Sony Xperia 1 IV

Sony's latest flagship is the first smartphone with an optical zoom lens. Amy Davies tries it out

- Amy Davies

Although Sony makes some of the best cameras available, it's struggling to keep up with the big players in the smartphone market, most notably Samsung and Apple. The firm has released a number of high-end smartphones in recent years, with hefty price tags and camera specifications that are designed to appeal hugely to enthusiast photographers. But has it succeeded in producing something special with the bizarrely named Xperia 1 IV?

Design and features

In terms of the camera system, there's a triple-lens setup. All the cameras offer 12 megapixels, though the physical sizes of the sensors differ. The largest of the three (1/1.7in, 7.6 x 5.7mm) is found behind the 24mm equivalent f/1.7 main lens. Joining it is an ultra-wide angle lens (16mm, f/2.2), which sits in front of a 1/2.5in (5.8 x 4.3mm) sensor. Lastly,  there's a 1/3.5in sensor (3.8 x 2.9mm) accompanied by an optical zoom lens - for the first time in the smartphone world. You can zoom through 85-125mm equivalent settings, with the aperture changing from f/2.3 to f/2.8.

The Xperia 1 IV's design probably won't appeal to everybody. It has a 6.5in 4K HDR OLED display with a 21:9 aspect ratio, which proves to be very bright and very detailed. But the phone itself is on the long and narrow side which makes some tasks a little awkward, such as touching anything towards the top of the screen when holding the phone one-handed.

Other than that, it's a very phone. The ordinary-looking display doesn't take up the whole of the front, with a thin bezel running around the entire screen. On the plus side, this means there's no notch at the top of the screen where the front-facing camera sits, but you do lose some of the available real estate.