Sony Xperia 1 V real world camera test

The Sony Xperia 1 V has officially landed! For the past few years, Sony has been focusing its smartphone efforts on making the best smartphone camera for professional camera enthusiasts. The smartphones have offered impressive hardware, but they’ve also shied away from truly jumping onto the computational photography bandwagon since they thought that their users would be more interested in letting the hardware capture a pretty standard image and then giving users the ability to edit the photos to their liking before sharing them.

While that approach is perfectly fine with professional, full-frame cameras, it’s simply not practical with smartphones – especially since most of us want to capture an image and share it immediately on Instagram or Facebook.

Fortunately, Sony realized the error of its ways and it now stopping up its computational photography efforts so that the phone captures and stitches together 2 to 16 images with each shot, giving us better dynamic range in daytime shots and also delivering a 2x improvement in low-light conditions.

Sony is also bringing back its variable telephoto zoom camera that captured images between 3.5x and 5.2x rather than resorting to a digital crop like most other devices.

To see how the Sony Xperia 1 V performs in everyday use, check out the video above or the image gallery below.