Sony's AI Camera Feature Ruins Its Best Phone Yet

Sony's Xperia 1 VIII has genuinely excellent camera hardware — large sensors across all three rear lenses that technically outclass Apple and Google at the same price tier. The AI Camera Assistant layered on top of that hardware is, by The Verge's account after a week of use, almost impressively bad.

The feature embeds itself directly in the default camera mode and activates automatically while you're framing a shot. A small preview box appears in the viewfinder showing what the image would look like with Sony's AI adjustments applied. One tap to accept, swipe down to see three more options. The concept isn't unreasonable. The execution is.

What the AI actually suggests

The overwhelming majority of suggestions from the AI Camera Assistant are aggressive adjustments to exposure, white balance, contrast, and colour saturation. It loves sepia tones. It loves warming photos to a yellow hue. It cranks highlights until they blow out, or pushes shadows dark until the photo turns murky. It adds artificial portrait-mode background blur in situations where no reasonable photographer would want it. In a week of testing, The Verge found a handful of photos worth keeping and just one or two that were genuinely better than the unedited original.

Sony claims the assistant can recommend switching between the phone's three rear lenses or help you find 'the most photogenic angle.' Neither capability appeared once in a week of shooting. The assistant also doesn't explain its suggestions — no indication of what effect it's applying or why, no lesson in what makes a photo work. You accept a preset or you don't.

It also slows the phone down

Calculating AI alternatives for every frame in real time — before the shutter is pressed — appears to stress even the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. The Verge reports the camera app opened slowly, froze when switching between lenses, and crashed once during the review period. Turning the AI assistant off resolved most of those performance problems. The phone costs the equivalent of $1,850 and isn't launching in the US.

What's notable is what the AI Camera Assistant doesn't do: it doesn't remove objects from photos, expand the frame with generated detail, or alter the scene in ways that change what was actually there. Unlike Apple's iOS 27 generative photo tools or Samsung's Galaxy AI editing, Sony hasn't crossed into creating images that don't match reality. It just applies filters that look like Instagram in 2012 — which is a strange use of 2026 AI hardware.

The Xperia 1 VIII is otherwise a strong phone with genuinely capable cameras. This is the best camera system Sony has shipped on a consumer device. The AI assistant layer doesn't improve it — and the performance cost it extracts from the underlying hardware means the tradeoff isn't neutral. Sony lets you turn it off entirely, which is probably the right call.