The Sony Xperia Z: the mobile camera, reloaded? A brief shootout, Xperia Z Vs Galaxy Note 2 Vs the Nokia Pureview 808

This piece is a heads-up of sorts to let you know that thanks to the good folk at Mobicity, we're fortunate enough to have an Xperia Z in our hot little hands already.

As you might guess a (rapid-) review will be forthcoming, but this time around I'm going to start with something a little different. You see I had some fun yesterday on Twitter trying out the Xperia Z camera, pitting it against the Note 2 camera and the undisputed king of mobile imaging, the Nokia Pureview 808. After looking at the results I thought it was too worthwhile an exercise to leave just to Twitter, and so here it is on the blog too.

Although it's a little bit of a departure, the camera of the Xperia Z is too fundamental a part of its marketing drive to leave to a couple of paragraphs in a rapid-review; it demands more. If you believe Sony's hype surrounding the purported imaging advances offered by its latest and greatest, you'll be expecting a solid improvement over last years shooters, and maybe even a substantial improvement. Sony is betting the bank on the camera being a strong differentiator to favour their 2013 flagship against incumbents like the incoming HTC One and Galaxy S4, so the question of whether its camera can indeed carry the day looms large over the Xperia Zs fate.

Before I give you the shots, a brief explanation of the test conditions.

Firstly, the subjects and composition are nothing special. That's not what they're for. Each of the settings was chosen to illustrate the phones relative performance in some of the more challenging scenarios that face smartphone cameras; principally thinking of wide dynamic range and low-light.

All the shots were taken in each of the phones respective auto-modes, since for the most part that is still how most users use their smartphone cameras the vast majority of the time. The Xperia Z shots were all taken at 12mp to try and leverage the best the phone has to offer, and similarly the Pureview 808 shots were taken in Pureview mode at 8 or 5mp depending on the setting to give shots most representative of how users actually use that phone. I took a half dozen or so shots of each scene from each phone to ensure that I didn't ruin the comparison by getting aberrant focus issues or colour reproduction issues that can be difficult to spot on-device. I suppose you can argue that either way, but from my point of view including obvious low-quality outliers that don't represent the median image quality of the device isn't helpful to a meaningful comparison. As it turned out, all the shots from all the phones were clustered around a fairly narrow range of quality, so I simply selected the best from each and what you see represents each of the cameras well.

If you follow me on Twitter you'd have already seen some commentary on those shots, but try to look at them with fresh eyes as best you can (bear in mind though that expectation bias is a very hard thing to adjust for, even if you're conscious of it).

Please don't make comments on the appearance of the thumbnails only - click on the images to head to the Flickr set so you can check them out at their full resolution (and even download them for a spot of proper pixel-peeping).

Xperia Z, outdoors very bright light:

Same shot, Note 2:

Same shot, Pureview 808:

Xperia Z, pitch black room:

Same shot, Note 2:

Same shot, Pureview 808:

Xperia Z, macro shot indoors under incandescent light:

Same shot, Note 2:

Same shot, Pureview 808:

Xperia Z, indoors no flash:

Same shot, Note 2:

Same shot, Pureview 808:

Xperia Z, indoors with flash:

Same shot, Note 2:

Same shot, Pureview 808:

I did take one more with the Pureview in the pitch black room using some manual settings - an ISO of 50 and exposure compensation, which I've included here since I thought it was interesting to see the kind of illumination you can get from the Pureview in those settings by tweaking the settings:

Strangely on that last one, although ISO 50 was the setting I chose, EXIF data gives an ISO of 320 for the shot.

So that's all the shots, although there may only five scenes, the selected ones were chosen to really test the mettle of the Xperia Z camera in some of the most challenging mobile shooting scenarios. Given most of them featured low light settings, they should really provide an opportunity for the F/2.4 aperture and BSI Exmor sensor a chance to show us what its made of.

Naturally I'll be including my own thoughts on these shots and the camera in general in the upcoming rapid-review for the Xperia Z, but for now what I'm interesting in is your thoughts dear readers. Do you think the Xperia Z camera is living up to Sony's hype and its own spec sheet? Let us know in the comments section folks!

(If you really want to play the game make sure to check out the full-res images and pixel peep a little too)

Finally, if you want to grab an Xperia Z, like right now, head to Mobicity who have it in stock. If some other piece of upcoming hotness has taken your fancy instead, also make sure to head over their way - they usually have devices in stock before other parallel importers and much, much earlier than retail.