Engadget reviews Xperia 1 II
“Feels like a love letter to creative types”
For all intends and purposes, Xperia as a brand died a handful of years ago as far as any mainstream consumer are concerned. While selling 25 million phones in an entire year isn’t overly impressive, it still shows signs of life, but when you sell under 10 million phones in the past two years, you barely exist as a brand. The only people buying an Xperia phone today are hardcore Sony fans, and luckily there’s something to that.
Chris Velazco for Engadget:
Rather than revamp everything with the mainstream in mind, that phone’s successor — the $1,200 Xperia 1 ii — is even more of a niche device.
One of the biggest faults with Xperia and most Sony Electronics products has been their inability to predict where the consumer market is headed and create compelling mass-market products. Till now, Sony hasn’t decided to double down on people who are buying its products, but with Xperia 1 II, they’re doing precisely that.
Once again, Sony drew from its expertise in pro-grade cameras, resulting in a phone that feels like a love letter to creative types and very few others.
I’d argue with the above point that Xperia 1 II might be the first phone that’s actually embraced and fully tapped into Sony’s camera expertise. Ironically, the camera on Xperia phones has been hardly anything to write about, likely not wanting to ‘take away sales’ from Alpha — a short-sighted move. But this phone is all about its cameras.
For one, all these cameras are shielded by Zeiss’s T* lens coating, which is designed to keep reflections and ghosting from fouling up your photos. And, despite making some of the most pixel-dense smartphone camera sensors in the world, Sony kept things pretty modest here. Not one of these cameras tiptoes over the 12MP threshold. Meanwhile, Samsung is running around, selling its 108-megapixel ISOCELL sensor to vendors like Huawei and Motorola.
One might assume that Samsung’s cameras are superior, but the numbers never tell the whole story. Sony did a remarkable job squeezing everything it could out of these sensors and developed a suite of tools to help you do the same.
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Unsurprisingly, Samsung has resurfaced the megapixel war count. It’s what you do when you’re out of options and need the next gimmick to move your device, and that’s what Samsung is all about — gimmick feature after gimmick feature. Luckily, Sony wasn’t duped into this. Like iPhone, the megapixel count on Xperia 1 II isn’t astronomically high because more pixels don’t equate to better photos.
Human eye-tracking debuted on the Xperia 1 and all but ensures you’ll get a clean, crisp shot of a person’s face, and the 1 ii expands that trick to work on animals too. I don’t have a pet myself, but the feature came in very handy during a social-distanced hangout with a friend’s adorable, somewhat Instagram-famous dog. The Xperia 1 ii’s autofocus is also shockingly fast — it performs focus calculations about 60 times per second, so it’s better at continuously locking onto a subject than any other phone I’ve used.
Best of all, Sony’s choice of main camera sensor means you can shoot as many as 20 photos per second. For lack of anything more elegant to say, that is absolutely wild — it’s easily the most impressive thing about the Xperia 1 ii’s camera system. But we’ll get to that. We need to talk about the Xperia 1 ii’s split camera personalities first.
For people who just want to point their phone at something and take a picture, it’s pretty hard to recommend the Xperia. It offers controls to quickly switch between the three cameras, set your color temperature, and swap between a selection of artsy photo effects. And when you start shooting, the camera’s scene detection generally does a decent job figuring out what you’re looking at kicking to the right scene mode. If you’re super tight on something, for instance, the camera automatically switches to macro. And when you’re shooting someone with light at their back — as is often the case over the summer — a Backlight Portrait mode does a marginally better job exposing their face.
Xperia 1 II also offers a host of improvements over its predecessor when it comes to video as well.
Like the Xperia 1 before it, the 1 ii draws inspiration from Sony’s CineAlta cameras. They’re a mainstay of movie sets, not the vlogs you’re likely to run into on the street. If you’re not shooting your thesis student film, you’ll do fine sticking to the standard Camera app. It shoots in 4K, and the resulting footage looks pretty damn good. Sony’s Cinema Pro app, meanwhile, offers a wealth of controls for people trying to capture a very specific vision.
The app lets you shoot 10-bit color video in either 2K at frame rates as high as 120fps, or the more standard 4K at 60fps. Want to dial in a specific ISO or shutter speed value? You can do that. What about cycling through a palette of video filters? Yep — Sony’s Venice filter is especially moody and atmospheric. Need to set focus manually? Go right ahead. You can even set the camera to perform a focus pull at the touch of a button, which comes in especially handy when you’re, say, shooting a smartphone review video.
The Cinema Pro app is a great tool for anyone who wants more than just a point-and-shoot video experience — it’s feature-rich, but not too daunting. That’s not to say it’s perfect, though. Once you’ve decided what resolution you want to shoot in, though, you’re basically stuck with it. The Cinema Pro app keeps all your footage organized by in separate bins by project, and the only way to change your resolution after you’ve started shooting is… by making a new project. In shooting with my video producer, Brian Oh, we noticed that it can also be surprisingly tough to get properly exposed footage, even when ISO is bottomed out at 64. And more than anything, I’m surprised Sony didn’t add even more pro-grade features. Manual focus is a nice touch, but Sony has been doing focus peaking on its actual cameras for years, and it would’ve been a huge help here. Even LG figured that out years ago, on its V-series smartphones.
The entire review from Chris is worth a read, considering there’s much more to the phone, like its massive 6.5-inch OLED display and powerful hardware that powers it, but if we’re honest, the main reason a majority of us upgrade our phones is that we want to capture our lives in more vivid details. Xperia 1 II seems to deliver on that promise and goes one step further by also fulfilling your creative needs.
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