[Sony Xperia 1 II Guides, News, & Discussion] ciarpame:
I left my cameras at home during my summer vacations and only took my brand new Xperia 1 II.

Since it costs a lot (as you all know) I wanted to see if it could really replace a real camera as the marketing hype suggests.

I'm a kind of lazy guy so this is not a detailed review with shoot examples and comparisons (by the way, I recommend you to take a look at this one by [MENTION=4975763]stsdema28[/MENTION] ).

I'm just focusing to the Photography Pro app features, its pros and cons on my opinion.

I own a Sony mirrorless camera (DSC-R1) it's quite old and here you can see why I'm still in love with it. But it's not an Alpha camera so I have no experience on the interface that should have inspired the Photography Pro app. Anyway I'm using smartphones since 2011, I used a few "pro" camera apps, (Camera FV-5 was my favorite one, I used it on my Oneplus devices)

I found the Photography Pro app a step in the right direction, with many perks but also with several flaws.

PROS

3:2 aspect ratio. This is a most welcome and unexpected feature in a smartphone, I always shot 3:2 pictures, beginning with reflex cameras in the 80's, then with Sony mirrorless cameras and even my small Canon S120 is set to 3:2 ratio. It's great for consistency with all those photos I took before and because it is a better, more "photographic" and slightly panoramic format.

Great WB control. Shade option is here and 3 custom options too: uncommon to find such granularity in some pro cameras too.

Big EV +/- slider, I used it a lot.

All those controls right at the fingertips

Grid and virtual horizon line, great to shoot straight pictures

CONS

HDR settings buried in the menu and missing visual clues. I forgot so many times when it was in auto mode or off, so I took many pictures with an unwanted HDR feature turned on and viceversa. It seems to me there is plenty of room for such setting in the main screen.

It would be great a setting to force max brightness to better see the screen where there is too much light in the environment. Camera FV-5 has it and it worked great on my Oneplus devices. I shoot many pictures in blind mode.

Timeout too short and not adjustable. Screen is dimming after 20s sec and app closing after 10 more secs: many times app closed in my face if I forgot to periodically touch the screen while looking for the right framing or waiting for the right moment to take a picture. I understand that this setting and the previous one are probably meant to reduce battery consumption. Thank you very much but I prefer to be in control of such details.

Jpeg quality maybe too low? Sometimes it seems to me to see some jagging due to jpeg compression artifact, most cameras and many pro-like camera apps have settings to increase jpeg quality (and size), it would be great to have such a feature. A recent firmware upgrade enabled RAW+jpeg shots so it should be easy to check if my fears are true (but, again, I'm too lazy to do it).

Changing focal length requires two tap, it would be an improvement to select the desired lens without having to use a submenu (as you can do in the standard camera app).

A sharpness control would be nice, even if the default applied sharpness does not seem to strong.

A feature to save custom settings profiles would be great too.

App icon is ugly (and not following material design guidelines, I guess).

Other thoughts

The dedicated key is great!

Default 24mm lens is wider than most other smartphone default lens and too wide for me. The short focal length combined with the minimum focusing distance does not allow to make macros as close as I would have liked (and to which I was used to on the oneplus 3t) but maybe it is a side effect of the sensor size.

Switching from traditional zoom camera with a 24mm to 120mm range to 3 fixed focal lengths it was not easy for image composition but I thought it would be worse, most of times you can just fix it by moving closer to or away from the subject. Again, having a 26 or 28 mm instead of a 24mm would have been better.

I would also like to let Sony know what I think (with an app like FV-5 I could have written to the developer) but I'm afraid there is no way, unless any of them read XDA :D