Sony: Internal obstacles caused inferior cameras in Xperia phones

Internal obstacles between the Sony divisions that make the cameras and smartphones mean that Xperia smartphones have less good cameras than the competition, a marketing manager for the Japanese company has said.

Those obstacles stemmed from fears of cannibalization of sales of more expensive cameras in favor of Sony’s own smartphones, Adam Marsh, marketing manager of Sony’s smartphone division, said in an interview with TrustedReviews. “Although we are one company, there were obstacles that prevented Alpha from giving certain things to Mobile because phones would have what a 3,000-pound camera can do.”

As a result, certain functions and specs were probably missing on Sony’s Xperia smartphones, such as optical image stabilization, bright lenses and sensors with large pixels. Under the leadership of a new CEO, that is now changing, Marsh says. A possible XZ4 smartphone was scrapped in favor of the Xperia 1 shown last week.

One of the things users should notice is noise cancellation, a point that has been highlighted in reviews for years. Previous Xperias only do noise reduction on the already compressed jpeg, but from the Xperia 1 that already happens on the raw files. “That’s a big step,” said Marsh. Eye autofocus is also coming to the Xperia 1, which keeps an object sharp when using burst mode, because the software pays attention to the eyes of animals and people.

Sony makes a 48-megapixel sensor for phones, but chooses to use conventional 12-megapixel sensors. According to Marsh, that makes sense. “The 48-megapixel sensor has no dram memory and therefore a function such as video at 960fps is not possible.”