Sony Xperia Z1 preview: A closer look

Video recording done in 1080p

The Sony Xperia Z1 is capable of capturing 1080p video at 30fps and that's about it. With the inclusion of the powerful Snapdragon 800 SoC we would've liked to see 1080p video recording at 60 fps or even 4K but we guess that's just too much to ask from Sony at this point. In any case, there aren't too many 4K screens around yet, so it may not be such a big loss. 1080p is still competitive enough.

The camcorder app UI is practically the same as the still camera's. You can enable digital video stabilization ( which crops a little from the field of view), or set a timer and fiddle with settings like exposure, metering, focus mode, etc.

The camcorder in Manual mode

Sony has introduced a new camera feature dubbed SteadyShot to tackle cam shake. In our experience it worked as advertised, but we'll see in our full review if it can compete with full-blown optical image stabilization.

The Sony Xperia Z1 is a reasonably powerful camcorder. It captures 1080p videos at steady 29 frames per second with a good bitrate of 18 Mbps with stereo sound recording with a bitrate of 132 Kbps and 48 kHz audio sampling rate.

We took several videos with the Sony Xperia Z1 for your viewing pleasure. It's a bit early to pass a verdict at this point - we'll need to do some more shooting (and in better weather) before we are ready for that, so we'll just let you enjoy the videos.

Here's a video taken with the Sony Xperia Z1 in Superior Auto mode.

Also, here's the same scene snapped in Manual mode.

We've also switched to the HDR video mode.