Sony may not be the most interesting smartphone maker out there and after many years, it seems that the company has finally given up competition. However, the company still develops some of the best camera sensors available in the market. Nowadays, most of the smartphones shipping with large camera sensors with 48MP and 64MP have sensors developed by Sony. So, the best strategy for Sony now seems to be delivering smartphones with a camera performance that can resemble DSLR cameras. With this in mind, the company introduced the Xperia 1 II.
The Xperia 1 II was introduced earlier this year and it brings a special Photo Pro mode which gives an abundance of settings and features. Experienced photographers can dive into this application and tweak the options to achieve the best possible results. One missing was RAW support. Today, Sony is finally addressing this issue by introducing this format. It comes along with the latest July 2020 security patch through the firmware update version 58.0.A.3.88.
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The RAW mode will bring a new level of image quality to the Xperia 1 II camera
The update package is a quite small weighing in just 75MB. It brings many improvements to the selfie camera during video calls. However, there still isn’t any sort of Night Mode. Despite this being a massive trend with many manufacturers introducing it in cheap smartphones, this is something that the Xperia 1 II still lacks. We can only hope that Sony will introduce it in the future. Getting back to the point of this update, worth mentioning that the RAW option will only be available in Photo Pro mode. The files are stored in DNG format and are saved automatically to the internal storage. Unfortunately, there’s still no option to switch to microSD storage. Sony decided to keep the files tied to internal storage to ensure that the write speed is sufficiently high. There’s no guarantee that the smartphone will be equipped with a high-efficient microSD. Of course, you can move the images to the microSD after saving them.
Worth noting that taking pictures in RAW may not sound like a good deal for the average user. However, it’s awesome for post-processing. You have more room to edit the depth of a RAW image in comparison to standard JPEG images. Combining the new format with the Photo Pro Mode, users will be able to get some of the best camera experiences in the smartphone market. Of course, the increase comes at a cost. DNG images are much larger than a JPEG. So you can fill your storage quickly using this mode. Another interesting detail is that RAW photos will always be saved in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
