Sony's Xperia 1 IV Is for the Streamers
Do you even stream? Sony's latest ultra-high-end, photography-focused Android phone combines dedicated livestreaming features with flagship-level camera capabilities, creating a device whose $1,600 price tag could pay off for people who make their money from the images it creates.
Sony claims that the Xperia 1 IV is the first smartphone with a continuous optical zoom, which uses optics rather than digital interpolation to get from 3.5x to 5.2x zoom.
We're pretty sure that isn't the case; there just hasn't been one for a few years. Nokia's N93, released back in 2006, had a 3x-zoom in a barrel which may have been continuous. The same year, Samsung's SCH-B600 had a telescoping zoom which certainly looked continuous. In 2013, we reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, which had a continuous zoom.
The telescoping components were bulky, expensive, and attracted dust. Meanwhile, computational photography got good enough that phones could easily interpolate images using multiple cameras, so phones instead switched to fixed-zoom lenses and used software to generate the intermediate zoom levels. Samsung's Galaxy S22 Ultra, for example, has 1x, 3x and 10x lenses, combining them for zoom levels in between.
Sony's phone has three 12-megapixel rear cameras: an ultra-wide, a standard lens, and that dynamic optical zoom. On the front, there's also a 12MP camera with a larger image sensor than in Sony's previous models, the company said.
The phone isn't just a camera, though. A big part of the investment here appears to be in proprietary software directly aimed at online creators, letting them use pro-mode controls in their streams, mix, and upload their content.
A new "videography pro" application directly live streams to some services
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