A Bit More Conventional

Review: Sony Xperia 1 VI - With Top-Class Camera and Battery Life

That Sony has conformed to industry standards does not make the Xperia 1 VI any less good.

Published 22 January 2024 - 01:20 Modified 24 January 2025 - 16:40

Xperia 1 VI should be read as “Xperia 1 mark 6”. It is the sixth edition of Xperia 1 and the phone has largely been built on the same formula with an extra elongated screen with 4K resolution. Until now.

With Xperia 1 VI, they are abandoning the screen that has been something of a hallmark for Xperia 1 in favor of a significantly more conventional screen of 6.5 inches, with the comparatively low resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels, which means it is in a 19.5:9 format.

I think few will mourn this. The 21:9 screen has never felt particularly practical, it gave phones that became elongated, top-heavy, and difficult to use with one hand. The video content that would benefit from the screen's wide format was rarer than the more TV-shaped video clips that got black borders on the sides. It was also hard to see any real benefits with a 4K screen in such a small format, and personally, I am not bothered by the fact that they haven't even chosen a 1440p resolution here but are content with 1080p.

The screen also comes with advantages, and perhaps even more than wanting to conform to industry standards, it is probably these advantages that Sony wanted to achieve. Firstly, the screen is significantly brighter than its predecessor, and secondly, it consumes less power, which according to Sony should provide significantly improved battery life. More on battery life shortly, regarding brightness, it is an area where concrete improvements are happening between mobile generations right now, and Sony would probably have suffered if they had fallen behind due to the 4K screen's limitation in brightness. On the Xperia 1 VI, we find a screen that can be read even in direct sunlight, something we have come to expect from new flagship models.

No camera hole

In one aspect, Sony has not adapted with the screen. They still have the selfie camera on the edge outside the screen instead of embedded in the screen. They are right to do so. The phone still has fairly thin edges on the short sides, and very thin on the long sides. The selfie camera is placed next to the speaker to minimize space and is therefore not centered, but this is not noticeable when using it.

Sony sees creators like photographers and YouTubers as their core target group, and this is already evident on the screen. In the display settings, you can choose between standard mode and creator mode. This roughly corresponds to the natural or intense colors you can choose between on other phones, but in creator mode, efforts have been made to ensure that color reproduction is as accurate as possible for photos and videos.

Besides the phone being wider and less tall, the design is recognizable from previous generations. Fairly straight lines, a special physical camera button on the side, a 3.5 mm jack for a headset, and a camera island with three cameras that are not particularly protruding. The phone is thinner than its predecessors and more grippable thanks to slightly grooved sides and a glass back with a textured pattern. I have to admit that the surface texture of the glass back feels very similar to plastic. Not luxurious, but comfortable to hold and surprisingly good at preventing fingerprints.

Sony highlights the battery life as one of the phone's advantages, and they are right to do so. It may not show much in our screen time test, where the Xperia 1 VI gets a respectable but not remarkable result. We test screen time at full brightness, so it is somewhat dependent on the maximum brightness being high as well. It's more about the subjective experience. I install a lot of apps and services to put a heavy load on the phone and still don't need to charge it even every other day.

Of course, the phone is also fast with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 as the chipset. 256 GB of storage might feel a bit small for some, but there is also room for a memory card, something that virtually no other top model has anymore.

Three cameras

The camera setup is just like on all previous Xperia 1 models: a main camera, a wide-angle camera, and a telephoto camera. This year, the 12-megapixel telephoto camera is new, while the 48-megapixel main camera and the 12-megapixel wide-angle camera are the same as last year's model. The telephoto camera has variable optical zoom from 3.5 to 7.1 times magnification, and you can also use the main camera's high resolution to take cropped images with two times optical zoom. Sony likes to use professional photographer terminology here, and with that, we have lenses for 16 mm, 24 mm, 48 mm, and 85 - 170 mm.

Sony has struggled to really get their cameras right until last year's main camera, which was convincing. The edition in this year's Xperia 1 VI is just as good, with fine sharpness and color reproduction and excellent light sensitivity. The images consistently feel natural in lighting, which means that high-contrast images often have dark and light areas compared to, for example, Samsung, which often brightens the dark. When you zoom in, you can see that there is a lot of detail reproduction even in the dark.

Sony boasts about its autofocus, which can maintain focus even on moving targets. In this year's edition, it can recognize people and focus on them based on their body posture, even if the face is turned away. Here, the camera button is useful because you can press it halfway down to lock focus.

The wide-angle camera also does a good job, and it can also function as a macro camera if you want to take pictures really close up. The telephoto camera impresses on paper, 7.1 times optical zoom is better than what is available in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and in addition, the camera has stepless optical zoom from 3.5 to 7.1 times. The result is not as impressive in practice. I don't think the images become one hundred percent sharp in Sony's optical zoom, and the gain is therefore not that great. I compare the zoom with the Oneplus 12, a mobile that on paper only has 3 times optical zoom but where the zoom camera is 64 megapixels, and therefore there are pixels to spare if you also crop the image. In practice, this means that Oneplus takes noticeably sharper zoomed-in images pretty much regardless of which zoom level I choose, but Oneplus pulls ahead the more I zoom in. Xperia 1 VI has a max zoom of 21.3 times, and then it looks quite bad, while Oneplus 12 lets me zoom up to 120 times, and thanks to digital sharpening, it looks quite okay at least up to 30 times zoom. Here, Sony still has some catching up to do.

Missing Photography Pro

The camera app is yet another example of Sony conforming to industry standards. It's good that there are no longer four different camera apps. Now, like everyone else, there is a camera app with a Pro mode and a user interface that more closely matches what other mobile cameras have. This obviously makes it easier when switching between phones, but I do miss the old Photography Pro app, which I think had a nicer user interface than the Pro mode in the new camera app. One detail I like that doesn't follow industry standards is that the camera app remembers the settings you used last and reverts to them, so if you prefer Pro mode, you don't have to scroll to it every time you start the camera.

Sony's ambitions for software in recent years have mainly extended to apps for creators, and we still see that here, with an iMovie-like app for editing video, an app for mixing music, and an app for connecting the phone with external drives and video cameras. But I am also surprised that this time they have also tweaked quite a bit in the user interface of Android 14. For example, the icons in the status bar are square instead of rounded, which may not be a major innovation, but it still contributes to a sense of system refreshment. The side menu has also changed from a list of app shortcuts to an alternative to swiping down the quick panel.

I have really enjoyed the Sony Xperia 1 VI during the test period. The phone feels smooth despite its size, thanks to it being thin and relatively light. It is fast with an excellent screen, and I mostly get excellent pictures with the camera. And I hardly ever get stressed about the battery running out.

Questions & Answers

How is the speaker sound? The phone has stereo speakers, but the sound is a bit flat and tinny.

How is the fingerprint reader? Sony has avoided placing it in the screen and instead has it in a recessed power button on the side. It's a wise choice, and my only objection is that I quite often wake the phone by mistake when holding it.

Does the phone charge quickly? Sony does not include a charger, but with a standard charger, it can charge up to 30 watts, providing 50 percent battery in 30 minutes.