Xperia Camera Test

I originally intended this blog to be solely about Unity, though since I got to be a Sony Ambassador for the Xperia Z I got to test it and it's been a lot of fun. This was the last week of my 4-week testing period and  I've been testing the camera. Next week I'll also know if I can test more Sony product and, if so, you'll get a lot more posts like these, since I really liked testing the Z!

The very short answer

The Experia Z's camera doesn't come close to a professional camera. Yet it does take awesome pictures and is great for taking some photos while on the go. It's basically as good as one of those small compact cameras. So no fancy arty photos, but good vacation photos.

Fish-eye, Canon 550D

Where is falls short

Less control

Even though the Xperia z gives you a lot of options, there are still some missing. You can change your exposure value, iso, white balance and a lot more, though I couldn't change the aperture. Nor can you use any lenses, of course this it true for pretty much any phone-camera, but it's still something I missed.

(Some fun with a fish-eye lens on a Canon 550D on the right.)

No hardware button

Like the title says, there's not hardware button to take pictures. You can zoom by using the volume buttons but to take a picture you'll have to touch the screen.

Where it excels

Features

Even the default camera app has a lot of them. There's an awesome panorama mode, which works great but can be a little blurry sometimes. Also there's 'Smile Shutter' which takes a picture when everyone is smiling. It even adds a meter next to everyone's face telling you how hard they're smiling which is really funny. And of course you've got a timer, geotagging, image stabiliser, flash and HDR. On top of that there are also a bunch of focus modes: face detection, object tracking, touch focus and mid-screen auto focus. And it all just works.

Ease of use

The Xperia Z also has a 'Superior auto' mode which just does everything for you. It'll try to put everything just right for the current conditions, and does a good job at it too.

Not good nor bad

Quality

The Xperia Z's picture quality is average. It's really good when looking at it on the Xperia Z, with it's fancy Bravia technology. Though when I looked at the pictures on my computer the quality was noticeably worse, still not horrible, but worse.

Here's a small part of a 13MP photo, so you can see for yourself:

Conclusion

I really like the camera, it has everything I need. It takes simple pictures very good and without bitching about settings, yet gives you the option to change them if you would want to.

So that's the camera, hopefully till next time!

Xperia Z Speed Test

I recently became a Sony Ambassador Recruit, along with 10 other people. Four weeks of testing the new Xperia Z. Last week I tested if it's really waterproof, and this week I'm testing it's speed.

Benchmarks

So, the first thing that came to mind was to run some benchmarks. Though, since this is the only phone I have I looked around for the most interesting benchmarks, and put some here. So thanks to ZDNet for the numbers!

Although they did a lot more tests, I think this says it all. The Xperia Z is all the way up there with the best phones on the market right one. Even though it's not the fastest, it's the only one that can do these speeds under water.



I also ran a few test myself and they came out a little lower than what ZDNet got. So perhaps I've got too much stuff installed or too many widgets running. Still, very impressive.

Games and apps

Next I've been trying out several apps. To put it shortly, it handles everything out there. I've been playing some slightly boring but visually stunning games, such as CSR Racing and Real Racing 3. Both ran really good. I also tested more interesting games, SuperHexagon, Splice, Solar 2, and they also run very smooth.

After that I tried some video editing, with the build-in Movie Studio app, and that too worked perfectly. Adding video's was very fast, searching felt snappy and adding effect was instant.

Lastly I did a little test of my own using Unity 3. I spawned a whole bunch of physics cubes to see how much I could spawn. My gaming pc could do about 1300 at 30 frames per second. The phone almost 500. To test the GPU I did the same test, but now with lighting. My computer did 1200, while the phone did only 220. So CPU-heavy applications will run better than GPU-heavy ones. Impressive stuff for a phone!

Daily Use

I've been using the phone now for almost two weeks and I have to say it's been great. It just feels very smooth and looks really good. Sony added their own skin over Android and usually that means it runs worse, but not in this case. The 1.5GHz quad core CPU can handle it with ease.

I don't play much games on my phone, so perhaps I don't put the full power of this machine to use, but I never experienced any slowdowns whatsoever.

Conclusion

I love this machine! It's fast, looks gorgeous and just works really well. This of course is what you would expect from a €650 flagship phone. Although there are faster phones out there, I think this is the best looking one, with the HTC One as a close second. The Xperia Z has some really awesome features none of the other have though. I still can't believe it's waterproof, that's so f... awesome!