The Sony Xperia Pro-I has got a brutal camera

As we predicted yesterday, today arrived Sony’s new, top-of-the-line mobile phone, primarily designed for photography and video professionals. The Xperia Pro-I got a huge 1-inch camera sensor with variable aperture, but that’s not just because it’s interesting.

Let’s start by saying that the letter I in the name of the Sony Xperia Pro-I refers to the word “Imaging,” which is completely confusing with the numbering I, II, and III of the Xperia 1, 5, and 10 phones, which denote generations (Mark 1, 2, 3). But since there aren’t dozens of Sony phones a year, there might not be any confusion.

Most of the features are the same as the current Sony flagship, the Xperia 1 III, the Xperia Pro-I is built on this phone, which means that we get a 6.5-inch, 4K resolution OLED panel with 120 Hz image refresh, from the drive to Snapdragon The 888 provides 12 GB of RAM, and the storage is 512 GB and expandable. The battery has a capacity of 4500 mAh and supports 30W fast charging. And now come the fundamental differences!

The 1-inch primary sensor on the back has been taken over by Sony straight from the RX100 VII compact camera, of course, optimized for mobile use. The resolution is 12 MP, and the actual physical pixel size is 2.4µm, which other telephone sensors can only achieve by pixel merging. Anyway, the Xperia Pro-I doesn’t take advantage of the sensor as a whole, but it still has a 20% more helpful interface than the iPhone 13 Pro Max and is pretty much the same as what the Galaxy S21 Ultra has to offer. The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, on the other hand, works with 2.8µm pixels at a similar resolution but achieves this with a nine fusion.

Well, let’s not get lost in the numbers, it’s not just the image quality that depends on them anyway, and Sony has one more trick in its bag. The aperture of the 24 mm lens with OIS in front of the primary sensor can vary between f / 2.0 and f / 4.0, which means that the depth of field can be adjusted dynamically.

There are also two other 12 MP cameras on the back, one is a 16mm, f / 2.2 ultra-wide-angle, and the other is a 50mm, f / 2.4 2x telephoto unit. Unfortunately, the Xperia 1 III and Xperia 5 III periscope 5X zoom cameras did not get the Xperia Pro-I.

However, there are physical camera buttons, one is a two-position firing button with a knurled surface, and the other is a dedicated button for Videography Pro. By the way, the mobile can record videos in 4Kat up to 120 fps, and there’s a special Vlog Monitor add-on to it, which means a 3.5-inch, 1280 × 720-pixel extra display on the back.