Sony is a company that we don’t talk nearly as much about as one would expect when it comes to their smartphones. In fact, here at AnandTech we had the odd circumstances of never actually been able to review a Sony phone. Be it unfocused marketing on Sony’s part or just bad luck on our part, it was a coverage area we’ve been looking to address for some while now.

This year, after numerous quarters of financial losses of the division, Sony’s mobile group was in particular turmoil as the company division has been going through some major restructuring. The most major change is that the Xperia Mobile division has been now grouped into Sony’s TV, audio and camera product lines, ending its time where the group would operate completely independently from Sony’s other divisions. In a way, this is a good change; we’ve in particular seen statements from the company’s spokespersons that past Sony smartphones suffered from the disconnect to other company divisions, for example having to figure out camera processing on their own as the Alpha camera team would not be allowed to help the smartphone team.

We’ve met with Sony back at MWC earlier this year and had a preview of the new Xperia 1 in its earlier stages. The one thing that I took away from that meeting is that the mobile division is now a lot more hopeful and motivated under the new management, and the new Xperia 1 is the first phone that’s really been affected by the new reorganisation. In general, Sony is hoping to turn the page on several years of lacklustre success, and bring back the mobile division into form.

With the new Xperia 1 thus representing the first flagship device under the new organisation, it’s an incredibly important device for Sony, and a phone we didn’t want to miss out on reviewing. The phone is characterised by its unusual 21:9 screen aspect ratio on 4K OLED screen and a new triple-camera setup. Today, we’ll be putting the Xperia through our usual test suite and look if Sony has been able to deliver on its promises.

Sony Xperia 1
		Sony Xperia 1
SoC		Qualcomm Snapdragon 855  1x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A76) @ 2.84GHz 3x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A76) @ 2.42GHz 4x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A55) @ 1.80GHz Adreno 640 @ 585MHz
DRAM		6GB LPDDR4X
Display		6.5" AMOLED 3840 x 1644 (21:9) HDR
Size	Height	167 mm
	Width	72 mm
	Depth	8.2 mm
Weight		178 grams
Battery Capacity		3330mAh 18W USB-PD Adaptive Charging
Wireless Charging		-
Rear Cameras
	Main	12MP 1.4µm Dual Pixel PDAF f/1.6 78° lens with OIS 960fps video recording
	Telephoto	12MP 1.0µm f/2.4 45° 2x zoom with OIS
	Wide	12MP 1.0µm f/2.4 130° fixed focus
	Extra	-
Front Camera		8MP 1.12µm f/2.0
Storage		128GB UFS 2.1
I/O		USB-C no 3.5mm headphone jack
Wireless (local)		802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.0 LE + NFC
IP Rating		IP65 & IP68
Other Features		Dual Speakers
Dual-SIM		1x nanoSIM + microSD  or 2x nanoSIM
Launch Price		$949 / £849 / €949

In terms of hardware specification, the new Xperia 1 is in line with most other flagships this generation and employs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 SoC. We’ve covered the chip extensively over the past few months and the piece has impressed us with its speed and efficiency, and should represent a great foundation on which the new Xperia 1 can build upon.

Sony is equipping the phone with 6GB of RAM, whilst not quite as aggressive as some other vendors, is still plenty sufficient and enables an excellent multi-tasking experience. On the storage side of things the phone comes in a sole 128GB UFS 2.1 storage configuration, however Sony still offers a microSD slot which is something that is becoming a rarity nowadays.

Moving on to the obvious, the phone’s key feature is the new 21:9 OLED screen. It represents the Xperia 1’s defining characteristic which makes it stand out from all other phones in the market. Although the screen is 6.5” in diagonal, as with other phones these past few years, the metric doesn’t really mean much anymore in terms of it defining a phone’s size. So even though the diagonal sounds a bit scary at first, due to the 21:9 aspect ratio, the Xperia 1 is still only 72mm wide, which is smaller than other “plus” sized devices in the market, and the phone is in fact smaller than say a Galaxy S10+.

Sony I think nailed the form-factor and I do greatly enjoy the size as for me it falls into the sweet-spot between screen real-estate and one-handed usability and ergonomics. Of course, this is also quite a long phone, so while its width can be narrower than most of the competition, it’s absolutely longer than any other mainstream devices out there with a very height of 167mm.

Sony’s rationale for the 21:9 aspect ratio lies mainly in viewing 21:9 video content, however I found this to play second fiddle to the actual benefit: more vertical content space in your web-pages and applications. While yes there are very much benefits to viewing native 21:9 movie content on the device, I still think most consumer video content will be staying at 16:9 for the foreseeable future. Here I had wished Sony’s marketing had put a bit more focus on the more important benefit of having more content in vertical mode.

The display’s design is relatively straightforward, but that’s not really a bad thing. There’s no notch and the bezels aren’t exactly ground-breaking either, but for some people this can also be a benefit as there’s also no distracting screen cut-outs and the flat display doesn’t add additional reflections as seen in other recent curved screen devices.

The screen itself is also one of marvel: It’s a 4K (3840 x 1644) resolution OLED which, while not the first 4K display phone, is the first OLED of its kind in a consumer device. Sony makes some big claims about its capabilities in regards to HDR and colour spaces, some of which do pan out while others aren’t quite as honest. The one big thing that I do need to mention here in the intro is that Sony is a bit misleading as to the 4K resolution. While the panel is indeed 4K, only certain media content such as the native photos gallery app as well as video playback in some applications is in fact rendered in 4K, as the default software rendering for most other applications happens at 1440p. It’s something we’ll address later on, but it’s something one should be aware of from the start.

The “forehead” of the device is small. The right side doesn’t contain much as it lies over the SIM tray, but the left side is filled with the usual sensors as well as the front camera. There’s also a notification light – odd that I have to mention this, but I do miss the feature on other recent devices. What I’m not too sure about is Sony’s design of the earpiece; it’s quite recessed at over 1mm in the front-glass cut-out, and while it has a very fine mesh/membrane protecting it, I can see that it’ll be a dust collector over time.

The rear of the phone is characterised by its triple-camera setup. Sony opted for a vertical layout, which works well for the elongated phone. The cameras are triple 12MP units. The main sensor is a full dual-pixel PDAF design with 1.4µm pixels, and features a f/1.6 lens with OIS. The telephoto and wide-angle sensors are of 1.0µm pixel pitches and both have f/2.4 aperture lenses. The 2x zoom module’s viewing angle is 45° (78° on the main camera), while the wide-angle is a very wide 130°. The wide-angle is of a fixed focus design with no OIS, while the telephoto unit does have OIS.

Unlike the front of the phone, the back glass is slightly curved on its sides which, together with the round frame design of the phone, gives it quite nice ergonomics even though at first glance the phone might mistakenly appear quite boxy.

The weight of the phone is also kept in check at 178g. Although the weight and the phone’s 8.2mm thickness, Sony only managed to employ a 3330mAh battery into the phone whilst other vendors have managed to cram in 4000mAh units in similar form-factors, and this is definitely one of the phone’s weak-points in terms of the hardware design.

Sony’s SIM tray design is quite unique in that it doesn’t need an ejector tool. You can just use your fingernail to pull the cover and pull the tray. I’m still a bit paranoid about accidental prying open the tray (Particularly for an IP68 phone), but it does feel well designed and robust.

The left side of the phone is barren of buttons as they’re all located on the right side. Here we find a volume rocker, a fingerprint sensor, power button and a dedicated camera button.

The fingerprint sensor is good, although I wasn’t too impressed with the unlock speed. The issue here isn’t the fingerprint itself as it does seem it’s able to recognize it quite fast as demonstrated by the vibration feedback, but the screen turns on just a bit later than that, which I found a bit slow. The phone can be woken up by double-tap to wake, the fingerprint sensor, the power button, or with the camera button. Interestingly enough you don’t need to unlock the phone when waking it with the camera button and you’re free to take pictures or videos like this – however you’re sandboxed and can only view content during that session.

The camera button is also a two-stage button, pressing it lightly in the camera app is akin to focusing, and pressing it fully will capture a photo/video.

On the bottom of the phone we find the USB-C port and the main speaker grill, which by the way along with the earpiece speaker are able to play back in stereo. What’s obviously missing here is the 3.5mm headphone jack, and it is quite the travesty of Sony to abandon it. Sony had a promotion bundle of offering the Xperia 1 with one of its own wireless headsets, so I think the company has fallen prey to the anti-consumer move of attempting to gain profits by trying to sell accessories on top of its devices. The phone still offers a 3.5mm dongle adapter, and the kicker is the included headphones are 3.5mm themselves.

Overall, I liked the Xperia 1’s hardware design. The elongated aspect ratio was something fresh, and in general the device’s ergonomics are excellent in my subjective view. The phone still managed to somewhat continue Sony’s Xperia industrial design, yet also evolves it into a different direction that is quite enjoyable.

System Performance

System performance of the Xperia 1 shouldn’t result in many surprises as it’s mainly dictated by the Snapdragon 855 SoC as well as the software stack of the device.

Overall, the Xperia 1 behaves in line with other Snapdragon 855 devices. In fact I’d say it seems to behave the most like the LG G8 in terms of our performance numbers in the benchmarks which would point out a similar BSP version to the one that LG uses, meaning not quite as refined as what we saw on the Snapdragon Galaxy S10.

Overall, performance on the Xperia 1 was very good an in line with most other S855 devices this year, which should be a good place to be for any device.

GPU Performance

3D performance of the Xperia 1 is dictated by both the SoC’s GPU and power efficiency, as well as the device’s thermal dissipation design. I found Sony’s design quite weird in this regard as there’s some discrepancy in terms of the resulting thermal performance. For one the SoC is seemingly located on the right next to the cameras which is by far the phone’s hottest hot-spot during heavy operation. I found that however this heat isn’t nearly as well dissipated to the whole body of the phone as other designs, and there’s a big delta between the skin temperature near the SoC and the bottom half of the phone.

In the 3DMark physics test, the CPU throttling situation was actually quite dire as the phone lost more than half of its peak performance during prolonged thermal loads, which is the worst showing of a Snapdragon 855 phone yet, at least in terms of the CPU behaviour.

However when looking at the GPU behaviour, we’re seeing the Xperia 1 not faring nearly as badly, with the phone only trailing the OnePlus 7 Pro which had exemplary throttling behaviour.

The figures continue in a similar pattern for all our other GPU-bound 3D tests, showcasing that the Xperia 1 is surprisingly able to maintain quite high GPU performance even though its thermal dissipation design isn’t the best. It’s an interesting juxtaposition between how the CPU throttles and how the GPU throttles, and it’s obvious the GPU is being given more leeway in terms of the peak temperatures it’s allowed to reach.

Overall, unless your game is quite CPU intensive, the Xperia 1 should offer still quite excellent gaming experience. It’s to be also noted that even though the device does have a 4K screen, games will be rendered at 1440p which is less demanding. Sony doesn’t offer any gaming tools which could further optimise performance or the experience – for example I think the phone would have greatly benefited from a 1080p gaming mode, however the Xperia 1 has to rely on actual games resolution scaling to further improve performance if necessary.

Another gaming aspect of the Xperia 1 that is unique to Sony’s phones is the fact that the phone out of the box supports PS4 remote play, in which your PlayStation 4 is able to stream the game to your phone. You’re also able to pair up with the DualShock 4 game controller -  the combination definitely is an interesting. (Note: Yes it’s also possible to do this on non-Sony devices with a modified APK)

Display Measurement - Professional 4K Screen?

The centre-piece of the Xperia 1 is the new 4K OLED screen. This is the first of its kind in smartphones, and Sony’s marketing focuses very strongly around it.

The display panel is supplied by Samsung and uses a newer DDIC generation. I’ve been trying to investigate as to how Sony implemented the 4K resolution in terms of the connectivity between the SoC and the DDIC. Whilst I haven’t been able to find explicit mention of it, I do think that the phone uses two MIPI interfaces as I’ve seen software evidence of the display rendering in two halves. The reason for going with two interfaces is that a single MIPI-DSI with D-PHY 1.1 or earlier is that the interface doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to transport resolutions higher than 1440p at 60Hz, even with DSC (Display Stream Compression).

OnePlus surprised me earlier this summer with the OnePlus 7 Pro which was seemingly bypassing this limit and employs a 1440p 90Hz screen with a single interface, resulting in lower power draw than expected.

My assumption on Sony using dual interfaces is also strengthened by the base power draw of the phone: At 538mW all black screen it’s noticeably higher than the competition, which again likely is due to the higher resolution and the DDIC having to work more pixels.

As for the 4K resolution itself: It’s immensely sharp, however I have to remind users that everyday applications are not actually rendered at the native 4K, but rather at a reduced resolution of 1440p. The full resolution is only available when viewing pictures in the native photo app, or when viewing videos on YouTube or applications such as NetFlix. I do find this somewhat of a pity as text rendering would be very much the use-case that would most benefit from the higher resolution.

However, even though the software only renders 1440p in applications, it’s still a much better experience and it’s still a lot sharper than a regular 1440p screen. The OLED’s pentile display matrix is still a ton finer and the scaling and interpolation still greatly benefits the sharpness of the content, even at 1440p rendering. In fact, even though I’m near-sighted, I’m not able to make out the pixel matrix of the display even at the closest possible distance my eyes can focus at, whilst I do see it on 1440p panels such as on the S10+’s.

In general, one can argue that the 4K display is pretty much overkill for everyday scenarios, and I would actually agree with that notion. The times where I would actually have close enough and bright enough for the resolution to make a notable difference in experience is very rare.

We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Xperia 1 screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.

In terms of the brightness characteristics of the display, the phone goes up to around 331 nits at maximum manual brightness, and will go to up to 550 nits in adaptive brightness mode when under bright conditions (APL100). The screen has adaptive brightness scaling with APL so it will go brighter in peak brightness for lower APL content, and in general I found zero issues with the display’s performance even under direct sunlight, as it still managed excellent contrast levels.

Yes, unlike what the configuration settings menu says and what Sony keeps annoying reminding you of via notification when in the mode, the Creator mode isn’t actually a BT.2020 colour gamut. Frankly I have no idea where this BT.2020 gamut is supposed to appear as I haven’t been able to find any content or mode that triggers it. There’s no evidence of it in the phone’s drivers, and even any HDR video content will specifically have the panel switch to a P3 gamut. I’ve reached out to Sony for clarification, but at time of writing haven’t heard anything back yet.

Furthermore, the “10-bit colour” part also is seemingly misleading. The display panel is only 8-bit and it relies on tone-mapping to display 10-bit HDR content, which is essentially standard for how any other phone does it.

In fact, when reading the Xperia 1’s specification sheet, we find a few footnotes in regards to the gamut and the bit depth, as if Sony’s legal department realised their marketing department was a bit too eager in terms of making claims.

The colour temperature controls however are quite welcome: here Sony allows pre-sets as well as manual controls for both display modes, which is better than what a lot of other vendors offer. Unfortunately I found that none of the pre-sets actually target a 6500K temperature, but since this can be customised and the UI has discrete values, I’m able to share my settings like how I calibrated it on my review unit.

 
SpectraCal CalMAN

 

The phone comes in the standard mode with a much too inaccurate and cold colour temperature, which is a bit disappointing given how Sony markets this as a great content creator screen. Setting the Creator mode we also see that even on the “Warm” setting things are still far too blue with an average CCT of 7071K. I set up a custom setting getting accurate 100% white at near 6500K, however we still see the temperature still varies quite a bit at the lower levels and is sometimes too blue, resulting in the average of 6700K.

What is really out of the norm here is that Sony is targeting a gamma of 2.5 for the Creator mode. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or not, but it’s not exactly in line with DCI-P3 which targets a gamma of 2.6, nor is it in line with Display P3 which targets 2.2. In fact, because this is a sRGB gamut for most content I’d argue it’s completely off the mark with any standard.

Oddly enough again, the “Standard” mode doesn’t have nearly as a high gamma, whilst still not accurate to a target of 2.2, it ends up still a bit off at 2.31. It’s to be noted that these measurements were done at APL50 and windows size of 50%, which due to the display’s adaptive brightness can impact the accuracy of the numbers.

Creator Warm against Gamma 2.2

Looking at the patterns, we again see that the default Warm mode is too blue, and we also see the tones are too dark.

Creator Custom against Gamma 2.2

Correcting the colour temperature resolves one issue, but the gamma problem is still present and we’re not able to fix this.

Creator Custom against Gamma 2.5

Comparing the result again against a gamma target of 2.5, we see nearly perfect patterns, pointing towards that this was indeed a deliberate calibration for the 2.5 target.

Standard Custom against Gamma 2.2

Finally, the standard mode with corrected temperature is near accurate with just a slight offset in the gamma.

In the end, the greyscale accuracy of the phone isn’t very good with a dE2000 of 3.54. The colour temperature can be improved with the aforementioned custom settings and this does improve the score a bit, however the gamma issue isn’t something that’s solvable for the Creator mode and the phone is far off the mark for the standard consumer content target of 2.2.

 
SpectraCal CalMAN
Creator (sRGB) against Gamma 2.2 and Gamma 2.5

Moving onto the saturation accuracy measurements, we’re seeing some interesting but troubling behaviour. When measuring against a target gamma of 2.2, the saturations look seemingly correct with an overall dE2000 of 1.7. However, we did discover that the greyscale levels aren’t targeting a gamma of 2.2 but rather 2.5. When comparing the saturations against such a target, we see that they’re far off and not quite reaching the levels they should be.

This is a bit of a contradiction and the only possible explanation is that the display is simply miscalibrated, with the luminosity values being off while the chromacity values aren’t quite as bad against a 2.2 gamma.

Overall, the saturation values with the corrected colour temperature target isn’t quite bad with a dE2000 of 1.7, while the warm preset comes at a worse off 2.35.

SpectraCal CalMAN
Standard (Display P3) versus Gamma 2.2

The “Standard” mode which targets the P3 space is adequate and ends up with a dE2000 of 1.93. It’s to be noted that a P3 target is also used for video content, however I don’t have a test methodology prepared for video and as such not able to measure it in the Creator mode.

SpectraCal CalMAN
GMB Creator Custom against Gamma 2.2

SpectraCal CalMAN
GMB Creator Custom against Gamma 2.5

Finally, the Gretag MacBeth chart of common colour tones better represents the oveall accuracy of the display. I again present the chart both against a gamma target of 2.2 as well as 2.5, and we again see that in the latter target we see the luminosity error of the Xperia 1’s Creator mode disappear.

Unfortunately in both modes there’s still a large chromacity error due to undersaturation (and in general due to the not full coverage of sRGB), which does give the display a worse off result.

Display Conclusion

Overall the Xperia 1’s display is a double-edged sword. The panel itself is excellent with fantastic viewing angles and the 4K resolution gives for outstanding uniformity and sharpness that is above that of other displays. On the other hand, 4K is very much overkill and unless you’re used to holding phones right up to your face, you will not be able to tell the difference to a regular 1440p screen.

Colour calibration of the Xperia 1 is very odd and very much off the mark. The Creator Mode which is supposed to be an accurate display mode for professionals and content creators is very evidently the mode which has the worst problems, which is ironic. There’s a very stark contradiction between the gamma behaviour of the luminosity and the chromacity of colours, and it somehow feels like a repeat of what we saw on Google’s Pixel phones, only this time around it’s very embarrassing for Sony as they’re actively promoting the mode in the phone as well as the marketing materials.

In general the issue with the gamma is that things appear too dark, and in the very first few hours I had with the phone this had given me the false impression that the screen just doesn’t get as bright as it should.

The colour temperature settings are also disappointing as none of the presets actually target the more accurate 6500K white point, with all of them being far too cold. At least here Sony gives the option to fine-tune it and we’re able to share the discrete values for better white levels.

Overall, it’s still a good display, but given the Xperia 1’s price point and targeted audience, I expected a lot more on the software side of things as the calibration just seems amateurish.

Battery Life - Meagre Results

Battery life results of the Xperia 1 is among one of the biggest questions for the device. With a 3330mAh battery capacity, the battery is a tad lower than what we’d find in other devices of the same device footprint this year. Sony managed to keep the size and weight of the phone in check, but it’s still quite on the lower end of capacities we’re finding on the market.

There’s also the big question of as to how then 4K resolution screen will behave. As mentioned on the previous page, the display implementation for the 4K might not be done in the most power efficient way, and the phone did showcase idle full screen black base power consumption of 538mW which is quite high compared to the ~400ish mW we saw from Samsung and OnePlus. As such, I’m heading into the battery results with a bit of pessimism as to how the Xperia 1 will end up.

Unfortunately my fears were validated and in our web browsing test the new Xperia 1 performed well short of its competition. The double-whammy of a smaller battery and more efficient screen isn’t a great combination and the device longevity visible suffers from this.

If one would simply scale up the result and normalise it for a 4000mAh battery, the phone would still largely lag behind at around 10.3h, but at least it’d be in line with other phones such as the OnePlus 7 Pro.

In PCMark the phone is also lagging behind by a tad, although the display’s inefficiencies here are less amplified as on the web browsing test.

Overall, the Xperia 1’s battery life isn’t too fantastic. It falls in line with the LG V40 which also suffered from an inefficient display, and I made the remark on that device that it was a deal-breaker, so I have to be fair and also say that it’s also a massive negative for the Xperia 1.

The display’s 4K resolution and less efficient DDIC is just a big trade-off to make, but to also have a competitively smaller battery really represents a double-negative for the phone which is very unfortunately given its price-range.

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.

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

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

In the first shot here, it’s a typical situation where a camera which only has a certain level of limited dynamic range, has to choose between exposing between the darker parts or the highlights of the scene. The Xperia 1 chose to go for exposing more for the shadows which has the adverse effect of really blowing out the highlights.

Unfortunately Sony here can’t compete with other phones which just have better and wider dynamic range processing – for example Apple’s iPhone XS manages a significantly better result.

The phone is already bottom barrel as it is, however against phones with dedicated night modes it’s no longer much of a competition.

On the wide-angle the dynamic range is still bad, however Sony’s detail preservation as well as noise reduction is top notch, while other phones end up with quite blurred out and ugly noise reduction.

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

In more artificially lit scenarios such as this one, the composition differences between the phones are relatively small. The biggest difference remains detail, and notice how the Xperia manages to preserve the dirt on the foreground wall.

The wide angle continues to show a dynamic range weakness and it blows out highlights too much.

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

This scene was a disaster for the Xperia 1 as the stabilisation didn’t manage to get a clear shot and there’s lots of blurring due to longer exposures both on the main and wide angle. It’s a pretty bad result.

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

Here we also see the phone struggling with dynamic range and it’s just not able to get sufficient light into the sensor.

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

In dim indoor light, the phone still struggles to get much light in, so while details are alright, the exposure isn’t sufficient. The competition’s night modes are just way ahead.

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

Finally while in extreme low light, even though goes into a special mode, it seems to be all that this does is capture longer exposures, and there’s not too much in way of computational photography.

Low-light Camera Conclusion

While the Xperia 1 has good noise reduction and detail preservation, its lack of dynamic range is extremely evident in low light as it just can’t deal with many scenarios as well as the competition can. The phone actually performs worse than the iPhone XS which is a bad place to be at, as it means that the device definitely can’t keep up with other Android devices which have developed their computational photography capabilities.

Video Recording & Speaker Evaluation

Video recording on the Xperia 1 is a prime feature. Sony promises HDR recording in HLG and BT.2020 colour space. The phone can record in various modes and Sony make available H.264 and H.265 codecs.

Xperia 1 Camera Modes & Features HDR Recording
Capture Mode	Main+Zoom	Wide Angle
1080p	✓	✗
1080p60	✗	✗
4K	✓	✗

There are some limitations as to the HDR feature however; the phone can’t use it in 1080p60, and for whatever reason also not in 720p. Furthermore it’s also not available on the wide-angle lens module. Sony has other features such as video object racking and their well-known video stabilisation that can be turned on or off.

     
    

HDR recording on the Xperia 1 is excellent and rivals that of some of the best phones in terms of picture quality. There’s still the big question of format and display compatibility; video playback on the phone itself looks excellent while the YouTube upload here likely doesn’t quite do it justice.

EIS on the other hand was a complete and utter disaster on the main camera: The picture had massive amounts of left/right jitters and jump which are so annoying in that if Sony doesn’t fix the issue, I’d rather recommend just leaving EIS turned off.

Wide-angle video recording is alright, but without HDR, it’s not too great in scenarios where there’s lot of light and shadows.

It’s to be noted that the wide-angle lens cannot be used in combination with the other two modules, and the video recording between the two sets has to be separate. It’s very likely that Sony is multiplexing the MIPI-CSI interfaces between the cameras and the SoC and thus can’t easily switch between modules. For what it’s worth, transitions between the main sensor and the telephoto is quite fast, but the wide angle is separate. This is also valid for photo captures where switching to and from the wide angle has a notable delay that’s much longer than any other phone.

Sony was the first vendor to introduce 960fps video recording on their phones thanks to its integration of DRAM onto the image sensor. The Xperia 1 continues this feature and it’s still as good as ever.

Alongside the standard camera app, Sony ships the phone with the “Cinema Pro” app which essentially is a full manual video recording app.

 

The thing is that this might be very useful for professional users – but the limiting factor that when in this recording mode you do not have any kind of auto-exposure and that you’re meant to control ISO and exposure yourself manually means that this is a very niche use-case for most users including myself, and I don’t see a lot of people bother with as it’s a lot of work to get any kind of reasonable video out of the app.

Conclusion & End Remarks

The Xperia 1 is a very important device to Sony as it marks major changes in the company’s product strategy. While I go over the various parts of the device in the conclusion, I do have to remind reader that the phone was launched with a release price of $/€949 which currently stands quite a lot higher than other Android flagships in the market.

Design wise, I do really like the Xperia 1. Sony’s choice of differentiating themselves in the design by adopting a 21:9 screen works out really well and it is very much a different experience than other narrower aspect ratio devices. The change reminded me of the original shift from 16:9 to 18:9 phones a few years ago.

The biggest benefit here isn’t what Sony makes it out to be; although there’s some gains for video consumption and yes it does fill up native 21:9 content such as movies a lot better, I still think that’s going to be a rarity for most users – unless you’re really into watching moves on the small screen. For me personally the biggest benefit is simply having more vertical space for more content in applications, which does work very well on the Xperia 1.

The one thing that I would think would improve things even better is if Sony actually improved the navigation and maybe introduced gesture navigation to get rid of the default Android P nav bar – I still think Google majorly messed it up and it was a stupid change to make from the classical nav buttons. Sony being the only other major vendor to adopt it by default strikes me more as them not having put in the resources to customise it.

Other benefits of the device’s aspect ratio is that even though it’s a big screen and larger device, its ergonomics remain excellent as the 72mm width is at a sweet spot many users will like. The round edges of the phone are also comfortable to overall I enjoyed the Xperia 1’s in-hand feel.

The other part of the the 21:9 aspect ratio is the display panel itself. This is the first 4K OLED display in a smartphone, and I have mixed feelings about it. It’s an incredibly sharp display and you’ll notice its clarity. However while there is a difference to 1440p screens out there, I do have to question if it’s actually worth it. The fact that Sony still renders applications at 1440p and only reserves the full native resolution of the display for photos and video playback is a bit counter-intuitive, as you’d imagine text rendering being the use-case that would most benefit the higher resolution. Make no mistake, the 4K panel still improves such content even if it’s rendered in 1440p.

For the vast majority of users though I doubt anybody will actually notice the difference. Unless again you’re used to watching content very close up on your phone, you’d be hard to tell the difference to a 1440p screen at normal arm’s length distance.

Other characteristics of the display are fine – brightness and viewing angles are excellent. The colour calibration of the panel however is not. Here even though Sony promises some more professional grade features, they are quite misleading in their marketing as they don’t match up to the technical characteristics of the phone. It’s actually quite embarrassing for Sony to promote an accurate display profile yet then very evidently miscalibrate it with some noticeable gamma issues, and I had to manually set a more accurate colour temperature.

Performance of the Xperia 1 is good. The Snapdragon 855 serves as a great cornerstone of the phone and the experience is similar to that of other devices in the market, and I haven’t had issues with Sony’s implementation.

Gaming wise, even though the phone showcases some very severe CPU throttling, the GPU throttling is kept in check and still manages to perform quite well compared to other S855 devices bar the OnePlus 7 Pro – which was a bit surprising as the Xperia 1’s thermal design didn’t quite seem as good as that of other phones.

Battery life is a major negative for the phone. Here there’s a double-whammy of a power consuming display as well as a smaller battery that lands the Xperia 1 amongst the bottom of our charts. The 4K resolution screen here is just another negative that maybe wasn’t needed for the product to be a good device, and in fact I believe it would have been a better device without it. The 3330mAh battery is alright but not quite matching that of what other vendors are able to implement in similar sized devices. Sony also foregoes wireless charging on the phone – one has to wonder about the internal design.

The cameras on the Xperia 1 are good, but not great. I don’t have too much experience with Sony’s past devices but I hear they weren’t very good in the photography department. While I’m sure the Xperia 1 has improved here, there’s still major issues. Dynamic range is the number one issue, with the phone evidently not able to deal with scenes of very high contrast and the camera just falls apart – both in daylight and in night time photography. Colour temperature was another issue as sometimes things were just too warm, although this can be fixed after the fact with a simple white balance.

Where the Xperia’s strengths lie is in the sheer amount of detail that the camera is able to capture. I was thoroughly impressed by the results and the phone is quite far ahead of all of the competition in this area, resulting in resolving significantly better spatial resolution, detail, and textures. The wide-angle lens in particular, while having the dynamic range issues, is quite far ahead other phones when it comes to the clarity of the pictures.

Low-light performance of the phone isn’t good. Here Sony falls behind Apple’s iPhone XS which itself falls behind essentially most other Android devices over the last year who have embraced computational photography.

Video recording quality on the Xperia 1 was good- although the experience isn’t as good as say a Galaxy S10. HDR video quality is good, however Sony’s current implementation of the EIS on the main sensor is a disaster and I would just keep it off instead of enduring the jittery picture jumps. The wide-angle video is alright, but the camera really lacks dynamic range here as it’s not able to use HDR.

The stereo speaker setup of the Xperia 1 is adequate but can’t compete with the full-ness of the iPhone XS or Galaxy S10. Also Sony abandoning the 3.5mm headphone jack is just overall a very sad situation.

Overall, I’m not convinced by the Xperia 1. I started this page by mentioning it’s a $949 phone, and at that price level I’m expecting excellence at most aspects of the phone. Unfortunately, the new Sony phone doesn’t showcase that. The screen and form-factor great, however is calibration issues, its higher power draw resulting in worse off battery performance, and the phone’s many problems with the cameras just don’t make it appealing as a purchase. This is especially in the face of the competition released earlier in the year which has seen larger price drops with which you’ll definitely end up as getting more value out of your purchase. Sony’s product development needs to focus on actually delivering a more solid and robust phone, rather than trying to upsell it via marketing buzz-words – here’s to hoping they’ll manage to get there.