Sony Xperia 1 V Review

The Xperia 1 IV overheated and its camera lagged the class, so the 1 V had two jobs and did both. The new main sensor is Sony's own Exmor T for mobile, a 1/1.35-inch stacked design with the photodiodes and the pixel transistors on separate layers, which is why a 52 MP sensor that outputs 12 MP photos suddenly held up at night in a way no Xperia had. The 85 to 125mm telephoto still zooms optically through its range and the 16mm ultrawide is unchanged; all three record 4K at 120 fps.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with 12 GB of RAM runs cool where its predecessor throttled, and the 5000 mAh battery with 30W wired and wireless charging gets comfortably through a day, since the 6.5-inch 4K 120 Hz panel spends most of its time upscaling 1080p. The screen is accurate and sharper than anything else on sale but still not as bright as a Galaxy S23 Ultra, and it is not LTPO. Sony kept the headphone jack, the microSD slot and the two-stage shutter button, and the textured glass back is pleasant to hold.

Photo Pro, Video Pro and Cinema Pro remain three separate apps with a learning curve. The problem is the deal around the phone: 1,399 dollars in the US from July 2023, two OS upgrades and three years of security patches when Samsung and Google were promising far more. A year later the Xperia 1 VI skipped the US entirely.