(Pocket-lint) – The Sony Xperia Pro is finally available for pre-order in Europe and will be available for purchase in a few days on 10 May. The price: set at an eye-watering €2499 Euros in Europe.
Of course, this isn’t just a regular smartphone for the average consumer. It’s a highly modified Xperia 1 ii designed to fit into the workflow of professional videographers and photographers.
The main featured addition is the HDMI input built into the phone which allows you to use as a touchscreen monitor for your digital camera, like the A7S III (for example).
Once plugged in and mounted you can use the 4K OLED screen to pinch-to-zoom in and out of the frame to touch focus, while also hacing the ability to adjust screen brightness, add grid-lines for framing.
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What makes this different to most on-camera monitors is – of course – that it’s a phone with 5G support. That means you can live stream direct from your camera connected to the phone using a fast cellular connection.
This is also useful for those times you want to offload files and footage off to a remote server quickly and easily. Sony says its 360-degree antenna structure enables great signal performance, for a reliable connection.
The phone is built to be a lot sturdier than the standard Xperia 1 ii as well as being water and dust resistant, certified to IP65 and IP68 levels.
Apart from those customisations, this is mostly identical to the phone it’s based on, featuring the Snapdragon 865 processor, same quad camera system on the back and 6.5-inch 21:9 cinematic 4K display on the front.
It does come with more memory though. The Xperia Pro comes equipped with 12GB RAM and 512GB UFS storage.
As the modifications prove, this is very much a niche product for a small subset of users and we suspect that only those who truly appreciate the additions would be comfortable spending the €2.5k required to get one.
Writing by Cam Bunton.
