Sony as a company has a good reputation for cameras. While there have been disappointing aspects to their recent smartphones, the new Xperia Z5 uses a new, 23MP shooter and we're excited to get to grips with it.
As we know are a lot of folks who are interested in the Z5.
Ahead of our full review we've been out with the Z5 in our pocket and snapped a few samples in various situations. The experience of using the camera and camera app is mostly good, if a little sluggish at times. We love that there's a physical camera button, though. It has two stages of depression in the camera app. Press a little to focus, all the way to take the shot.
Focusing isn't exactly slow, but in our early tests we have noticed that it can struggle to lock on from time-to-time without you actually touching the screen and showing it where to focus. It actually seems to work quicker if you press the physical camera button to focus.
In any case, the images speak for themselves and we're reasonably impressed so far. Check them out for yourselves in the gallery below. For consistency we used Superior Auto mode on the full 23MP resolution at 4:3 aspect ratio. No touch to focus was done, just the method involving the camera button detailed above. We have had to resize the images to upload to the site but no other editing was done.
Indoors in artificially lit situations the images are still pretty noisy, but that's not necessarily unexpected. In good lighting conditions the Z5 is very strong delivering crisp, bright images that don't seem to get over exposed too often. It seems to be the same story at night, too, so long as there are some strong light sources. We're reasonably impressed with its performance here.
We've only scratched the surface and there's plenty more to play around with on the camera. The early impressions are good, without being spectacular. After all, the major players in the Android space haven't been slacking on their own cameras this year and the competition is stronger than ever. We'll talk more about the Z5s shooter in the course of our full review.
