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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Which makes it all the more amazing that Sony smartphones don't take great photos. If there's one area they ought to absolutely own, it's this.

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I'm not sure about that. DxO rates Sony's very highly, and they're by far the most objective of all the camera ratings.

Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.

For me (the owner of both a Z3C and Z5C) the photos don't even come close to the quality of an iPhone. I don't have any objective measure for that, just my own experience - I will always use an iPhone if I can.

Perhaps just as importantly, it takes at least four seconds for the camera app to activate and be ready to take a photo. Simply put, the software is awful.

I used to have a Sony Xperia Z3C and I feel like the photos were acceptable for me. The bigger issue to me was that the cameras were significantly slower than the iPhone camera. I suppose this is only an issue depending on what you're taking but I mainly only take pictures of my cats who never stay in one position for long.

I have to chime in to backup the others here that despite my absolute love affair with the Z3 compact (I had one stolen after a year and bought another immediately to replace it cause I loved the battery life and form factor so much), the camera really was a big letdown. My second Z3 compact finally broke and due to the fact that the current generation of Android devices lacks a sub 5-inch phone with as good of battery life as the Z3 compact had (I'm purposefully ignoring some great Chinese phones cause they lack licensing to be able to run on 4G/LTE in the USA), I ended up switching to iPhone 5 SE and entering iOS for the first time.

So yeah Sony, you used to have shit cameras but amazing battery life, but now the battery life is trending downwards, great job.

And yes everyone, if you look at just the hardware the Sony phone's cameras should be great, but the software and processing has always been so shitty that the pictures you get have been awful despite the great components.

Yeah, that's very strange. My Z5 Compact, for all its upsides, makes terrible photos. Which is strange, since reviewers were positive about it.

DxOMark certainly disagrees with you if you're talking stats. In the real world maybe, but then again, my Sony phone takes very good pictures.

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