Sony Xperia Pro-I brings 1.0-inch sensor and variable f/2.0-4.0 aperture

Update: Check out our Sony Xperia Pro-I handson review.

Out of the blue, Sony has a new Xperia Pro phone. The Xperia Pro-I (where ‘I’ stands for ‘Imaging’) is the first phone outside Japan to deliver a 1.0-inch camera sensor with phase-detect autofocus.

That 1.0-inch type imager is taken straight off the company’s very popular RX100 VII compact camera, but it has been ‘optimized for a smartphone’. What that means is that the Xperia Pro-I uses a big chunk of that sensor (but not all of it) to produce 12MP images with a 2.4µm pixel pitch – that’s some 20% larger than the iPhone 13…