The Sony Xperia 1 Review: A 21:9 Take of the World

Camera - Daylight Evaluation

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Starting off in the first scene, the exposure of the X1 is good although it’s lacking a bit in the highlights. The colour temperature is also a bit off as the clouds weren’t nearly as grey. It doesn’t crush the shadows nearly as bad as the Pixel 3, however it lags behind the S10 in dynamic range.

Where the Xperia 1 shines is in detail. The phone manages so much detail in the foliage of this scene that it’s far ahead of any other phone in the comparison. The phone’s camera must have outstanding optics as well as excellent deep trench isolation on the sensor to be able to resolve this much sharpness.

On the telephoto lens the exposure is more similar to that of Samsung and Apple, however the colour temperature is still a bit too warm. Here in terms of detail Sony’s advantage isn’t nearly as pronounced, winning some parts of the scene while losing others.

On the wide-angle photo, the scene is much too underexposed and the colour temperature remains off. The Snapdragon S10 had the best composition here as the scene optimizer on the Exynos messed up things. When we zoom in to investigate details, we again see Sony far ahead in terms of detail compared to other wide-angle camera phones. Even though there’s a big resolution and angle difference, Sony even manages to beat Huawei’s 20MP wide-angle sensor which until now I deemed as the best of its kind in terms of detail. The Xperia 1’s wide-angle optics looks to be superior to the competition as it’s avoiding chromatic aberrations and blur even on the very edges of the frame, something that’s very hard to do for a 130° small wide angle lens such as found on the phone.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

On the next scene we see a good exposure, however the HDR processing is a bit too aggressive and thus the image ends up slightly flatter than it should be. Detail-wise, Sony is again far ahead of everybody else and it manages to get an astounding amount of level of detail in the whole scene.

On the telephoto, exposure is good but composition is weird as it’s lacking a tad of dynamic range and the levels are all too compressed together. There’s also far too much red in the picture and the colour temperature is thus unnatural.

The wide angle here did a great exposure and dynamic range is also good, but that colour temperature is just really bad. Simply auto-balancing the result afterwards gives a much better picture than what the camera is able to output.

Detail-wise Sony again beats the competition and battling with Huawei’s 20MP unit, but ends up still winning on the outer parts of the frame.

While it wasn’t as obvious in the previous shot, here we can more clearly see that the wide angle lens’ distortion characteristics are very different from that of other phones. The fish-eye lens effect is much more pronounced on the Sony phone. The camera does have an option to correct for the distortion in pictures, and this work very well, although it loses a bit of the field of view and can also end up with a slight regression in quality due to the post-processing. This mode is off by default and that’s how I captured the scenes – other phones such as the S10 also offer lens distortion correction but obviously they don’t need a quite as heavy correction as the Xperia 1.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

In this shot, the Xperia 1 could have done better with the exposure as it near clips the shadows where it shouldn’t have, most obvious in the tree. Details and textures continue to be excellent.

The telephoto is very good but I would have liked the processing to maintain the highlights of the white building in the sun such as on the other phones. Colour temperature is again a bit warm.

Dynamic range on the wide-angle here lags a bit behind, the shadows are too dark. Details are again outstanding.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Next up we see the Xperia 1 lagging behind a bit again in dynamic range and the local tone mapping of the HDR, but it’s not too bad. Details on the left building are excellent and the Sony camera manages to preserve the texture better than any other phone.

On both the telephoto lens and on the wide angle lens, this shot ended up quite a failure for the Xperia 1 as its HDR didn’t manage to compensate for the sky like on other phones or on its main sensor, ending up with a very blown out result. So even though detail is again great, it’s not a useable picture.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Next up, the Sony didn’t do well in the exposure as the picture lacks any levels beyond 85-90% which ends up with no highlights at all even though the scene is in direct full sunlight.

In the telephoto again it’s a bit too shy with the highlights as the building is in sunlight. Excellent detail overall.

The wide angle has good exposure and dynamic range, but again the phone loves its warm colour temperature too much. This scene again makes the fish-eye lens distortion much more pronounced.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

This shot is really tough on the dynamic range and unfortunately the X1 didn’t manage to keep up, blowing up and clipping the highlights of the scene. The telephoto lens also is near too high exposure on the background.

The wide angle results were interesting as two consecutive shots ended up quite different in the HDR processing. One shot the background was again too overexposed, and in the other it was brought down. Both really weren’t too good on the exposure and dynamic range and lagged behind by a lot.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

I’ve grown to like this scene as most phones just fail on colour temperature. The Xperia 1 is one of them and the result is far too gray, with only the wide-angle getting some sort of more reasonable colours.

All three cameras are very much struggling with dynamic range and the highlights are blown out. The Xperia continues to have outstanding detail quality throughout the scenes and modules.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

The stand-out aspect of indoor shots such as this one is the Xperia’s ability to retain detail. Here the phone again manages to beat every other device out there.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ G8 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Close-up and macro shots will exhibit some hazing and bokeh blurring due to the f/1.6 aperture. Details in the focal plane are excellent but we have to remember it’s also a quite narrow plane.

[ Xperia 1 ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]

I did a quick panorama test with a limited set of phones, and discovered that the Sony has massive issues here. The exposure is for the sky and the scenery is just vastly underexposed and too dark. Other phones are able to maintain a fuller dynamic range even in the panorama mode.

Daylight Camera Conclusion

Overall the Sony Xperia 1 is a good daylight shooter, however I found that it did have troubles with colour temperature and with dynamic range. Exposure of the shots was fine most of the time, however the processing was quite inconsistent and many times it either lacked in the shadows or it couldn’t deal with highlights. The latter was especially a problem as there were many shots where the phone resorted to just blowing out parts of the scene as it couldn’t deal with the natural dynamic range of the shot. Here Sony largely lags behind by quite some amount.

Colour temperature was also often a problem as the phone has the tendency to be too warm. A lot of the pictures here look significantly better after a quick white balance after the fact - Sony should definitely look into improving this part of the processing.

Where the phone does shine however is in detail and texture preservation. I don’t know if it’s due to the optics, a better sensor, or simply a non-stupid image processing, but the Xperia 1 is leading all other phones by quite some considerable margin when it comes to the actual resulting spatial resolution of images. This was especially noticeable in a lot of the foliage and fine textures in many of the scenes, where other phones would just blur things together while Sony actually manages to get out every pixel out of that 12MP sensor.

The telephoto lens was good – it had some of the same HDR issues as the main camera although not as pronounced.

The wide-angle lens of the Xperia 1 is interesting. First of all, what we said about the detail is especially pronounced on the wide-angle camera and it is leaps ahead of Samsung and Huawei in terms of the details the camera can resolve. HDR issues aside, the other interesting aspect here is that Sony’s optics have a significantly more pronounced fish-eye distortion that what we’ve seen from any other smartphone wide-angle lens. I guess it’s a matter of preference, but Sony does offer a distortion correction option which pretty much alleviates this aspect.

Overall, I even though the Xperia 1 has some astounding positives in regards to the details the cameras can achieve, I still think they lag a tad behind some other competitors simply because there’s issues with the HDR as well as the colour balance.