Bold look, smarter camera than last year, slow-motion video capture can be fun
Photo quality, 4K screen is a limited real-world benefit, bulkier than its Android rivals, unique features wanes rather quickly
Phones no longer beg for more power or sharper screens. A Samsung Galaxy S8+ has more than twice the number of display pixels as an iPhone 7 Plus, but this is not really one of the top three reasons to pick a Samsung over an Apple.
Top-end phones instead now use impressive-looking tech baubles to convince prospective buyers a monthly £45 contract is still a sensible plan.
The Sony Xperia XZ Premium has a few of these, attached to a phone that is otherwise eerily similar to the old Xperia Z5 Premium, now more than 18 months old. Its duo of ‘special moves’ not found elsewhere are ultra slow motion video shooting and a 4K screen, first attempted in the Z5 Premium, but now with HDR.
If these fail to appeal its chances of outdoing something like the Galaxy S8+ are slim.
The Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s slow motion capture comes courtesy of Sony’s new IMX400 camera sensor. As in previous years, Sony’s top phones get Sony Digital Imaging’s newest chips before others.
This is a large 1/2.3-inch sensor, the same size as that of a standard compact camera. Consistent with the current trend, resolution has actually decreased since the last Sony flagship, with 19 megapixels instead of 23.
Its three-layer CMOS structure may interest the odd electrical engineer, but for the rest of us the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s slow motion video capture is the highlight. The Samsung Galaxy S8 can shoot slow motion video at 240fps, but that will seem positively quick next to the Sony’s 960fps mode.
This slows real-world action to 1/40 of its actual speed, simmering the fast and chaotic down to a glacial ballet. Capturing just an eighth of a second in real time takes up almost 10MB of storage.
To save the CPU, the internal storage and the patience of everyone you’re connected to on social media, the Sony Xperia XZ Premium does not let you simply shoot 960fps footage freely like the Sony RX100 V compact camera. Instead, there are two quick-fire shooting modes.
One captures standalone 5-second clips (a fraction of a “real life” second), the other inserts 5-second slo-mo segues into normal-speed footage. You press the shutter button to capture these while shooting.
Using the Sony Xperia XZ Premium for slow-mo video capture is fun, but in practise you might be surprised by how few situations actually merit it. The effect is so extreme it turns most footage of people into a dull slideshow. Extremely fast movement or that with complex patterns or particles is needed for the feature to shine.
Capturing speeding cars and bikes is no fun unless they’re driven by a maniac, but dirt bikes and flying insects are perfect for slow motion shooting. It’s a neat way to visually deconstruct bits of nature and physics, to view things our eyes normally see as a blur of movement.
The relative quality of the video means it really is best thought of as curio, not something to make the basis of your first short film. First, the Sony Xperia XZ Premium crops into the sensor quite significantly, providing a roughly 50mm view of the world rather than the usual 27mm-ish one.
More important, the very fast shooting speed mandates very short exposure times for each frame. In anything less than perfect blue-sky shooting conditions the camera has to ramp up the ISO sensitivity to compensate, which quickly reduces detail and dynamic range, and increases noise. It’s a reminder that while a 1/2.3-inch sensor is big for a phone, it’s still small among cameras in general. You’ll notice this as soon as you switch modes indoors: even the image preview degrades.
Unless you have studio lighting in your lounge, shooting slow motion video at home won’t work too well. Resolution is also limited to 720p, and judging by testing it looks like this might actually be upscaled from a 720p full frame feed: remember, the image is cropped when shooting at 960fps. The real image quality appears sub-720p.
In its defence, even the £900 Sony RX100 V’s 960fps mode is compromised, shooting at 1244 x 420 pixels. A professional slow motion camera used by YouTube stars The Slow Mo Guys like the Phantom Flex 4K costs $150,000. Despite all these criticisms, however, the fact that Sony has packed shooting this fast into a ‘normal’ phone is a real technical achievement.
Should you get fed up of the relatively low quality and that your friends seem incredibly boring when shot at 40x speed, there’s also a 120fps mode. It’s perfect for a Facebook-ready “everyone jump into the air at the same time” shot.
The Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s second star feature is its 4K, HDR-ready screen. Curiously, it’s not something you’ll be able to notice when using the phone normally as, just like the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, it doesn’t render Android at 4K 24/7.
Like a 4K TV, the resolution here is actually Ultra HD, 3840 x 2160 pixels, but most of the time Android runs at 1920 x 1080 pixels, Full HD. The phone then upscales this feed, effectively guessing the missing pixels.
Zooming in with a high-end camera, the effect is that text looks softer than it would in true 4K, or even as rendered by the LG G6 and Samsung Galaxy S8. That WIRED had to use a camera to check this tells you how much you should worry: not much.
Sony’s own video app will play 4K videos at their native resolution rather than upscaling from 1080p. They look fantastic, and the app seems to HDR-enhance even normal 4K videos. This brings out shadow detail for a richer image.
There’s also finally a reason to value the display, given almost no-one has a legitimate collection of 4K movies. Amazon’s Prime Video app supports 4K on the Sony Xperia XZ Premium.
You have to get your eyes almost uncomfortably close to the screen to really appreciate the extra information, and the almost 7GB an hour gobbled up by a 4K stream will kill any limited data allowance. But at least some apps now recognise the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s immense resolution. As we write this, Netflix’s app doesn’t, despite offering 4K streams for some other platforms.
If you don’t want to rub your eyeball up against the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s Gorilla Glass to appreciate the 4K screen, VR is the key. Universal phone VR headsets put the screen within a few inches of your eyes, using lenses to trick your brain that you haven’t simply stuck the thing to your head.
WIRED tried the Keplar Immersion headset from Mobile Fun to see whether 4K helps with VR, which normally looks very ‘blocky’ through a phone. It does, to an extent.
There are currently no good VR apps that make use of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s resolution, so you’ll still see 1080p visuals rather than 4K ones. However, the pixel structure is much less apparent here than just about any other headset currently available, including the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. This alone proves 4K is where VR needs to get, and soon.
For those who haven’t yet used one of the premier VR headsets, while they can be great fun, you can usually easily see individual pixels in the display, making graphics look grainy. Some find it spoils immersion, and even after suspending your disbelief you’d have to admit VR experiences look worse than a PS4 or PC game on a TV or monitor.
Despite its real resolution benefits, the Sony Xperia XZ Premium is not a great VR phone, though. It has an LCD screen, with response times much slower than those of an OLED panel, used in all of the dedicated VR headsets.
The response time tells you how quickly a pixel can change its state. It’s not something most will notice when using the phone normally, but the effect is magnified hugely in the context of VR. Turn your head in a VR app and there’s clear motion blur here. Text becomes illegible, textures a mush, and there’s a much greater risk of feeling like you’re about to revisit your brunch while trying a more intense VR experience. After a few minutes of VR Roller Coaster, WIRED started to feel a little queasy.
Using the Sony Xperia XZ Premium is an interesting intellectual exercise but does not set new standards. Put too much emphasis on the phone’s unusual features and you’re likely to be a little disappointed. Each is as compromised as it is tech-progressive.
However, the basics of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium are solid. Resolution set aside, the screen is still very strong. Its colours are intense, and contrast good for an LCD display.
There are core improvements in the camera this time around, too. While images still suffer from Sony’s overbaked and sharpened processing, which makes photos appear unnatural up close, the effect is less obvious than in the Xperia Z5 Premium.
When shooting a particularly challenging scene the Sony Xperia XZ Premium will often automatically take multiple pictures and let you choose the best, a form of machine learning. It actually captures images before you press the shutter button, which can be handy for extreme action shooting.
There’s a crucial missing ingredient, though. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium uses electronic image stabilisation rather than optical image stabilisation. This means the camera isn’t actually buffered against movement like the Samsung Galaxy S8 or iPhone 7 Plus, but motion sensors are used to tell the best split-second to take a shot.
As such, night photo quality is not among the very best, but is still fair.
The other important factor when weighing the Sony Xperia XZ Premium up against alternatives like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6 is size. Where they cut down bezels almost to the point of non-existence to pack in as many screen inches on the handsets, this phone is actually slightly larger than its predecessor.
It’s a real handful among 5.5-inch phones, just like the iPhone 7 Plus. The Galaxy S8 is almost a full centimetre narrower, making it easier to handle.
The stark, monolithic look of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium is one of its appeals, though. It looks like it might be made entirely of glass, and much of it is.
Front and rear panels are Gorilla Glass 5, the sides plastic with a finish made to look just like the glass. It’s a little unusual to see so much plastic on a phone this expensive, but Sony pulls the look off. The top and bottom panels are aluminium, and the Sony Xperia XZ Premium comes in off-black (it’s a very dark blue), silver and pink shades.
Previous Sony favourites like IP68 water resistance and a good side-loaded fingerprint scanner return, too.
Almost everything else about the phone is roughly predictable. It uses Sony’s inoffensive custom Android interface, which sits on top of Android 7.1.1, and has a Snapdragon 835 CPU just like the US version of the Galaxy S8.
This is one of the most powerful mobile processors in the world at the time of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s launch and could actually drive the phone at 4K resolution all the time. There are no performance issues here.
Battery life is the main reason the phone doesn’t use the 4K screen all the time. A 3230mAh battery offers capacity similar to that of the LG G6.
The Sony Xperia XZ Premium will last a full day with a few hours of audio streaming or some idle browsing, but two days of use is unrealistic unless the phone is used lightly and the power-saving mode is switched on. If that’s the plan, there seems little reason to buy a phone this expensive.
The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is a good phone. It’s powerful, well-made and has a high-end, impressive look that is often the kernel inside our desire to have a £650 phone when a £200 one would probably do the job just as well.
There’s little to dislike other than that among its peers it is very large given its screen size. Like Apple, Sony is yet to get with the space-saving design programme.
However, it’s hard to forget its stand-out features aren’t incredibly meaningful for most people. Slow motion video may be fun to show off on social media a few times, but friends will tire of it even faster than you will. Appreciating 4K HDR video demands active, even uncomfortable, effort on a screen this size, and given how limited most people’s 4G allowances are, it’s only really practical to stream at home. The majority of public Wi-Fi hotspots aren’t fast enough.
However, 4K is a big benefit for VR, even if the visuals aren’t actually rendered at 4K, but that too is soured by LCD motion blur. As impressive as the Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s technical feats are, their shelf life seems a little too short for the average buyer’s taste.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
