Gadgetory

there's been a lot of controversy behind the 4k screen on the Xperia z5 premium some people stood behind Sony's decision some others did not but that is I think mostly because of the fact that we do not fully comprehend how 4k behaves on the Xperia z5 premium I'm Anton denied this is PocketNow and in this video we're going to try to explain what 4k is and what 4k isn't on the sony xperia z5 premium let's dive into it first of all props to Sony for doing this props to Sony for managing to manufacture a 4k display in a 5.5 inch form factor and slapping that onto a smartphone and the same way perhaps go to HTC and Oppo for the Jade butterfly on the 5/5 which were at their respective times the first 1080p smartphones and 2 LG and vivo for the first quad HD smartphones with the g3 and the X play is for yes so yes Sony managed to have the world's first 4k smartphone with this Xperia z5 premium 3840 by 2160 that's what the 4k display on the Xperia z5 premium is that results on a 5.5 inch screen in a PPI resolution of 806 now we could go into debates whether that's something you will actually see or discern and the good old Steve Jobs quote comes to mind when he took the stage I believe it was for the iPhone 4 presentation when he talked about Retina display and the Retina display according to Jobs was beyond 300 PPI something which the human eye could not discern well of course that was a marketing trick because that is not true recent studies have shown that depending on your eyesight on the quality of your eyes visual acuity and vision in general the human eye could discern up to 7 or even 800 dpi everything is clear up to this point this is where things are becoming a little bit more calm placated Sony has a blog post explaining how 4k works and some of the decisions behind 4k and its implementation on the z5 premium I'll link it in the description below what Sony does with this panel is that they constantly run it at Full HD with a couple of exceptions Sony says that this is mostly a decision oriented towards better battery life and so far the battery life on the z5 premium has turned out to be exceptional up to two days which is the norm with most recent Z smartphones Z 2 Z 3 Z 3 plus so that is something they are putting out there but there's another aspect Android lollipop 5.1 which is running on the z5 premium does not support 4k resolution it does however support quad HD resolution and we're going to get to this in a moment but as of now it's easier for Sony to just lower the resolution basically cut it in half because 4 HD is half of 4k and run it constantly in this mode even so on a 5.5 inch display Full HD results in 400 PPI which is a great pixel per inch density 4k kicks in in this particular scenario and on this phone and we're not talking about future future use it scenarios with VR and everything because I've been reading your comments and yes some of you make a lot of sense we're talking about this phone in particular 4k will kick in once you start for instance the L beam application and play back a 4k video now there are two ways you can get 4k video onto this smart phone number one is to either shoot your own video with the camera on the smart phone which is capable of recording 4k video and the other one is to sideload 4k videos from your library or from your computer onto the smartphone itself through the SD card internal storage and a small 4k overlay will pop up on the thumbnail and that's when 4k video is played back in its native resolution now most of the streaming applications which support 4k resolution are not optimized for mobile and this is where I will return to my quad HD reference because we have the s6 or the v10 which we'll use in this particular example which are phones running in their native resolution quad HD on Android lollipop same as the z5 premium so what Sony does is let's take an example we fired up YouTube on both the z5 premium and the LG v10 we search for a 4k video and try to play it back of course you can change the resolution of the stream by clicking on the COG and selecting the resolution and the z5 premiums example we were limited so the highest resolution we could choose was 1080p that's because the YouTube application sees the z5 premium as a 1080p phone rightfully because it runs in 1080p opposed to the v10 where the highest resolution you could use was 1440 because the v10 and the s6 and other quad HD phones run natively in this resolution so playing them side-by-side fullscreen is pretty interesting sony explains it that for these scenarios where there is 4k content and it's not optimized for mobile they're using an upscale and Galgo rhythm so what basically is happening on the z5 premium is that Sony is taking the 1080p video and it's upscaling it basically it's pixel doubling again Full HD is have a 4k they are upscaling the video to 4k opposed to what's happening on the v10 or on the s6 where you see that quad HD video in its native resolution now of course I have not seen the difference you might be able to see it what we have is a smaller resolution on a quad HD display running natively and we have a higher resolution resulting in a upscaling or doubling of a lower resolution video source so that's interesting maybe some of you can see it some of you cannot but this is what 4k is when it comes to streaming media from YouTube or Netflix or any other source which is not yet optimized for mobile now when it comes to what the 4k display on the z5 premium is not well that's easy it's not a 4k smartphone running and 4k constantly so it's not a 4k smart phone per se the best example coming to mind is when you buy a sports car advertised you have 500 horsepower but limited to only 250 horsepower because of fuel consumption reasons of course you are able to access the rest of 250 horsepower by pushing a button for a short period of time but 99% of the time your 500 horsepower sports car will only run at 250 so that's probably the best example I could come up with and I can understand the reasons behind battery life this would make less sense if you would actually see the difference between full HD and 4k on this particular phone and don't get me wrong probably some of you might be able to see it I am personally not so there you have it we talked about what 4k is and what four key isn't now we very much wanted to make that clear and to put it out there because we want you to make an educated decision when going out and either deciding to buy or to pass on the Xperia Z if I bring them especially with the holiday season coming so if you think you will benefit from this 4k implementation of Sony and you want an exceptional smartphone at a higher price tag then absolutely go ahead and purchase this and this will serve probably as a short teaser on what our full review conclusion will be on the other hand if you think that the technology is in its infancy its implementation is still not there there are other options both Sony options because the z5 premium has the exact same internals as the z5 and the z3 plus before it aka z4 give or take 1 or 2 specs so you can get another Z smartphone from Sony if waterproofing or great build quality are your thing or you can opt for other flagships well that being said we hope we managed to shed some light on this controversy and we hope we manage to make you understand better how Sony does 4k on the z5 premium and what really is and isn't as the title suggests if you'd like this video please give us a thumbs up don't forget to follow PocketNow on all social media channels Eibon Antonina you can also follow me in the links above I'm not sure where I'm going to put them that's it for now until next time everybody take care