Sony has decided to step up its game in the professional smartphone camera market, and it has made its statement well-known with the Xperia PRO-I. Like any Android flagship, it touts top-end hardware, but it offers more in the optics category if you are ready to cough up the amount. Here are all the details you should know.
Sony’s Xperia PRO-I Offers Other Camera-Focused Features, Such as Recording and Saving 4K 120FPS Footage, and Has a microSD Card, Something Most Flagships Lack
First, let us get the hardware specifications out of the way. The Sony Xperia PRO-I sports a Snapdragon 888, coupled with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of internal storage. Unlike most Android flagships, this one offers you to expand your existing storage with up to a 1TB microSD card. It also sports a respectable 4500mAh battery, and it will ship with a 30W power brick, which lots of manufacturers like Samsung no longer provide.
The Xperia PRO-I has a 6.5-inch 4K OLED screen with support for a 120Hz refresh rate. Another thing it offers that lots of manufacturers exclude is a 3.5mm headphone jack, which gets treatment for Sony’s LDAC and DSEE technologies that deliver the best sound possible when attaching headphones or earphones. Now that the specifications part is out of the way let us talk about what makes the Xperia PRO-I stand out; its camera.
The Xperia PRO-I Has a Quad-Camera Setup, Which Also Includes a Variable Aperture Unit
The primary 1-inch camera has been borrowed from the Alpha RX100 VII, but Sony claims that this hardware has been optimized for the Xperia PRO-I. A large portion of the sensor will be used to capture 12MP images with a 2.4µm pixel size. You also get an Exmor RS sensor with a 24mm stabilized lens with a variable aperture that ranges from F/2.0 to F/4.0. Other units include a pair of 12MP sensors; one captures ultrawide angle images with 16mm focal length and F/2.2 aperture.
The other is a telephoto unit with a 2x optical zoom and F/2.4 aperture. According to Sony, the Xperia PRO-I supports pro-grade Real-time Eye autofocus that detects animals and humans. This auto-focus feature also has 315 points that cover 90 percent of your frame, so assume that little to no objects will go out of focus. To make capturing images easier, Sony has equipped its flagship with a two-stage shutter key, with one of them featuring a textured surface. The other button is circular in shape and fires up the Videography Pro app.
For those that do not know, this app gives more control to professionals and allows them to further adjust color parameters like exposure, focus, white balance, and more. You can also shoot Cinematography Pro videos thanks to Sony’s VENICE cinema camera-inspired color modes. When it comes to video capture, the Xperia PRO-I can effortlessly shoot at 4K, up to 120FPS for those 5x slow-motion clips.
Sony will also be selling a standalone Vlog Monitor to vloggers. It features a 3.5-inch 720p screen and has several modes for capturing video.
Get Ready to Pay a Small Fortune to Experience ‘Pro’ Smartphone Photography
The Xperia-PRO I comes in at a mind-boggling $1,800 price tag, and those spending the money will probably be thinking that they are getting an Alpha RX100 VII camera in a smartphone that also happens to run on Android. For those interested, pre-orders of Sony’s latest and greatest mobile offering will open on October 28, will availability to follow in December.
