Sony debuted a new camera for the Xperia XZ Premium as well as the Xperia XZs, and it’s a pretty impressive one. It’s a 19-megapixel shooter that shoots in 4K. Unfortunately while the Xperia XZ Premium is sporting a 4K HDR display, there is no support for shooting in HDR video just yet. It’s using a new custom Exmor IMX300 sensor, which is obviously made by Sony. Included is a RGB color sensor, distance sensor and phase detection autofocus. Now the RGB color sensor is going to help the camera produce better pictures, and more accurate pictures than a camera that doesn’t have one. Of course the distance sensor will help with things like bokeh effects, as it allows the camera see how far things are in the actual shot. Speaking of bokeh, we have a f/2.0 aperture here.
This is a 3-layer sensor, which Sony is touting as the world’s first. What’s interesting here is that it has a 25Gbps transfer rate from the sensor to memory. This is what Sony is calling the Motion Eye Sensor. Now many may wonder why this is important, well when you’re shooting in 4K, data is much larger than shooting in 1080p or even 720p. So the hardware is going to need more bandwidth to write to the storage in the device, otherwise you’ll be stuck waiting for it to write before you can take another shot (this is what happens with the Sony RX100 Mark V and why it is pretty slow when shooting in 4K).
Sony has also included a high-speed anti distortion shutter on this camera. This is going to help keep images from being warped, especially when they have moving objects in them – like kids or pets. The reason why this high-speed anti distortion shutter works so well and so fast is due to the bandwidth of the Motion Eye Sensor. Which allows the shutter to capture the scene itself much faster than it would on a camera without the Motion Eye Sensor.
Both the Xperia XZ Premium and the Xperia XZs will be sporting this camera, which while it does have a lower-megapixel count than some of the other cameras we’ve seen on phones lately – including ones from Sony – it does seem to be a great camera overall. Especially with the Snapdragon 835 being inside and powering the show, which Qualcomm did also note, has some great improvements when it comes to the camera.
