Goodbye to the camera that’s been in my pocket daily for 4 years
The Pro-I is a Sony RX100 with a smartphone attached. The camera is still great; the smartphone part is dead
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 9
On holiday
With a broken camera
And all I say
Is, "I could be happier"
I could be happier
The Sunday Reader, June 13, 2025
On Saturday evening I took a quick snap of a toy while shopping – a grandkid’s BDay is coming up - and slipped my old Sony Xperia Pro-I back into a pocket. If you would have asked me in that moment I would have told you it was good for at least another six months, barring dropping it in the drink or some such catastrophe.
By Monday I had a tracking number for my new phone.
Maybe I’d been fooling myself. OK, I had definitely been fooling myself. That’s what happens when one of my stubborn streaks runs into another of my stubborn streaks.
I’m not sentimental about phones. I am about cameras. And the Pro-I has been my constant companion for four years. Even when I was carrying my serious photo gear the Pro-I often came out for a quick snap, for reference, for colour.
The Pro-I is basically a Sony RX100 with a smartphone attached. The primary camera has the RX100 sensor, a Zeiss Tessar lens with the T* coatings, and the User Interface and wicked fast autofocus from Sony’s Alpha series cameras.
Yes, it also has an ultrawide lens and a telephoto with regular smartphone sensors, but who cares? I’m sure I used each once or twice, but why use smartphone gear when you have a real camera with a Zeiss lens right there in the middle?
Sony defined the Pro-I right in the name; Pro Imaging. No Night Mode. No Portrait Mode. No Computational Photography.
No AI.
This confused the heck out of pretty much every smartphone reviewer. All the reviews followed this script:
I am NOT a professional photographer
The Sony Xperia Pro-I was designed for professional photogs, so it doesn’t have auto-everything computational setups like the iPhone’s Night Mode. It’s designed for pros who want to set things themselves exactly the way they want.
But I’m not a pro and don’t know how to do that. So let’s put everything on auto and see how it does against the latest iPhone’s Night Mode!
Oh look! Here’s the iPhone’s Night Mode image. And I had no idea how to set up the Pro-I and got a completely black frame. The iPhone wins!
The problem here is that reviewers are Gadget Nerds – More megapixels!! More New Features!!! – reviewing a camera designed for photography nerds, whose Ur Camera is the Leica M.
The Leica M costs about $9,000. Without a lens. (Lenses start in the low four figures and run well up into 5 figures. Each.) You cannot see through the lens. It doesn’t have auto focus. If you’re willing to pay extra, you can get one without a back screen. Or colour. (The Leica Monochrom is an M with the sensor’s colour Bayer Array part of the removed.)
Why? Because photography nerds are all about control, about having a camera that reliably captures the image in their mind’s eye.
That’s the story of the Sony Pro-I. It doesn’t have any automation.
It has you.
The Xperia Pro-I is basically a Sony Alpha camera with a smartphone attached. (The smartphone is perfectly fine, and does all the smartphoney things quite competently.) It has incredibly fast autofocus, excellent eye autofocus, and shoots up to 20 frames per second. If you’re used to using any of the modes on any of the Sony Alphas, you’ll be right at home.
The video setup is perhaps even more impressive. The Pro-I shoots 4k at up to 120 frames per second. More important than any gizmo specs, however, is that the Pro-I supports professional colour such as Sony’s Venice CS.
The Pro-I also has a dedicated shutter button that takes you right into the camera even if the phone was asleep, and a lanyard attachment, which is surprisingly useful. The shutter button has that classic feel: a half press engages the autofocus; the full press then takes the image.
I’d been buying midrange smartphones for the better part of a decade when the Pro-I was announced in the fall of 2021. I pre-ordered it; I cannot remember the last time I did that.
It was expensive, even for a flagship smartphone, but I never regretted it. The autofocus was almost prescient, locking onto your subject’s eyes before your own Mark 1 eyeball could. The “low” burst was so fast that I think I only used the fast burst once or twice, just to see what it could do.
And the video was, frankly, better than my skills could use. Though I’ve gotten better over the last four years with it.
It wasn’t perfect. For one, it could get a little bit hot. And by a little bit, I mean you could sear steaks with it if you shot more than a few minutes of video. It would even get uncomfortable in your hands if you shot a bunch of still image bursts.
The camera was everything you could want in a compact pocket digicam. It still is.
That phone attached to it is, alas, dying. Dead, really.
The finger print sensor was the first to go. It started failing two years ago, working intermittently for a few weeks, then gave up the ghost entirely.
The battery was next. For the last year and a half I’ve carried a power bank everywhere, often having to recharge the phone as many as 3 times to get through a day.
A lot of this is down to all that heat. Heat kills electronics. Cameras that shoot high-end video run so hot they routinely shut down during shoots. Taking that setup out of camera and stuffing it into the much smaller confines of a smartphone made everything way worse. Even the camera itself suffered; it started chittering like a beetle’s wings on startup. So a year ago I bought a Panasonic Lumix G100 vlogging camera and stopped shooting video on the Pro-I.
The Pro-I got flakier and flakier. Screenshots sometimes worked. Sometimes they didn’t. It was always cool that the shutter button launched the camera. This summer every button launched the camera. Volume up? Camera. Power? Camera. Volume down?
Camera.
Then came Saturday. There was a situation – an elderly relative needed medical support, which thankfully was soon resolved – and a bunch folks called to help from numbers that weren’t in my contacts.
I didn’t get a single one.
The Pro-I would not accept phone calls from any number not in my contacts. It wasn’t in Do Not Disturb mode. We messed with the settings, but no joy.
My daughter used to run the cell phone department at Fry’s, back when Fry’s was a thing. I asked her what she thought.
Dad, she said, stop being stubborn and BUY A NEW PHONE!!!
So I did. But more about that in a later column.
In the past my old phones have ended up in a desk drawer. The Xperia won’t, at least for a while. That Sony autofocus and burst mode are still excellent.
It’s useless as a phone now. But it’s still everything you could want in a compact pocket digicam. And the Sony colour Pro-I and the Huawei P9 with its Leica Monochrom sensor will fit together in a pocket.