Sony Xperia Pro Review: Built For The Crew, Priced For The Stars By MrMobile [Michael Fisher]

- This video is sponsored by sellcell. com. Cameras, I use them every day, I rely on them, I even like a few, but what I've never liked is how making the most of a camera involves buying tons of accessories. Most notoriously, external monitors. In fact, I have a distinct memory of buying this monitor at BNH and being surrounded by a sea of monitors, and the accessories the monitors needed and thinking about all the cash I was gonna have to splash for all the accessories the monitors needed and the monitors themselves. And I remember thinking right in the middle of the store, this is stupid.

Why can't I just use my phone for this? Well, it took a few years, but finally someone built a smartphone that can pull double duty as a monitor. Not only that, it also serves as a standalone studio to send 4K footage over 5G live. The Sony Xperia PRO is the long awaited companion to the Xperia 1 mark 2 that I reviewed last summer. And I've spent the last 10 days seeing whether it's one of a kind experience, can justify it's heart-stopping price tag. (upbeat music) Okay, so from a hardware and performance standpoint, the Xperia Pro is basically a repackaged Xperia 1 mark 2, with some components like the 4K display and triple cameras copy pasted wholesale.

So if you wanna get a sense of how this device performs as a smartphone, I'll point you to that older review. Where the Pro departs from its predecessor, it does so dramatically, get a load of this casing to start with, the glossy glass is gone replaced by a black polycarbonate, that feels almost as reassuringly tough to the touch as Sony's camera bodies do. It feels like the piece of photo equipment it is, you can toss it into a camera bag and between the plastic on the back, and the gorilla glass six on the front, basically not worry about it. It's like having a case built right in. And Sony had more than one reason for choosing polycarbonate for the chassis.

And it wasn't wireless charging which has weirdly been omitted from the Pro. To your Sony tenet, it can sometimes be easier to work with plastic than glass, if you want the best 5G reception possible. Sony is really proud of its beam forming antennas on this model, and given what testing I was able to do, on Verizon's millimeter wave network in New York City, the pride seems justified. The millimeter wave is the finicky highest form of 5G, and while Verizon has significantly built out its footprint since I last tested it, the nature of millimeter wave is just not gonna change. Speeds and receptions still very substantially when I move even a few feet.

So Sony included something helpful here called a network visualizer, that's meant to help you orient yourself toward the nearest 5G node, so you can maintain a connection when you need it. Now it does look like an engineering test tool with a pasty consumer friendly UI slapped on, and it takes a little getting used to, but so far, it's the only example I've seen of a manufacturer trying to make this flavor of 5G easier for the end user to utilize. Then Sony deserves kudos for that. The other big change on this hardware is what Sony is calling a world's first, a dedicated HDMI input right next to the USB port. Now, to be clear, you don't need a port of any kind for a phone to serve as a monitor.

Most camera manufacturers offer apps that use WiFi direct or Bluetooth to do mostly the same thing. It's the input part of the HDMI label that's critical here. This is what allows you to take the footage from your camera and broadcast it via the phone, live at up to 4K resolution. To help me test that, Sony sent over what can only be described as a YouTube creators fantasy review kit. Alongside the review phone itself, I was able to spend 10 days with another A7S3 mirrorless camera, companion to the one I just bought, a 20 millimeter G-master lens, and all the cables, cages and clamps I'd need to mount the phone to the rail.

And it took maybe two seconds for the relief to register. Once I replaced my clunky small HD monitor with its heavy battery, with the experience pros positively petite 10 millimeter thickness and 225 gram mass. All you do is connect the cable, use the new dedicated hot key to open the app, and bam, your phone becomes a 4K OLED studio monitor for your camera. I shot most of my Galaxy S21 review video using the Xperia Pro as my monitor, and there were a lot of pluses to take away. Colors were almost perfect, the OLED contrast was as sharp as ever, and despite being something like 80% thinner than my small HD monitor with its huge honk and battery.

After two straight hours of filming with the screen on the entire time, I still had 50% battery left in the Xperia Pro. That's basically twice the duration I get with my monitor, and a nice side effect of having a dedicated HDMI port, is that the USBC port alongside it remains available, if you wanna plug in a battery pack to keep filming. Unfortunately, the experience wasn't without its hangups. Due to what I first thought was a bad HDMI cable, and now I believe was probably a loose HDMI port, the app would crash constantly if I jostled the camera at all and sometimes I didn't even need to do that. The app just crashed by the way.

And even when the app runs well, it's missing features that videographers have come to expect like the ability to record footage separately from the camera, and wave forms to calibrate the image, and things like focus peaking. That's the false color applied to an image to help you see if it's in focus or not. None of that is here, and Sony couldn't even commit to those features coming in the future. The fanciest thing you can do with the phone as a monitor is pinch to zoom, not very pro you know? Sony is also leaning heavily on the fact that this is a 4K display to make it worth it. I mean, sure, it's nice to be able to get right up onto it without seeing pixels, but if I'm getting that close I'm just gonna use the camera's viewfinder.

Also, you're almost never using the whole panel because of its tall aspect ratio, and I'd gladly trade down to something closer to HD, if it meant to screen, I could actually see in bright daylight. For the use cases, Sony is pushing with 5G broadcast from anywhere, I don't think that popping and dropping the same panel from the one mark two, was the way to go. Ditto for duplicating the year old Snapdragon 865 by the way. If you think I'm picking a few too many knits given the one of a kind functionality here, I might agree if the phone was launching at the price point we've all been expecting around $1,500. But Sony thinks the Xperia Pro is worth more, $1000 more.

And I'll show you why the company thinks that after a word from a sponsor who can help take the sting out of that premium price. This video is sponsored by sellcell. com, which isn't just another used phone marketplace, see when you punch in your old devices details at sellcell. com, it compares buyback prices from over 40 mobile tech trade-in companies. That means two things.

One, you save a lot of time, you'd otherwise have spent pro shopping, and two, you're guaranteed to always get the most cash for your old electronics. In fact, they're so serious about that promise that if you find a higher price anywhere else, sellcell. com, will pay you double the difference. Don't settle for less than your old devices are truly worth, hit the link in the description and get the most for your trade-in today. Thanks to sellcell.

com for sponsoring this video. Live video streaming, usually from a webcam or a phone's front facing camera, it looks like this, serviceable, but kind of flat kind of blown out, low Rez looking even if it's not, not that great in other words. So you can see the appeal of using a proper DSLR camera with a nice piece of glass instead. And just check out the interview I did on super last week with Jason Nellis, who's Sony, A6500 and Sigma 30 millimeter really trounced my MacBook Pro webcam. Thanks again, Jason.

We have to understand I'm really vain, I mean my vanity. - On paper, that's what makes the Xperia Pro 5G so cool. Because today, if you don't have this phone, and you wanna go stream live footage from your DSLR over a cellular connection, you need a modem to do that for you, then not just a modem, but also an encoder to properly format the video. When you consider that those alone stack up to about two grand just for that equipment, not counting a separate monitor which you will need, and all the accessories to power that monitor, then it gets a little easier to see why Sony thinks $2,500 is a fair price for the Xperia Pro, which does 4K over 5G, in a package that doubles as a monitor and fits in a pocket. And it's also pretty good smartphone, if you can get past the comically terrible vibration motor.

(phone vibrates) And you know, I get it. If I were Sony, I'd wanna charge top dollar for this too, because it really is a crazy confluence of multi-purpose tools in one package. And it can even do more than what I've shown you here, like transfer files over FTP, and use USB tethering, et cetera. But if you've been watching my videos for the past two years you know what I'm gonna say about 5G millimeter wave. Those networks are still barely built, and they're incredibly inconsistent.

While most streaming platforms still don't support 4K, and they're also just finicky with external cameras. It's just not going to happen for me, is it? Stream yard was straight up unable to detect the camera, even when I tried several versions of Chrome and Microsoft Edge. I had more luck with streamlabs which actually got the camera feed, but for some reason it botched the YouTube streams that I tried on the street. I've got to give thanks to Sony, which was kind enough to give me extra time with the device to iron out these issues, but the problems persisted right up to the day before this review. So if you're a MrMobile subscriber, the Xperia Pro probably isn't for you.

I knew that back when it was announced, but I've been eager to show it to all of you anyway, because I thought maybe it was a phone for me, for pro-sumer YouTubers in other words, but Sony has priced this thing for the buying departments of TV networks that cover NFL games at stadiums with 5G networks. It's a sensible strategy, and I'm sure the videographers down on the field will appreciate the streamline gear that company's paid for. But as a creator who shoots mostly on Sony, and could have made daily use out of a fully baked $1,500 version of the Xperia Pro, this $2,500 device that lacks key features, and bases its value proposition on a 5G technology that has yet to prove it's worth the hype, more than anything else, it just feels like a Missed opportunity. This review was produced following a week and a half with a pre-production Xperia Pro 5G review sample running pre-released software on loan from Sony, and tested on Verizon. As always the manufacturer had no editorial input or copy approval concerning this content.

Sony is seeing this for the first time, right alongside you. Please subscribe to the MrMobile on YouTube, if you'd like to see more videos like this. Until next time, thanks for watching and remember to stay safe and mask up while you stay mobile my friends. (upbeat music).

Source : MrMobile [Michael Fisher]