Review | Sony Xperia 1 II review: the phone that feels like a camera, and its incredible burst shots

Phone has a camera app allowing you to adjust parameters like on a DSLR camera, a shutter button, burst shooting mode, and Sony’s best-in-class autofocus

If you know how to manipulate ISO and shutter speed you’ll like the Sony Xperia 1 II; the phone is speedy, the display is 4K, battery life could be better

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The Sony Xperia 1 II gives users almost total control of the camera settings so they can shoot with it like they would with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Features from the latter have been used in the phone. Photo: Ben Sin

Published: 10:15am, 3 Jul 2020Updated: 10:28am, 9 Jul 2020

Whether it is their bezel sizes or screen aspect ratios, Sony smartphones have always zigged where others zag. The Japanese company’s latest release, the Xperia 1 II, continues to buck the trend with its unique take on mobile phone photography.

In recent years, smartphone titans hailed the era of “computational photography” – using AI-driven software algorithms to help users capture properly balanced photos without much thought. From Apple’s “Deep Fusion” to Google’s “HDR+” to Huawei’s “Night Mode”, the philosophy behind them is the same – the phones will snap a series of images in quick succession (even if the user has only pressed the shutter button once) then stitch all the information together to produce one photo that’s better lit and properly balanced.

The Xperia 1 II doesn’t want to dumb down the more traditional photography experience, so it is giving users almost total control so they can use the phone the way they would a DSLR or mirrorless camera.

To that end, Sony has built a camera app offering granular control over almost every aspect of shooting a photo, bringing over two popular features from its A series of mirrorless cameras: “Real-time Eye AF” and burst shooting mode. The former is Sony’s best-in-class autofocus system that can detect and lock on to a subject’s eye to keep their face in focus; the latter allows the Xperia 1 II to take up to 20 shots in a second.

Sony has built a camera app in the Xperia 1 II offering granular control over almost every aspect of shooting a photo. Photo: Ben Sin

Doing the work on the hardware side is the usual triple-lens camera system, offering the now standard focal lengths of 24mm (standard lens), 16mm (ultrawide angle), and 70mm (telephoto zoom), all with 12-megapixel sensors. There is also a time-of-flight sensor to help with depth perception. The selfie camera has a mediocre 8-megapixel lens.