Sony Xperia 1 II review: it’s a stretch

Sony’s new Xperia 1 II smartphone is specifically designed for one very specific thing: making your phone work a bit more like a standalone Sony Alpha camera. It takes a long time to arrive: Sony has made dozens of Xperia phones since its first phone in 2008, but so far none of them have had such a clear or compelling identity.

Each brand of smartphone tries to create its own ecosystem, or at least its own experience. Surely you understand what it is to live in Apple’s iPhone world, Google’s Pixel world or Samsung’s Galaxy world. But it’s been a long time since everyone at Sony is so well defined and has an equally dedicated user community. It’s just that Sony’s world was not about smartphones; it was his Alpha line of cameras.

Sony has finally taken the first steps to directly connect that world with the Xperia line of smartphones. And while the result is not a home run, the Xperia 1 II finally offers something to recommend beyond good looks.

It’s a shame you have to spend $ 1,200 to live in Sony’s new world of smartphones.

Last year, the Sony Xperia 1 put Sony on the path to a new design language for the Xperia line: high and minimal. The 1 II looks exactly like last year’s phone, only bigger. It is an all-black square glass slab with a large 6.5-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 21: 9.

The OLED screen measures 3840 x 1644 pixels. (Sony calls this 4K.) It has a standard 60Hz refresh rate, a disappointment on a phone of this class. There’s a “Motion Blur Reduction” option that’s supposed to make it feel more like a 90Hz screen, but it doesn’t support true high-refresh rate options like the Samsung Galaxy S20 or Pixel 4.

The tall appearance of this phone means that it is simultaneously more comfortable and more uncomfortable to use. It’s easy to hold with one hand and lets you see more content without scrolling, but give up any plan to reach the top with that same hand, no matter your grip.

That added height also means that your inductive wireless charger can be placed too high for some charging docks. It only worked on flat springs in my tests. But actually, it doesn’t work there either because the thing is so slippery. Even on a dock with a little sticky rubber, the Xperia 1 II glides on right away. In fact, my review unit hit the hardwood floor so many times that it eventually developed a crack in the rear glass. Damn if I know what drop she made, but I do know they were all about three feet. Get a case.

That’s a shame because, judging from the look alone, it’s my favorite 2020 phone. Its symmetry is embodied.

Beyond aesthetics, Sony has struggled in the past to differentiate itself from other phones. This time, it succeeds with a number of rare features. The fingerprint sensor is elegantly integrated into the side-mounted power button, there is microSD storage expansion, there are two front stereo speakers, there is a dedicated physical camera button, and, good grief, there is a real headphone jack.

To complete the rest of the basics of smartphones: it has the usual Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, IP65 / 68 dust and water resistance, and a 4,000mAh battery. The battery life is long enough for a day of basic use. But if you expect to use this phone intensively to play games or take photos and videos, plan to complete it in the late afternoon.

Typically, this is the part where I tell American shoppers that, at $ 1,200, you are paying more for the 5G modem that you won’t necessarily get much use for. That’s true with the Xperia 1 II, only Sony is not enabling 5G absolutely in the US Asking users to pay more for dubious 5G bothers me on other phones, but I ask them to pay without any The utility of the Xperia 1 II seems so out of touch that it is lost in outer space.

The objective of the Sony Xperia 1 II is the camera system. Sony has long manufactured the most popular image sensors within smartphones, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that it has had a phone with a Sony sensor inside, and yet Sony’s Xperia phones have historically had cameras. disappointing.

It is a mystery with a relatively simple explanation: photo processing. For whatever reason, Sony has never been able to keep up with Apple, Google, Samsung, or even OnePlus when it comes to turning what the sensor gets into a great photo.

Using the default camera app on the Xperia 1 II remains that way. The images I get from all three lenses (normal, telephoto, and ultra wide) are competent but feel a bit lifeless. They’re pretty good, but compared to other phones in the class, they’re not great. Sony’s camera system doesn’t shine until you take things into manual mode, in a completely different pre-installed camera app.

There’s another set of cameras with great sensors that don’t make it simple and automatic to get great photos: standalone DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. They put more responsibility on the user to determine their settings, but they also gave that user dramatically greater control over them.

That’s the direction Sony is taking with the Xperia 1 II. Instead of fighting a losing computational photography battle against other smartphones, Sony is taking the fight to its turf: the Alpha camera lineup.

It starts with a gigantic 12-megapixel 1 / 1.7-inch Exmor RS sensor located behind a Zeiss lens at a focal length equivalent to 24mm. Sony has optimized the entire camera stack for high-speed photography: it can focus at 60fps and burst shooting at 20fps. It also borrows the much-loved autofocus function from its Alpha cameras, continuously focusing on the eye of a human or even an animal.

That’s a great technical talk on camera, which is exactly the point. Where Google and Apple will gift you with stories about how their cameras take multiple frames and then combine them with enhanced HDR computing, Sony wants you to treat your phone like it’s a separate mirrorless camera.

It sounds silly, but the mere inclusion of a dedicated physical shutter button does a lot to make this device feel more like a professional camera.

Sony’s Photo Pro app even mimics the actual user interface of Sony’s Alpha cameras. As a user of a Sony camera, I love this, but I am also aware that many people on the camera hate it (or rather, they hate the menu system that is often behind it). In any case, it’s more familiar to me than many of the professional camera apps I’ve tried.

Once you jump into Photo Pro, you’ll find that shooting with the Xperia 1 II is enjoyable in the same way that full manual shooting with a real camera is fun. Sony doesn’t give you direct control over the shutter speed, but it can control everything else (including ISO, a fairly fair substitute since the lens aperture is fixed). The unit I’m testing has non-final software, so strangely, it doesn’t include RAW capabilities. As of now, it’s a weird glitch, and we’ll have to see how Sony’s promised implementation works at launch in late July.

The canonical example is capturing motion blur at night. Night mode on other phones won’t let you do it because they’re trying to do something else: brighten up the scene so you can see what’s in it more clearly. The Xperia 1 II gives you enough control to be experimental: you can force a low ISO to maintain a long shutter speed and not produce too bright an image.

Grid view

The same idea applies to video, for the most part. There is an app called Cinema Pro that offers many of the same video features that you would expect from an independent camera. Cleverly allows you to collect a bunch of video clips in one project while recording them. Rather than just pouring everything onto your camera roll, it allows you to think of your videos as separate film projects.

Full manual focus only really works on the main 12 megapixel sensor, which is of higher quality than the wide or tele sensor. When you get attached to it, you can get photos and videos that are really impressive, but you have to work to achieve it. I generally don’t want to work when I’m using a smartphone.

I dig deeper into the video above, but the cold reality is that, as much as we’d like to think that phones have replaced the need for independent cameras, they are different things. Just as you make different types of music depending on the instrument you choose, you take different types of photos depending on the camera.

What Google discovered first (closely followed by Apple, Samsung, and a few others) is that it is better to do great smartphone camera that builds on the strengths of a smartphone than make a smartphone that tries to replicate the experience of using a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. The trend in computational photography is not just about compensating for the limitations of sensors and small lenses; you are creating a new type of camera.

The Xperia 1 II’s camera works in the opposite direction. I’m really interested to see what kind of new instrument Sony could make here, but most of all, I wish the default camera experience was more robust.

Compared to all the phones Sony has made before, it’s gotten so much better on the Xperia 1 II that I can’t help but feel a little excited. Where Xperia phones previously didn’t have a differentiating reason to exist, now they focus on a new camera experience. Where other Android phones try increasingly arcane tricks to fix your photos, the Xperia 1 II simply puts control in the photographer’s hands.

However, despite all that, I cannot recommend the Xperia 1 II to anyone other than the world’s most devoted devotee of Sony. The high price of $ 1,200 combined with the strange lack of 5G in the United States makes it a confusing device at best. Phones that include now-standard flagship features like high-refresh rate displays and more powerful photos in auto mode can be had for hundreds less. And if you They are A citizen of the world of Sony cameras, wait to see what the next Xperia Pro can do. (It will have HDMI input, so you can use it as a suitable monitor in a separate camera).

With the Xperia 1 II, Sony has finally found the right address for its smartphones. Now you just need to move a little further without tripping over your own price.