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

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.

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.