available.
Shipping in time for the holidays,
so definitely make sure to get it
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 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 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 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
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 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 $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 wanna talk about in this video.
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 a one 1/1.1-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 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 a 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,
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 a shallow background,
there's often a lot of fringing around that main subject.
And so, that Samsung feature from a couple of years ago,
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 auto focus 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-y, 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 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 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 $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,
mwuah, it's great.
But you've gotta 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 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.
Either way, that's been it.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace!
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