Sony Xperia 1 II unboxing + overview - did Sony finally fix their phone cameras? By Tong Zou

Hey guys how's it going today we're going to do the unboxing and overview of the Sony Xperia one two or one mark ii. I think it's called um. This is Sony's new flagship smartphone that was just released earlier this year, which was uh in May 2020 um, and this is a pretty interesting smartphone, because I think that Sony finally uh listened to what people wanted from their smartphone devices. They added some features back in, and they improved their cameras, a lot, which is something that I know that other people have been asking and me myself. I've asked Sony this as well. You know they make perfect cameras, Sony alpha cameras, the rx100, even the camera, I'm shooting this YouTube, video with the zv1 they're, all perfect cameras.

Why can't Sony make a good camera for their smartphones? There's, always something I've been interested in um, very curious about why their smartphone cameras haven't really. You know, been up to snuff they generally in the past. They haven't been as good as Apple's iPhone cameras or Google's pixel cameras, or even Samsung or Huawei's cameras, so maybe this generation. Finally, they managed to fix it so anyways. This is the box um kind of very simple box.

Here you can see on the back so yeah. This is the back um you can see. They have triple cameras: uh 12 megapixels for each lens, 8, megapixel, front camera, 4k, HDR, OLED, display 4000 William hour battery Qualcomm, snapdragon, 865, processor, ip6568, dust, water resistant. It uses mass lens um, Wi-Fi certified micro SD card slot, which is always nice and Sony, has always given us that which is really nice NFC, which Sony has pushed on pretty much all its devices since the beginning of time and, of course, Bluetooth, um, so yeah. This is pretty basic box, but it's what Sony has always been going for? A very clean, simple box.

All right- and this is the phone itself- see it's a very, very tall, wide phone um. I'm just going to put this here. For now. We've got the startup guide right here: Sony, opera, 1 mark ii. So just a quick start guide here, and we get a.

This is a. I think this is the version I got is not the US version. So this is an international adapter um, not quite sure what this plug is. It looks like it's from the UK, maybe or Australia, or something like that. Definitely not a US plug, and then you also get uh.

This is looks like headphones, yeah earphones. You get some kind of earphones here, they're, just Sony earphones, so they're, probably better than most packing earphones, but not going to be, like you know, they're not going to be like um, 50, 100, earphones or anything like that. They're just good packing earphones, and then you come with an USB cable right here. So yeah, that's what we would expect um, there's, basically nothing else in the box, so pretty minimal there. So yeah.

I really like this design. Um. It's got the rectangular form factor they've been keeping this design style for the past few years, so they haven't really changed it all that much some people like it. Some people hate it, but I personally like it. I find it pretty uh modern, looking very sleek, and it really feels good in the hand as well pretty nice materials I mean yeah.

It feels pretty solid and uh. This color is purple, it doesn't look very purple to me. It's got kind of like an almost like a grayish tinge to it, so it is purple, but it's very, very light purple. So don't get this thinking that it's going to be some kind of deep um purple or something it's not like a concord grape, not like that kind of purple. This is just a very, very light purple and the back here is a very mirror finish, so it tracks fingerprints uh very easily.

You can see like there are some fingerprints that has got on there already um, so yeah, let's go over the specs. Like I said on the bottom of the back of the box, it's ip6568 dust, water resistant. It's got gorilla, glass, 6 on the front. It's got dual sims. This OLED display is supposed to be a bit better than other displays on the market.

Sony has been well known for their OLED TVs, so this one has one billion colors, apparently uh, other OLED displays usually have 16 million, so I'll have to put that to the test, but that's definitely the most colors. I've seen on any smartphone display 6.5 inch display 1644x3840, which is 4k 21.9 aspect ratio, which is a cinema aspect ratio. It is not a standard aspect ratio. So if you watch YouTube videos or movies, anything is 16.9 you're going to have little black bars, but if you have something that's native 21.9, then I think maybe Netflix or some other apps may have 21.9 content, but it's definitely not that much right now uh supports the HDR pt 2020 uh, which is the color space and whereas android 10, snapdragon 865 uh Aldrin 650 GPU does have micros card slot 256 gigs of internal storage, which is a lot that's what comes in most laptops, eight gigs of ram also what comes in most laptops? So I don't think anyone will be disappointed with the specs here. That's actually a lot um and then the camera on the back, which is pretty interesting because this is supposed to be a spec, a step-up from a lot of Sony's previous camera systems.

So, as you can see, this is mass branded with t-sharp anti-reflective coating. It's got three cameras on the back here. Actually, four cameras because one is for depth as well, but yeah three megs, three 12 megapixel cameras, um. We got a wide 24, millimeter, f 1.7, a 70 millimeter, telephoto, f 2.4 and a 16 millimeter ultra-wide f 2.2. So you got the same arrangement of cameras that you see on the iPhone 11 Pro a wide telephone or ultra-wide.

So I'll be doing a comparison between the pictures and video that the Sony Xperia mark ii um takes versus the iPhone 11 Pro that I got. It's got an 8 megapixel front facing camera, that's f, 2.0 and the chords 4k video. Of course, it has stereo speakers, which is a nice feature that not many smartphones have these days, and I really appreciate that because you know I listen to speakers a lot actually uh when I'm watching you know YouTube videos on my phone, so stereo speakers, front-facing ones, always appreciated right because still a lot of smartphones use the dumb, the down fiery, mono speaker even on Samsung's flagships and the iPhone they still use. That configuration which is kind of annoying- and it definitely doesn't sound as good um fascinating. Here Sony has brought back the headphone jack yes, so this is one of the things that prevented me from getting the Sony x uh.

What is xc2 I had. The xc1 did not get the xc2, because from that generation onwards Sony removed the headphone jack which to me that was a huge disappointment, because Sony created the portable music industry with the Walkman. So you would think that they would keep the headphone jack right and so far only a few phones have added it back in. But I'm glad that Sony is one of them all right, so Sony added back in the headphone jack hugely appreciated. So this is one feature that was missing from the previous generation Sony Xperia one right.

So only a few other manufacturers have done. This lg keeps their headphone jacks. Thankfully, Google Pixel has added it back in which is great as well. So I'm glad that some manufacturers are actually listening to consumers and adding some missing features back in um yeah. So that's perfect 24 bit 192 kilohertz audio with a dynamic vibration system, and then it's got Bluetooth 5.1 all your usual! You know Wi-Fi six use this USB. Of course this should be standard at this point and then on the side.

Here you actually get the sim card and micros right here and what's interesting. Are you don't need to have a sim ejector tool to remove this? You can actually just use your fingernails to remove it, which is really convenient right. So you have the sim card NATO, sim and micros. You can just remove it with your fingernails, no need for an extra tool, that's cool, um and yeah. You have you, have a dedicated camera shutter button, that's something that Sony has always put on their smartphones and has kept there, which is nice, because that's, this is kind of an old-school feature that was on a lot of phones before but um.

It's now missing a fingerprint sensor on the side here which Sony has done uh in a lot of their phones in the past, but not for the US versions, but now they fixed it or whatever. Now they have the fingerprint since they're working in the US versions, which is nice, and then they got the volume rocker up here. So yeah very, very nice phone. You can see very, very tall but easy to hold still because it's not that wide so still fairly easy to hold it's just tall. So it's going to be hard for you to reach the top and bottom here, but it's not necessarily going to be hard to hold, because it's still not that wide.

It's just tall, so yeah, lets uh! Let's turn this bad boy on! You can see that Sony does not put too much fluff on the UI layer, the way that Samsung or lg or Huawei they put UI layers on your HTC right. They put um UI layers on here. Sony does not put much of an UI layer, it's very close to stock android, just something that I really like about Sony phones. I really like this display. It is a gorgeous OLED display um.

I guess I'll have to compare it side by side with the iPhone 11 Pro to see how much better this OLED display is. So, there's only a few features that this phone would have that's a little different from other android phones, so one feature would probably be PS4 remote play so Sony experience. I've always had PS4 or PlayStation remote play, which, for those of us who own PlayStation um the ability to play remotely is a pretty nice. It's a pretty nice extra to have um and then for this phone in particular, there's a special photo app and a special cinema app. So let's just sample put something here and the photo app.

As you can see. This is a little different from a lot of other camera apps, because there's so many settings here right so um Sony has marketed this camera on the smartphone as being more of a professional camera or prosumer camera uh, because they realize a lot of people have been asking for better smartphone cameras on their smartphones right because it's weird but Sony makes perfect. Alpha cameras standalone cameras. So why can't they put a good camera on their smartphone? So Sony listened to that they put a lot of technology from their alpha cameras um. They worked with their alpha team actually to design a lot of these hardware and apps.

I guess so. I guess they listened. So this is a camera that you get, which is pretty good um. I will have to do some direct comparison with my iPhone 11 Pro um, but yeah uh there's a lot of settings here, so you can change uh. This is their different settings for shooting mode, and then you got basically these are the same settings.

You would find in a Sony the Sony camera I'm using right now, the zv1 or the rx100 or the alpha series. You have a lot of different modes here: single shot, autofocus, continuous autofocus manual focus. Furthermore, you change that you can see. Furthermore, you can change the focus area, the ISO! Furthermore, you can adjust that right and then metering mode as well. Furthermore, you have a lot of features that you don't get on.

Other smartphone cameras. I guess flash mode. You have a different flash mode. It's auto white balance! Um! You can change the white balance as well and face detection. So you have that and let's see you have different shooting modes here.

You can change a lot of modes here, medium mode yeah, so there's a lot of things that you could do here that you can calibrate. So you can even change this. You can change the lens. So this is a standard, wide angle, lens 24 millimeters. You can change it to the ultra-wide angle, which is the 16 millimeter when you change it to the telephoto, which is the 70?mm.

You can see this, so you can adjust the exposure manually just like this. It's not turning into a macro mode for whatever reason, but anyways yeah. You can adjust the exposure manually like that all right and uh yeah. You can see all your settings from here f1 1.7, which is fixed because of the smartphone lens, and this is the auto settings I guess so yeah we can take a picture like that, and you can see there's a there's, a little focus zone right here see what's going on yeah, so yeah, it's pretty cool um! Then this is the display. You can see the focus peaking right here, as well as the balance right.

So those are pretty nice extras to have, so these are the exact same features that you would get on a Sony professional camera like the alpha series, um or the camera, I'm using right now, the zb1 or the rx100. You would get the exact same kind of features, so it's cool that they brought this to their smartphone app yep, all right. So those are the pictures it just took all right. Those are pretty decent I'll have to compare those these pictures later on all right, so that's a photo app a lot of features. There's also a video app, which is the cinema pro, which apparently uses a lot of settings from their Venice camera, which is their high-end professional camera.

So, lets uh. Actually this can shoot in 4k, so we've got stabilizer on media manual. I can change all this stuff, grid lines level, new project, okay, and we can change the resolution to 4k here and ISO unfortunately tops out at 800, which is not a lot. So I don't think that this is going to be very good for low light video. Taking so don't expect perfect low light performance um then you have HDR mode, which is HL's hog h.265, codec um. This is the level right here, so you can see where there's now it's balanced, and then you got the eV exposure right uh, and then you can change the look so by default, set to Venice, cs change, to opaque bright, warm, that's, really warm uh strong, which is uh that color cool, which is going to be like more of a blue setting, soft, soft monochrome and n, a which is really blown out.

Okay, so the Venice cs is the default setting and I don't know it's actually kind of weird it's a little too bright. For me, I'm not sure, what's wrong with the setting. Fps is locked at 24 fps when you set it to 4k. Apparently I'm going to change the lens so, like I said a few different lenses here, this is the ultra-wide. Alright, then you can change it to a telephoto.

You can't see anything right now. Just use a standard wide lens here, maybe I can adjust this a little: okay and then the white balance right now, it's worse than tungsten. Maybe that's why, let's put it auto white balance? Yeah, the white balance was really off shutter speed, um. I think this should be automatic, but right now it's set to highest to be 60. Maybe I'll turn down the shutter speed a little and bump up the ISO.

There focus right and choose manual focus. I have autofocus right now and uh yeah, that's the settings for the video. So if you press record it's going to make the same sound as Sony cameras would yep, and then we are recording right now. So this is 24 fps and 4k right, so it should have active, steady shot, which means it has optical image, stabilization plus electronic image- stabilization right here right, so we can do like uh all right. So let's take a look at that.

The video I just took in 4k 24fps, not too bad um, but you could just you can definitely see the active steady shot which is kind of stabilizing the footage. This is pretty nice all right, so I'll have to do more comparisons versus the iPhone 11 Pro, but those are the apps so yeah anyways uh, that is the Sony Xperia one mark ii. Everything else is just started android, so I don't need to show you anything else. Um. I think the main draws of this phone is the camera which uh for those of us who use Sony cameras.

I think a lot of us use Sony cameras. Actually it's their, pretty popular um they'll people who use Sony cameras would be pr pretty much right at home in these apps here, they're very, very similar um, so yeah. I think the camera is pretty much a big draw, um the mass lens and has three different lenses right there pretty much. All you need, and the different apps here are very similar to what you find in Sony cameras. So I think the cameras here would be a big draw.

I think the OLED display is a pretty big draw too and the speakers right. So I think this is perfect for media watching like watching movies or a video. So, let's look at um example: trailer here, playground 2049! Let's look at this now. This is going to be cut off a little, because this is a 21.9 display all right. So let's watch a trailer from Blade Runner here.

You guys can do the speakers as well and then turn it up to full, pretty good stereo speakers right, and I can hear I can uh sense- the vibration from the phone as well, because there's dynamic vibration happening here, so yeah was built off the back of a disposable workforce, but I can only make so many shh happy birthday. So that's that's blade! Runner! I want to ask you some questions. I can say that the display looks really, really nice um, as you would expect right. It's a 4k OLED display with a billion colors um, so yeah definitely very, very color, accurate um. I can't say that it's like you know.

Other smartphone displays 16 million colors this one billion supposed to be a lot more um. I can't say that I can sense it that much easier, but it definitely seems like a perfect display. I always told you're special yeah, your story isn't over, yet there's still a page left, yeah, so uh. Definitely the display is really, really nice for watching movies and for watching video speakers. Also, you know the stereo front facing speaker, so they're going to be better than your typical smartphone as well.

So I think as a media playing device, this is perfect as well. So I think that would be another reason to get this phone and, of course, a lot of vertical area. So that's perfect for reading long web pages and stuff. So I think um. Those would be the two main reasons that I would get.

This phone is for the camera, mainly the two professional Sony, uh Sony, alpha style, camera apps right here for photo and video, and also for the media, watching experience right. The gorgeous OLED display stereo speakers and also a headphone jack by the way right now many phones have the headphone jack or added it back. I think um, only the lg Google Pixel, maybe some Samsung phones or Huawei phones- might still have it, but um yeah. I mean at least Sony added the headphone jack back in, which is something that I really appreciate, and I'm sure a lot of other people appreciate as well. So those are the main reasons I would get this phone uh so yeah, that's it um, I think, for twelve hundred dollars.

It is a lot of money. This is about. This is about the same price as the iPhone 11 Pro max, but uh it's more expensive than my iPhone 11 Pro, which is already a lot of money. So I think this is really competing at the highest of the high-end right, Samsung, galaxy s20. That would be that level.

So Sony's asking a lot of money here, and I'm sure people have to do some comparison against the highest flagship phones, but I do think that I've always liked Sony devices and uh. I do think that Sony has been trying especially hard with this latest model, because they added a lot of features. People were asking for, like the headphone jack um, kept the great speakers um and kept a great display, also added a better smartphone camera for a lot of us who are asking for that um, especially for the Sony alpha technology. So yeah, it's a really nice looking phone too um, just a fingerprint magnet, though just be wary of this, I would probably put a cover if you guys don't want to have your fingerprints showing, but it is a really nice looking phone uh very, very you know, mirror finish right here, even though this is purple, it doesn't really look purple. It's just yeah a very, very light purple metallic finish kind of like that, but yeah.

That's it guys, um the Sony Xperia one mark ii. Those are my first impressions here, so I will do a comparison between the iPhone 11 Pro and the Xperia mark ii for the pictures and the video and see if you guys, can spot the differences and decide which one is better, yeah, very, very expensive phone Sony phones, don't really go on discount, very often actually um. So it's its actually hard to find one at a discount, so I had to pay full price for this so that you guys can can see this review here. Uh but yeah. Let me know in the comment section what else you want to see from this device what else you want to know and uh yeah.

Let me know your feedback and as always, thanks for watching you.

Source : Tong Zou