Sony Xperia 1 III - The Ultimate Enthusiast Phone!

The camera app on the Sony phone is quite unique. There is no basic Android camera app; instead, as soon as you squeeze that shutter button, double tap the power button, or hit the camera icon, you're thrown immediately into Sony's advanced camera app. This app offers a wide range of features and modes, including manual controls and 20 fps burst shutter speed.

However, upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that not all is as it seems. The phone only has one telephoto camera on the back, despite boasting two different focal lengths in its software interface. It turns out that Sony has implemented a variable optical zoom system using glass inside the telephoto lens that moves to change the focal length optically instead of digitally. This allows for snapping between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters, which are both shot by that same sensor.

The technology behind this is somewhat mysterious, with Sony refusing to disclose the exact details. However, it's likely that some sort of magnets are involved in moving the glass around within the lens. The animation on Sony's YouTube channel provides a glimpse into how this works, although it appears to show multiple internal lens positions, which might be confusing given there is only supposed to be two focal lengths.

Despite the technical wizardry behind the camera system, the photo quality has been somewhat disappointing. Even with all the manual controls and advanced features, the images often come out soft, with muted colors and noticeable noise. This has led to some disappointment from users who were expecting better results from such a high-end device.

The Sony phone's camera system is certainly a technical marvel, and it's exciting to appreciate the innovative technology that goes into making it work. However, hopes for future improvements are tempered by the experience of previous attempts at similar features on other devices. The Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, had a dual aperture system that was touted as a major feature before it was ultimately abandoned.

In the case of Sony's variable optical zoom, there is hope that this technology will continue to evolve and improve over time. However, until then, users are left wondering what the future holds for smartphones with advanced camera capabilities. For now, the Sony phone remains an exciting device, but one that may not be suitable for everyone due to its high price point.

Ultimately, the Sony phone is a unique device that offers a lot of features and capabilities. While it may not be the best choice for everyone, it's certainly a great option for enthusiasts who are looking for something new and different. The only real drawback is the steep price tag, which makes it inaccessible to most people.

In terms of value for money, it's difficult to compare the Sony phone directly with other high-end devices like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. While the Sony phone offers some unique features that set it apart from its competitors, it also lacks in certain areas such as battery life and charging speed.

For those who are passionate about Sony products or have a specific use case for the camera system, then the phone might be worth considering. However, for most people, there are likely better options available at a similar price point that offer more comprehensive features and better overall performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up mkbhd here and i think sony's finally done it this mountain they've been climbing for all these years they finally reached the top and they've created the most enthusiast targeted phone in the world more than any gaming phone more than any other niche phone i recently made a video on why people don't really buy that many sony phones they've doubled down on all of that stuff since then it's kind of a work of art so i've been using this phone on and off for about a month now and everything that you can think of that would make the ultimate enthusiast phone they've done it sony's done it in this phone everything from the specs to the features to the details it's all here i mean you can start all the way from the top with the name it's the xperia one three good luck explaining that to your normal friends and it was unveiled literally months ago in april so you'd only know about it now that it's quietly actually gone on sale because you follow enough tech blogs or youtube channels because you certainly won't see any ads for it or find it in any carrier stores here but then just look at this design i mean you can probably already see some of the enthusiast features starting to stick out it's kind of hard to know where to start actually so first of all it has a super nice frosted matte black finish and it's actually even kind of like a little bit of a soft touch that i really like even the sides are matte black and the whole thing is built around this 21x9 aspect ratio which an enthusiast would love because now you can watch your 21x9 videos on a proper cinema display with no black bars but then let's just go down the feature list okay dual sim card tray at the top removable without a tool and the second sim card tray actually doubles as expandable storage for those micro sd cards up to a terabyte your wacom enthusiasts there's stereo front-facing speakers flanking the edges of the phone and they're nice and loud louder than the previous generation and far enough apart to create a nice real stereo image and then up in the corner yeah that's an led notification light the feature you really don't see in many features nowadays but that enthusiasts will appreciate and as i say that you're probably already thinking about a headphone jack so yeah the headphone jack is up here too up top feels like the phone is barely thick enough for it and this one actually also has some extra buttons so there's a volume rocker up top then the super reliable fingerprint reader power button combo underneath that then a custom button that's mapped to trigger google assistant then underneath that a dedicated shutter button for the camera system and it's got the half press for focusing and the full press for actually taking the shot and everything all of that wrapped in a body that's ip68 water resistant and pretty squared off overall maybe a little bit of a boring design to some but i like it i really like it it's the finish it's the overall like pretty square aesthetic that i've liked in the past but it's just it's nice the fingerprint reader on the power button is very fast and very reliable so i'm a fan of that and just the whole phone is of course very easy and comfortable to hold because it's so narrow because 21x9 but speaking of 21x9 let's talk about the screen this phone has a six and a half inch 4k 120hz display right off the bat jesus in in the settings you can switch between the super smooth 120 hertz or just normal 60 hertz but you actually cannot adjust the screen resolution at all it is always locked at 4k which is a little bit crazy i mean i get that it's an enthusiast phone and only an enthusiast would want to toggle their phone to 4k sometimes to you know watch a 4k youtube video or a movie or something but this is just 4k all the time this is full on maximum enthusiast if you literally can't turn it off no 1080 no 1440 it's locked i'm actually kind of surprised they do let you turn off 120 hertz i don't know maybe they'll remove that option in the mark iv the display itself though it looks pretty great as you might expect sony has this 10-bit creator mode it's had it before and it's also a highly adjustable white balance to tune this oled display to look exactly how you'd want i'd expect nothing less here but of course the downside to having a 21x9 display is there are still some apps that aren't perfectly optimized for it and honestly probably never will be that includes instagram stories and tick tock you know the normie apps most everyday people use they have black bars at the top and the bottom because most phones aren't this crazy tall aspect ratio but that's fine this is an enthusiast phone and so people who are willing to make that sacrifice to have a nice narrow taller better looking display with cinema videos they'll be fine with that couple apps not working no big deal this is gonna be great with 21 by nine stuff the one thing you can't get around though is having a display at 4k 120 hertz all the time yeah it eats into battery life pretty hard so this phone has a 4 500 milliamp hour battery which is solid but that's not gigantic but the rate that you can chew through battery at high brightness 4k 120 hertz is pretty high so i'd recommend you have one of those enthusiast battery banks somewhere near you if you plan on getting a whole day past about four hours of heavy screen on time away from your charger the brick included does get you 30 watt fast charging and it does have qi wireless charging as well but yeah if there is a weak point of this hyper-enthusiast phone it's definitely that so you've got your crazy enthusiast hardware with the headphone jack and the notification led you've got your crazy enthusiast screen 4k uh you've got your enthusiast specs of course you got snapdragon 812 gigs of ram and the works are all here but what's it like to actually use this phone with such crazy hardware you guessed it it's riddled with quirks and features i'd feel like doug demiro trying to point all of these out there's a lot going on now sony software actually think overall is pretty nice mostly because let's be real they don't try to do too much aesthetically it's like if you took near stock android 11 and then just plugged a bunch of features into it that work with sony's hardware i mean that's what an enthusiast like me wants so you've got your near stock looking quick settings and the google discover feed next to your home screens even the default google search box at the very bottom of your home screen for reachability but then in the settings like i've said you have a ton of display customization you have always on display controls reverse wireless charging toggle lots of battery care features to help you reduce the amount of time your battery spends at full 100 charge to prolong the life of your phone and then one of my favorite sony editions is called side sense so sony fans taught me if you've heard this before but it puts this little bar over here to the side of your screen you can double tap that bar anytime you want to bring up a quick app launcher which you can customize with whatever eight apps you want or just bring up the whole list hilariously and then you can slide up on that bar anytime you want to open multitasking which is pretty sweet on that extra tall 21x9 display i assume if you're a true enthusiast you're doing this all the time and you've got your favorite app pairs queued up so you can launch them both at the same time with a single touch and you can also launch one-handed mode from here which makes sense if you can't quite reach the top of this phone honestly it's so tall that the top corners can be a little annoying to reach even with big hands so you can customize the position of this bar the size the transparency level the sensitivity every little thing dial it to your heart's content and it's all over here in this little sidebar that's super reachable wherever you want to put it well done sony this one has really good strong haptics which is good to see always and there's also dualshock 4 support so you can connect a sony ps4 controller to this phone to play certain games if you're into that i imagine they're building in a dual sense 5 support it doesn't work with the ps5 controller yet but that would be cool but you want to know you want to know the worst part of the software though for some reason and this annoyed me a lot this phone has the slowest auto rotate i have ever witnessed in a modern smartphone yeah that's not a bug it's it's that slow every single time i don't know why i feel like this is either a i guess it is a bug and they can fix it with software but yeah that's that was extremely annoying now an enthusiast phone wouldn't be complete without some enthusiast cameras and boy does sony have that on lock here literally there is no basic android camera app as soon as you squeeze that shutter or double tap the power button or just hit the camera icon whatever you like you're thrown immediately into sony's advanced camera app now they do give you a basic mode in that camera app which is funny and that lets you switch to video mode and toggle between the ultra wide the standard and two different telephoto focal lengths but then of course you can just go straight from basic mode into basically a full on sony alpha camera with programmable auto modes and manual modes and 20 fps burst shutter and slider sphere shutter speed and iso and focus and all that it's great but did you catch one little thing i just said there two telephoto focal lengths but there's only one telephoto camera on the back of the phone so how are there two telephoto focal lengths well it turns out quietly for their hyper-enthusiast phone sony's dropped variable optical zoom on a single telephoto camera so this horizontally oriented telephoto camera has glass inside that moves to change the focal length optically instead of digitally so in the software you can snap these between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters these focal lengths are both shot by that same sensor it's pretty intense now sony won't tell me exactly how they're doing this i guess it's a secret but i imagine there are probably some sort of magnets involved moving the glass around the best i can show is this animation on sony's youtube channel one of their videos but this animation actually shows several different internal lens positions which kind of confused me because there's only two focal lengths so i don't know what this is about or how accurate this visualization is but you get the idea it's moving glass inside the phone to give you two different zooms and so the result is kind of amazing you now have two different focal lengths of telephoto in one sensor you have 70 and you have 105 and you can digital zoom between them but you can also just snap between them back and forth for optical zoom to match sharpness that's pretty cool the brutal part though is even after all that technical wizardry the photo quality really isn't that great like i'd like to think i know what i'm doing and i've shot with plenty of cameras plenty of sony alpha cameras and other sony phones but it's just never actually looked that great despite all the incredible innovative manual control the shutter is very fast auto focus is incredibly fast i never miss a shot with the dedicated shutter button it's awesome but the actual shot i get pretty soft a little bit muted colors a little noisy sometimes pretty meh so i was hoping for better there so the best thing i get out of this phone's camera system really is just it's a technical marvel and it's really cool to appreciate and i have hope for the future of smartphones with optical zoom but i also don't want to get my hopes up because well if you remember what samsung did with dual aperture in the galaxy s9 it was kind of just like this it wasn't smoothly adjusting aperture between a range but you could snap between two different apertures on the same camera lens with a moving lens that was in the samsung galaxy s9 and then the next year it was gone and it never showed up again and it would have been really useful in some of their later years galaxy s20 having such a thin plane of focus having dual aperture could make a bigger range of focus if you shut down the aperture a little bit but they didn't do it anymore so i see that and then i think of sony's where now you're snapping between focal lengths and it's cool and i hope it advances but there's no guarantees so we'll cross our fingers for that but overall sheesh this this phone is a lot it's got a camera i've never seen before it's got a screen i've never seen before it's got a ton of features there's just a lot going on and so if you care about smartphones at all this is a really exciting phone and aside from the awful auto rotate i thoroughly enjoyed using it now would i recommend it honestly probably almost no one should actually buy this one i mean it is 1200 bucks that's how much i get it for it's on b h right now i you can get a galaxy s21 ultra for that price which would have better battery faster charging better cameras better software with more updates and just overall a bit more versatile so you have to you have to really want this but if you are that enthusiast or if you're into sony headphones or sony ps5 or sony i don't know bravia tvs or the other stuff they make then you might consider this one too so there you have it that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace youhey what's up mkbhd here and i think sony's finally done it this mountain they've been climbing for all these years they finally reached the top and they've created the most enthusiast targeted phone in the world more than any gaming phone more than any other niche phone i recently made a video on why people don't really buy that many sony phones they've doubled down on all of that stuff since then it's kind of a work of art so i've been using this phone on and off for about a month now and everything that you can think of that would make the ultimate enthusiast phone they've done it sony's done it in this phone everything from the specs to the features to the details it's all here i mean you can start all the way from the top with the name it's the xperia one three good luck explaining that to your normal friends and it was unveiled literally months ago in april so you'd only know about it now that it's quietly actually gone on sale because you follow enough tech blogs or youtube channels because you certainly won't see any ads for it or find it in any carrier stores here but then just look at this design i mean you can probably already see some of the enthusiast features starting to stick out it's kind of hard to know where to start actually so first of all it has a super nice frosted matte black finish and it's actually even kind of like a little bit of a soft touch that i really like even the sides are matte black and the whole thing is built around this 21x9 aspect ratio which an enthusiast would love because now you can watch your 21x9 videos on a proper cinema display with no black bars but then let's just go down the feature list okay dual sim card tray at the top removable without a tool and the second sim card tray actually doubles as expandable storage for those micro sd cards up to a terabyte your wacom enthusiasts there's stereo front-facing speakers flanking the edges of the phone and they're nice and loud louder than the previous generation and far enough apart to create a nice real stereo image and then up in the corner yeah that's an led notification light the feature you really don't see in many features nowadays but that enthusiasts will appreciate and as i say that you're probably already thinking about a headphone jack so yeah the headphone jack is up here too up top feels like the phone is barely thick enough for it and this one actually also has some extra buttons so there's a volume rocker up top then the super reliable fingerprint reader power button combo underneath that then a custom button that's mapped to trigger google assistant then underneath that a dedicated shutter button for the camera system and it's got the half press for focusing and the full press for actually taking the shot and everything all of that wrapped in a body that's ip68 water resistant and pretty squared off overall maybe a little bit of a boring design to some but i like it i really like it it's the finish it's the overall like pretty square aesthetic that i've liked in the past but it's just it's nice the fingerprint reader on the power button is very fast and very reliable so i'm a fan of that and just the whole phone is of course very easy and comfortable to hold because it's so narrow because 21x9 but speaking of 21x9 let's talk about the screen this phone has a six and a half inch 4k 120hz display right off the bat jesus in in the settings you can switch between the super smooth 120 hertz or just normal 60 hertz but you actually cannot adjust the screen resolution at all it is always locked at 4k which is a little bit crazy i mean i get that it's an enthusiast phone and only an enthusiast would want to toggle their phone to 4k sometimes to you know watch a 4k youtube video or a movie or something but this is just 4k all the time this is full on maximum enthusiast if you literally can't turn it off no 1080 no 1440 it's locked i'm actually kind of surprised they do let you turn off 120 hertz i don't know maybe they'll remove that option in the mark iv the display itself though it looks pretty great as you might expect sony has this 10-bit creator mode it's had it before and it's also a highly adjustable white balance to tune this oled display to look exactly how you'd want i'd expect nothing less here but of course the downside to having a 21x9 display is there are still some apps that aren't perfectly optimized for it and honestly probably never will be that includes instagram stories and tick tock you know the normie apps most everyday people use they have black bars at the top and the bottom because most phones aren't this crazy tall aspect ratio but that's fine this is an enthusiast phone and so people who are willing to make that sacrifice to have a nice narrow taller better looking display with cinema videos they'll be fine with that couple apps not working no big deal this is gonna be great with 21 by nine stuff the one thing you can't get around though is having a display at 4k 120 hertz all the time yeah it eats into battery life pretty hard so this phone has a 4 500 milliamp hour battery which is solid but that's not gigantic but the rate that you can chew through battery at high brightness 4k 120 hertz is pretty high so i'd recommend you have one of those enthusiast battery banks somewhere near you if you plan on getting a whole day past about four hours of heavy screen on time away from your charger the brick included does get you 30 watt fast charging and it does have qi wireless charging as well but yeah if there is a weak point of this hyper-enthusiast phone it's definitely that so you've got your crazy enthusiast hardware with the headphone jack and the notification led you've got your crazy enthusiast screen 4k uh you've got your enthusiast specs of course you got snapdragon 812 gigs of ram and the works are all here but what's it like to actually use this phone with such crazy hardware you guessed it it's riddled with quirks and features i'd feel like doug demiro trying to point all of these out there's a lot going on now sony software actually think overall is pretty nice mostly because let's be real they don't try to do too much aesthetically it's like if you took near stock android 11 and then just plugged a bunch of features into it that work with sony's hardware i mean that's what an enthusiast like me wants so you've got your near stock looking quick settings and the google discover feed next to your home screens even the default google search box at the very bottom of your home screen for reachability but then in the settings like i've said you have a ton of display customization you have always on display controls reverse wireless charging toggle lots of battery care features to help you reduce the amount of time your battery spends at full 100 charge to prolong the life of your phone and then one of my favorite sony editions is called side sense so sony fans taught me if you've heard this before but it puts this little bar over here to the side of your screen you can double tap that bar anytime you want to bring up a quick app launcher which you can customize with whatever eight apps you want or just bring up the whole list hilariously and then you can slide up on that bar anytime you want to open multitasking which is pretty sweet on that extra tall 21x9 display i assume if you're a true enthusiast you're doing this all the time and you've got your favorite app pairs queued up so you can launch them both at the same time with a single touch and you can also launch one-handed mode from here which makes sense if you can't quite reach the top of this phone honestly it's so tall that the top corners can be a little annoying to reach even with big hands so you can customize the position of this bar the size the transparency level the sensitivity every little thing dial it to your heart's content and it's all over here in this little sidebar that's super reachable wherever you want to put it well done sony this one has really good strong haptics which is good to see always and there's also dualshock 4 support so you can connect a sony ps4 controller to this phone to play certain games if you're into that i imagine they're building in a dual sense 5 support it doesn't work with the ps5 controller yet but that would be cool but you want to know you want to know the worst part of the software though for some reason and this annoyed me a lot this phone has the slowest auto rotate i have ever witnessed in a modern smartphone yeah that's not a bug it's it's that slow every single time i don't know why i feel like this is either a i guess it is a bug and they can fix it with software but yeah that's that was extremely annoying now an enthusiast phone wouldn't be complete without some enthusiast cameras and boy does sony have that on lock here literally there is no basic android camera app as soon as you squeeze that shutter or double tap the power button or just hit the camera icon whatever you like you're thrown immediately into sony's advanced camera app now they do give you a basic mode in that camera app which is funny and that lets you switch to video mode and toggle between the ultra wide the standard and two different telephoto focal lengths but then of course you can just go straight from basic mode into basically a full on sony alpha camera with programmable auto modes and manual modes and 20 fps burst shutter and slider sphere shutter speed and iso and focus and all that it's great but did you catch one little thing i just said there two telephoto focal lengths but there's only one telephoto camera on the back of the phone so how are there two telephoto focal lengths well it turns out quietly for their hyper-enthusiast phone sony's dropped variable optical zoom on a single telephoto camera so this horizontally oriented telephoto camera has glass inside that moves to change the focal length optically instead of digitally so in the software you can snap these between 70 millimeters and 105 millimeters these focal lengths are both shot by that same sensor it's pretty intense now sony won't tell me exactly how they're doing this i guess it's a secret but i imagine there are probably some sort of magnets involved moving the glass around the best i can show is this animation on sony's youtube channel one of their videos but this animation actually shows several different internal lens positions which kind of confused me because there's only two focal lengths so i don't know what this is about or how accurate this visualization is but you get the idea it's moving glass inside the phone to give you two different zooms and so the result is kind of amazing you now have two different focal lengths of telephoto in one sensor you have 70 and you have 105 and you can digital zoom between them but you can also just snap between them back and forth for optical zoom to match sharpness that's pretty cool the brutal part though is even after all that technical wizardry the photo quality really isn't that great like i'd like to think i know what i'm doing and i've shot with plenty of cameras plenty of sony alpha cameras and other sony phones but it's just never actually looked that great despite all the incredible innovative manual control the shutter is very fast auto focus is incredibly fast i never miss a shot with the dedicated shutter button it's awesome but the actual shot i get pretty soft a little bit muted colors a little noisy sometimes pretty meh so i was hoping for better there so the best thing i get out of this phone's camera system really is just it's a technical marvel and it's really cool to appreciate and i have hope for the future of smartphones with optical zoom but i also don't want to get my hopes up because well if you remember what samsung did with dual aperture in the galaxy s9 it was kind of just like this it wasn't smoothly adjusting aperture between a range but you could snap between two different apertures on the same camera lens with a moving lens that was in the samsung galaxy s9 and then the next year it was gone and it never showed up again and it would have been really useful in some of their later years galaxy s20 having such a thin plane of focus having dual aperture could make a bigger range of focus if you shut down the aperture a little bit but they didn't do it anymore so i see that and then i think of sony's where now you're snapping between focal lengths and it's cool and i hope it advances but there's no guarantees so we'll cross our fingers for that but overall sheesh this this phone is a lot it's got a camera i've never seen before it's got a screen i've never seen before it's got a ton of features there's just a lot going on and so if you care about smartphones at all this is a really exciting phone and aside from the awful auto rotate i thoroughly enjoyed using it now would i recommend it honestly probably almost no one should actually buy this one i mean it is 1200 bucks that's how much i get it for it's on b h right now i you can get a galaxy s21 ultra for that price which would have better battery faster charging better cameras better software with more updates and just overall a bit more versatile so you have to you have to really want this but if you are that enthusiast or if you're into sony headphones or sony ps5 or sony i don't know bravia tvs or the other stuff they make then you might consider this one too so there you have it that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace you\n"