Sony Xperia Pro-I review

Rear camera selfies

The Xperia Pro-I and its vlog monitor add-on can be used to make a selfie camera out of the rear trio - one with a viewfinder, that is, otherwise every camera can be a selfie camera. That means that you get to experience the much higher quality of the main unit and benefit from its naturally shallower depth of field without having to resort to the bokeh mode. On top of that, you're able to use the ultrawide camera for selfies, letting you fit more people in the frame or provide better context. You could also use the 2.1x zoom module, but that's impractical at arm's length, as the samples below show.

The shots by the main camera look pretty great. The skin tones are life-like, dynamic range is excellent, and the slight natural background blur is just enough to help draw attention to your mug.

Selfies with rear camera, 1x, f/2.0

Switching the aperture to f/4.0 sharpens up the background, which could be useful if it's of importance or if you have more people at different distances from the camera. The two stops of light gathering capability that you lose this way need to be compensated somewhere, and in darker situations, that means cranking the ISO up and quality does drop.

Selfies with rear camera, 1x, f/4.0

Selfies with the ultrawide aren't as great, and the phone was often not too keen to lock focus on the subject. A slight pink cast on the skin tones is less than ideal too. Then again, ultrawide selfies are all about the perspective, and technical imperfections elsewhere can be forgiven. Though you should be more careful and pay closer attention to where you're focusing.

Selfies with rear camera, 0.7x

We entertained the possibility to shoot selfies at 2.1x, simply because we could. Framing is tight, quality is excellent.

Selfies with rear camera, 2.1x

Bokeh mode

Bokeh mode adds a bit of simulated blur on top of the natural one. There's no reason why it wouldn't work with the vlog monitor for taking pictures of yourself instead of other people, and that's what this reviewer did.

At the default level (a fairly conservative 1/5 along the length of slider) there's already a noticeable difference compared to just a regular photo at f/2.0. Since there is a clear separation between subject and out-of-focus area from the natural blur, the subject isolation in bokeh mode is very precise, and the combined overall effect is very convincing. One downside is that bokeh mode is missing HDR.

Bokeh samples (1x)

Front camera selfies

Selfies with the front camera on the Xperia Pro-I are more of a last resort type of deal. We'd probably go so far as to say that we'd take rear camera selfies with no framing aids (no vlog monitor), instead of using the front-facing unit.

Dynamic range is decently wide, detail is okay in good light, but even then, there is visible noise. Colors are fairly good too, but the skin is a bit more yellowish and less human than what the main camera outputs. Gets the job done, but our original statement for using the rear camera stands.

Selfie samples