Sony Xperia Pro-I as a video camera

Odds and ends

There's a handful of things we'd like to mention that don't quite fit into any of the previous chapters, so we'll just go on and throw them in here in no particular order.

The Xperia Pro-I's hardware has a few additions that can prove beneficial. One of those is the lanyard eyelet at the left bottom of the phone, which lets you attach a strap so you can ensure the phone won't drop to its death, if you were to get too carried away in your video capture and it slipped.

The other neat new development is the extra key next to the ever-present hardware shutter release. It can be set to launch any app on the Xperia Pro-I, but you can specifically use it to summon one of the video-centric apps, and it's set to Video Pro by default. It's not customizeable within those apps, however, and that's a missed opportunity, though one that can be seized in a future update.

Lanyards are welcome • Quick launch but that's it

One more hardware aspect of the Xperia Pro-I that came up repeatedly was the lack of a first-party solution for using ND filters. Back in Xperia 1 (Mk 1) days, we had a jerryrigged case that would take standard screw-on filters, and that did the job, but we weren't all too keen on ruining the $90 leather case we got with the Pro-I. There are clip-on third-party ones, but for a product that Sony is trying to market as a pro video camera of sorts, a Sony accessory seems the logical way to go.

Admittedly, the ability to stop down the aperture and thus limit the light hitting the sensor helps in a way. But that negates the advantages of the big sensor and robs the footage of the shallow DoF.

We also couldn't find a way to edit videos on the phone beyond a simple trimming function. That is, we can edit videos captured in the basic (for video purposes) Photo Pro app with the entirety of tools available in Google Photos, but for clips recorded in any of the other two apps, all you can do is trim, and that's it. There is nothing of the sort of editor shown in the promo materials, but again, this might be due to this unit being not quite ready feature-wise.

Lastly, not strictly related to the Xperia Pro-I's use as a video camera, but very much related to using it in a video recording environment, the Pro-I can be put to work as an external monitor for Sony's real cameras, same as the 1 III and 5 III.

External Monitor app on the Xperia Pro (the previous one, non-I) with the A7S III

Final words

Since we were given a preview-grade sample of the Xperia Pro-I, we haven't delved too deep into actual video quality. We have the samples from the current firmware up on YouTube for you to check out, but the results may change as the phone reaches a final state, and since there's a good two months before the market launch, there could be significant changes.

We did play around with the apps Sony is offering (an ever-growing number seemingly), and we can say there are good bits and not-so-great bits. For starters, Cinema Pro is mostly unchanged from previous incarnations we've seen, and things like the missing focusing aids or the hard-to-grade color profiles are long-standing gripes we've had with that one.

On the other hand, Video Pro is easier to like. It's a lot more approachable for someone without cinematographic training, yet it offers nearly as much creative control. It's perhaps just A-B focusing and 4K120 slow motion away from being as fully capable as CinemaPro, and it doesn't require labor- and time-intensive post-processing.

Photo Pro's video-recording capabilities, meanwhile, are basic, and that's all that's needed there - the two other options can fully satisfy more advanced videographers.

Now, how good of a smartphone the Xperia Pro-I is, that will be a matter we'll ponder in December. As for whether it can justify its price tag, this one is probably clear already, but it's also entirely missing the point. Sony wanted to put a 1.0"-type sensor in a phone and did that. They also came up with a new video recording app, and that's likely going to make it to the mainstream phones, and that's great. They've never been much into doing things like the rest of them, and that's okay too. The best that can come out from all this is a properly great Xperia 1 IV, so we're on board.