Sony Xperia 1 ii :: A9 in a Smartphone?

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. This has been kind of an announcement-intensive week, but I've got one more for you guys. I wanna talk about an announcement from Sony. This happened earlier this week. This is not a camera, it's not a lens. It is the new phone. Many of you know that I have reviewed both the Xperia 1 and the Xperia 5 this year. It's a phone that I've been very impressed with, especially when you consider these are kind of the first part of a reboot that Sony are doing. There was an announcement this week for the Xperia 1 Mark II, as well as a development announcement for the Xperia Pro. So I wanna get to both of these today because I think there's some really exciting stuff in the mix. But first, let's talk about the Xperia 1 Mark II. As I mentioned in my Xperia 1 review this year, this is an interesting phone because Sony is this gigantic company that umbrellas over many divisions. And so you have the Sony Alpha division, which is the camera division. You have CineAlta, which is high-end video. You've got Bravia that does TVs. You've got a gaming division. So these phones represent actually a collaborative effort across all of those little sub-companies under the big Sony umbrella. And you're getting a phone, I think, that's really starting to look interesting. So with the Xperia 1 Mark II, the cameras on this phone are going to integrate features like real-time autofocus, even animal AF. We're looking at 20 frames per second burst shooting with full AF-AE tracking while using the main 24-millimeter wide-angle camera. There's also full menu control. This time around, we're finally getting raw support. And this is all going to be coming to the phone in a future software update. The Xperia 1 Mark II actually features a triple camera configuration. You have three 12-megapixel sensors, and these are gonna sit behind 16-millimeter lens, a 24-millimeter lens, and a 70-millimeter lens. These are all Zeiss lenses with Zeiss T-coating that are going to give you, quote-unquote, exquisite rendering and contrast. The 16-millimeter and the 24-millimeter cameras both feature sensors with dual photodiode autofocus. And then the largest sensor of the bunch that's on the 24-millimeter camera in the middle is a 117-inch Exmor RS for mobile that's actually 50% larger than the one 2.6-inch sensors that Sony has used in the past. And we also get a 3D indirect time-of-flight sensor that's going to provide better low-light autofocus. This is powered by the Sony Bionz X for mobile engine that's going to allow you to do things like 60 calculations per second for autofocus and auto-exposure on the main camera. And on the 16 and 70-millimeter cameras, it will do these up to 30 calculations per second. The Xperia 1 Mark II also has upgraded hardware. It uses a Snapdragon 865 5G processor. It's got eight gigabytes of RAM and comes with 256 gigabytes of onboard storage. Of course, we retain the 21 by 9 aspect ratio, 6.5-inch 4K HDR OLED display with 100% coverage of DCI-P3. We now have a 4,000-milliamp battery with wireless charging support finally, and also an IP65-68 water and dust-resistant rating. Few months back, I did a review of the Xperia 1 when it was released, and I also did one on the Xperia 5. And I was very impressed with both of these as really interesting alternatives in a very overcrowded smartphone market. So if you look at smartphones, particularly in terms of image-making, this is part of everybody's day-to-day life now. We communicate using a visual language more than we ever have in the entire human history. So this is really exciting to me, actually. But what I like that Sony offer that's very different is they offer you a phone that will also operate like a camera. And this is kind of one of their strong suits, I think, because you have this umbrella of Sony, like I mentioned before. You have all these companies that work underneath that, and they all make really cutting-edge, high-end products. And so why not bring them together to make the best phone that you can find? So what I personally like the most about Sony's approach is they let you use things like the camera as a photographer. You have access to manual settings. You get great image quality. The lenses behave like lenses. Sure, you do have computational imaging that goes on behind the scenes, which is only gonna get stronger as Sony keep progressing in this field. But I really feel like that if photography is your thing, this is the phone that behaves a lot more like a camera than other smartphones. And so that's a really unique edge that Sony have in this space, and I think it keeps them fairly competitive. So I'm really excited with what we've got with the Xperia 1 II, because the only downfall on the Xperia 1 and even the Xperia 5 were things like battery life, the fact that you couldn't do wireless charging. And so a lot of improvements have been made. We're getting an even more upgraded camera system. There's a lot of functionality under the hood that we're gonna be able to do that starts to rival what we see on cameras like the Sony A9. Now there was also a development announcement for the Xperia Pro, which I wanna get into as well. But real quick, I wanna give a shout out to our sponsor for this video, who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com. Present your photography using Squarespace's modern professional portfolios. The layouts are completely customizable and you can use Squarespace's drag and drop based backend system, which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites, easily claiming your domain or URL, and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life. Squarespace is host to a number of other tools, including e-commerce, appointment scheduling, and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following. So head over to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, you can go to squarespace.com slash AOP to save an additional 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash AOP. And I wanna thank the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography. So the Xperia Pro, which is just a development announcement at this point, does look really interesting. So in many ways, it's going to be similar to the Xperia 1 Mark II. It's gonna have the same camera setup, the same battery, the same processor, so on and so forth. But it is a 5G compatible phone, which is going to include a unique four-way antenna technology with low permittivity materials that's going to increase the sensitivity of 360 degree omnidirectional communication within the 5G space. Now, I think we're still a little ways away from having 5G as a standard. And one of the problems with this is the way that it transmits. You have to have a clear line of sight to a tower. So you can see that Sony are clearly being forward thinking with this, with coming up with an antenna scheme that's going to essentially get you better reception. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run. But the other interesting thing about this that I think a lot of you are gonna be really into is this camera actually has a micro HDMI input, which is going to allow you to connect the phone to pretty much any camera that has HDMI output. And so you're gonna be able to use the phone as a monitor for DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, professional camcorders, whatever you wanna plug in. And hopefully it will also be possible to transmit broadcast video during shooting to a server or cloud that has a 5G connection. So the idea is that you could get really high quality looking video that you could stream over 5G connections to YouTube or Instagram or Facebook. It's going to up the game of what you're able to do by using the phone technology and having it interface with cameras. I still think we're a long way from 5G being the adopted standard, but I do love the fact that Sony are being very forward thinking with their strategy here. Because once 5G does come along, you'll be able to do a lot more with higher speeds than we've had before. And thinking about this phone in terms of how this interfaces with existing cameras. Obviously this is a space that Sony has been in for a long time, not only for video, but also for still photos. And how can we integrate those two things? So if we have the broadband capacity to upload a really beautiful looking video that's broadcast quality to YouTube or wherever we wanna upload it to, then why not make that available? That makes the phone integrate with that system really nicely. I mean, if you look at the whole adoption of phones, the reason, or one of the reasons they've been so popular with people is they enable us to do things in the mobile capacity while we're on the go that we used to have to do on a computer. You've got access to your email. You don't have to be chained to a desk and a device. And I think being forward looking into how photography and how cameras and how video interfaces with this, I think is actually pretty cool. So I hope to get my hands on an Xperia 1 Mark II fairly soon to review for you guys. I am really excited about that phone. Would love to know what you guys think about all this. Drop me a comment below. I'll see you all in the next video. Until then, later.