today is going to be a really fun phone video for me because
I'm considering switching to this phone
but we have to find out how good it is in front of me today I have the Xperia 5
4 the naming convention is confusing at
best we have the Xperia Pro I which we've done a video on the most recent
Xperia one four which is coming out soon actually shipping along around the same
time as this phone in September and then now the Xperia 5 4. Sony please change
this naming scheme it's not great but the phone is potentially great uh in the
box we have just the phone and some very
eco-friendly packaging this is paper there is no charger or cable so they're
taking the Apple route now here's the phone you might think this looks pretty
similar to the one four and it does that
is a very good thing there are a couple key differences so on the back here we
have this like soft touch Metal finish which I actually love on Sony phones it
doesn't really attract fingerprints that much it will if your note if you've got
like super sweaty hands or whatever and you're holding your phone but like it
really is one of the best finishes on a phone in my opinion because I hate you
know like I have a OnePlus 8 which is pretty old at this point but look at
this thing it is a mirror on the rest of the back are three
cameras are 16 mil 24 mil and 60 mil now
if you watch the 1-4 video or you know anything about that other predecessor
phone we're actually missing the telephoto 85 to 120 mil lens that they
had was actually an optical zoom really cool technology there's also no time of
flight sensor but again this is the more affordable version of a similar phone on
the writeathon we have a power button shutter button which actually this time
around isn't knurled or marked or
textured in any way it's still there which is nice so when you turn the phone
on yeah you long press for your camera app
and it's just open and then you have a shutter button in relatively the same
position as a camera when you hold it like this I think the fingerprint sensor
is built into the power button and then we have a volume rocker on the right and
then on the left of the phone we have nothing which is not a bad thing I
actually don't mind everything being on one side this phone and this is probably one of
my favorite things of Xperia phones has
a headphone jack 2022 most smartphones don't have
headphone Jacks you might not care on top of using headphones you can actually
use a mic you have a mic input and that is very
important because high quality audio especially if you're shooting on just
your phone very necessary on the front we have a 25 20 by 1080p full HD display
it is OLED which is very nice and 120
hertz the 120 hertz is actually off by
default which I assume is just a battery saving
measure but I'm going to turn it on so that we get the full experience
speakers are front firing and they've actually apparently changed the housing
on the speaker so that there's less vibration in the phone which in theory
should make them sound better on top of that we have a new 12 megapixel selfie
camera on this phone over its predecessor the 5.3 this is also one of
the first phones along with the one for they tease this in the one for but this
is the first time I'll try this in person they have this music Pro app
which is just supposed to be able to allow you to do voice recording it's an
app that you can literally record an instrument on if you really wanted to
and then actually you can send it off to Sony to their servers and it will remove
background noise for you you can also edit it on the phone which is kind of
cool okay this phone is also ip68 65 so
you can drop it in a puddle and not cry and on the bottom of the phone we have
your typical type c and a tool-less Sim
and micro SD expansion thank you Sony for still doing this because again a lot
of phones you get these days do do not have Micro SD expansion obviously it's
going to be slower than the memory built
into the phone which is I think this model is 128 gigs final couple specs on
this phone it has the Snapdragon 8 gen 1 and it also has 8 gigs of RAM built in
the other new feature on this phone is actually has Wireless and reverse
wireless charging which I'd love to see because I haven't personally used a
wireless charging phone and on top of wireless charging this phone just like
the one four has 5000 milliamp hour battery which is pretty respectable
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okay cameras so I have heard that this thing
will overheat at certain resolutions for long periods
of time and as this warning is telling me
the videography Pro app is just kind of a slightly nicer UI to toggle things
like your Zoom you've got your manual autofocus it's laid out very similarly
to an alpha camera ISO is right here like I really like
this UI Photo Pro similar you got a couple modes the basic
is pretty much like your standard smartphone camera app the 16 millimeter
and the 24 millimeter cameras on this phone are the same as the one four the
main difference is the 60 ml because this is a fixed 60 mil versus the 85 to
120 mil you got your Venice color different Luts warm cold strong all that
kind of stuff that's awesome similar layout to the video Pro up but with a
couple extra things like the codec is here in display you have audio levels
it's a little bit more professional it's got shutter angle that kind of thing frame rate is here oh also each camera
on this phone just like the one for has
120 FPS 4K shooting which is very nice
this is what the selfie camera looks like this is also what the mic sounds
like so uh I'm gonna just keep talking
and what you guys can tell me in the comments what you think of the mic I'll
listen to this later on the laptop but selfie camera in HDR and this is what
the mic sounds like let's test how this looks so it's assuming I'm in a backlit
portrait this is kind of optimal lighting but
honestly my impression of this on the phone display anyway is it looks a
little bit on the bright side the way that the camera thought to meter the
shot also let me just check if there's any skin softening on oh
please Sony I understand but please
don't have the soft skin effect on by
default let's do that again without the
skin softening feature well you can see texture in my skin
versus less if you looked at the other photo
there is I auto focus on every single
one of these cameras which is again an
excellent thing looking at it I really like the display it feels Snappy as I
would expect a 120hz display and I actually agree with this resolution more
than the 4K OLED that was in the 1-4 because the pixel density you're not
really going to notice 4K versus 1080p on a display this well and if you are
the one person who does well good for you why don't we actually try listening
to the speakers questions
oh that's so weird so there's this feature when I press the volume rocker
of dynamic YouTube vibration and so it's
like vibrating the phone along with the song I mean on its own without comparing
it side by side to another device this sounds pretty good to me
most phones these days have much tinier mids and aren't really great on the low
end I mean again this is just a phone speaker that is front firing which is
nice the last thing I want to test is going over some of the photos we
actually shot on the weekend because I have been using this phone for about three days and we're gonna do some tests
live so we're gonna go outside with Adam and take a couple photos and video first
thing I want to test is the 60mm lens on this phone because it is different than
the other two cameras which are the same as the one on the one four this will
also test the image stabilization and how good it is as we walk backwards so
Adam's here we're gonna just walk around
here in a circle and then we're going to come back and I'm gonna follow him the
entire or he's going to follow me I miss those instructions
I'm walking here
thanks a lot and one
two so the main thing I want to test here is mainly the 60 mil just because
we've seen the performance of the 16 and the 24 mil
both of them are good but I'll I will do a couple shots with both as well
nice the last test I want to do is how
the selfie camera handles a backlit situation so one thing I don't like
about the video Pro app in this instance I'm using the selfie camera but the UI
is still in the horizontal setting so
this is what the selfie camera looks like in 4k
backlit situation it's also shooting in HDR
so it does seem like I can't do any manual control in the selfie camera at
least not in the video Pro app which is a bit unfortunate because I really like
a lot of things about this app I should just be able to go into this and change
the settings the last thing I want to test we have some background noise right
now there's a train that way there's some people doing Garden work that way I'm going to record a voiceover on this
phone and then we'll send it off to Sony and see how this process is okay we're
back inside um I actually took this phone on a
weekend trip to Seattle so we're going to take a look at some of the photos
from that trip also we're going to look at some of the photos we just took of
Adam outside as well as the video now one interesting thing I'll note before I
even get through any of this really is the dngs on this phone don't actually
perform amazingly so this is one of the jpegs on
the 60 mil that I got camera performance pretty good sharpness is decent in
comparison to the raw dng of the same photo yeah so you'll see in the dng
quite a bit noisier you can obviously edit this so I can take down the
exposure I can take down the highlights
um I don't believe it's clipping as badly the auto focus on this phone is
excellent this photo of these birds I was just walking down the sidewalk not
really slowing down to take this photo I snapped it really quick because these
birds flew by and Bam there's this there was this giant Norwegian
cruise ship I was really pushing the ultrawide to see if I could fit the
entire thing in this ship is massive like if you can see this tiny little
boat here and then you look at this thing it's like the size of a building I
believe this is on the telephoto and you can actually like see individual
people obviously we can't see their faces but you can make out people and
that's pretty awesome here's another wide shot from a different perspective
again a little bit earlier in the day so you can see the sun's kind of on the
right shining this way dynamic range held everything really well we even have
the shadows in this tree on the left perfectly balanced I just I like using
this phone as a camera I think I was never really unhappy with the
performance of this one especially in a daylight setting when you're outside if
you're using it in that situation a lot of the time then it does pretty well
here's a couple photos of my son on the
inside of our hotel room now the struggle here was I believe he was
moving a lot and even the autofocus
could not always keep up with him at a close distance though I did nail a
couple like here's one that was in focus and perfectly fine still a one over one
hundred here's the selfie that I took just earlier it actually doesn't look
Overexposed at all on the computer it's on the higher end here's the photo of
Belle and Mark and it's a little bit on the noisy side because it's ISO 800 but
if you actually punch in Bella is perfectly in focus and he was a tiny
head in this photo but the focus nailed him even though he's in the darker part
of the image the HDR video
of the selfie camera again also it didn't turn out as dark as it looked on
the phone because obviously the full sun was on that display so it was kind of
hard to tell there is a little bit of what feels like Shadow clipping
um because it's really trying to balance both the sky and me but it is
completely usable so this new selfie camera is solid so here's the telephoto
video the stabilization guys excellent
and it managed to keep Adam like it looks like I'm not just walking like it
looks like it's almost on a gimbal or something Auto
exposure is doing a pretty good job here it's not the highest quality video
not the sharpest I've seen I feel like the telephoto in the 1-4 was quite a bit
better but obviously that's what you're paying for Also let's have a listen to
the music PRO voice over both the
unedited process voiceover and here is the Sony edited process voiceover okay
so this is a test of the Sony Xperia 5
4's mic using the music Pro app to
record a voiceover I've got some background noise from a person doing
some yard work behind Mark and then behind me
there's going to be a train and I think I actually hear a plane so there's a lot
of background noise here to deal with all right it's been a couple of days
because I actually had a couple issues setting up the account for the music Pro app but you guys just heard both the
original and the processed vo and I just
listened to them myself I mean I didn't know what I was expecting but I think
Sony did what they set out to where they made the voice in the voice over sound a
little bit more separated from the background noise the yard worker you
could hear a little bit less but things like wind noise and you can kind of hear
a little bit of compression throughout the recording so obviously still not an
ideal place or setting to record a voiceover and that's to be expected if
you start with a bad recording no level of post processing is really going to
fix those problems especially not one that's AI based to be fair to Sony
though I do want to actually do one more recording right here right now to see
what it sounds like kind of in a studio environment more like maybe this is
similar to a hotel room if you were to record your voiceover which is probably
more likely what people will do if they're even going to use this feature
so this is a test of the Xperia 54's mic
indoors select the settings that you want I'm
going to just denoise let's see what D Reverb does
do some mic simulation and Studio simulation let's do all of them so
here's the original so this is the test of the Xperia 54's
mic indoors in a studio setting so this
is the test of the Xperia 54's mic indoors in a studio setting second time
around I'm actually pretty impressed I think Sony did exactly what they set out
to with this AI based program the tuned version of this vo does sound a decent
amount better and it kind of eliminates that echoiness of this being such a
large room it's not perfect but I'd say
to my ears it's pretty good this phone checks so many boxes especially in terms
of the specs expandable storage all that kind of stuff headphone jack it is
definitely squarely aimed at creators so I am probably fitting within the niche
of a phone like this but I really like what Sony's been doing with their Xperia
line and I do really hope that they're successful because there are very few
other smartphone makers really kind of packing all of these features into one
device so yes 9.99 us is expensive and
this is not a review it is only a first impressions but
this phone is awesome could it be better yes but
think they're going in the right direction so I hope for Sony's success
on this one anyways thank you guys for watching if you want to see more on the
Xperia lineup maybe you can watch the 1-4 video If you haven't it's a slightly
bulkier better version of this phone but also more expensive and I hope you have
a great day take care I'm looking at Andy He is wanting me to wrap this up