Sony renews its “compact” phone for another season with the announcement of the Xperia 5 IV. It’s a step down from fourth 1 in size, price and features but it shares the same focus on parity across its camera system. This means that all three of the phone’s rear cameras – standard wide, ultra-wide, and telephoto – include the company’s excellent Real-time Eye AF feature for better photos and are capable of super-fast continuous shooting speeds even with HDR enabled. It has other key specs to support its camera features as well, and it comes in at an equally prime price: $999.
The Xperia 5 IV includes (side note: What will they call next year’s phone? This telephoto lens is fixed, by the way; it’s not the optical zoom lens in the 1 IV. Each uses a 12MP sensor — lower resolution than most flagship cameras 50 or so 100 megapixels these days. Heck, even Apple looks like they’re going to start Stay away from 12 megapixels. Sony spokesperson El Deane Naude says this is an intentional move to make these high readout speeds possible on all of its cameras and to maximize low-light sensitivity with larger pixels.
Both of these rear cameras are capable of 120fps readout, enabling 4K/120p video recording on each one. They can also shoot still photos at 20 frames per second with auto focus, auto exposure, and HDR technology enabled. There is also a new 12MP sensor in the selfie camera.
Outside of photographic features, the Xperia 5 IV includes a 6.1-inch 1080p OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, 21:9 form factor, a first-generation Snapdragon 8 chip, and a 5,000mAh battery — now, with wireless charging. It comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, an IP65/68 rating, and related to some quick-disappearing hardware features: a headphone jack and a microSD card slot. There’s sub-6GHz 5G support – without mmWave – and a bunch of new, more powerful stereo speakers in the phone. The 5 IV is scheduled to ship on October 27th.
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