Sony Xperia Z Review

Whether they had a point to prove to the ex or simply kept themselves busy to get over it, Sony were hard at work in the last year or so. They can look back at a prolific period, though somewhat lacking in brilliance. Keen to quickly build a lineup from scratch, the company was consciously avoiding fights that were impossible to win. Steering clear of the premium end, Sony positioned its flagship devices just below the Samsung Galaxies and the iPhones.

   

Now with solid backup in the midrange, returning to the fiercest battle in the mobile market is Sony's top priority. The Xperia Z, which leads the charge, got us properly impressed in a recent hands-on and if it walks unscathed from a complete review, we'll know the Japanese have hit the form of their life. Sony is the first of the major manufacturers to bring 5 inches of 1080p goodness to the market, which not only is a morale booster, but will get cash registers chiming too.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support; 3G with HSPA; LTE
• 5" 16M-color 1080p capacitive touchscreen with 441ppi pixel density; Bravia Mobile Engine 2
• Android OS v4.1.1 Jelly Bean with custom UI
• Quad-core 1.5 GHz Krait CPU, 2 GB RAM, Adreno 320 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset
• 13 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geo-tagging, HDR
• 1080p video recording @ 30fps with HDR mode, continuous autofocus and stereo sound
• 2.2 MP front-facing camera, 1080p video recording
• IP 57 certification - dust resistant and water resistant
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA; Wireless TV out
• GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
• 16GB of built-in storage; microSD card slot
• MHL-enabled microUSB port
• Bluetooth v4.0
• NFC
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
• Glass front and back panels

Main disadvantage

• Low contrast display with below-par viewing angles
• Non user-replaceable battery
• 13MP camera hardly any better than some competitors' 8MP units
• Feeble loudspeaker

The Sony Xperia Z is stuff geeks' dreams are made of, it's designed and built to the highest standard and has raw processing power to spare. IP57-certified - on top of that - for dust and water resistance, it's tougher than most competitors. High-end smartphones aren't quite fit for the beach or white water rafting, but the Xperia Z won't be at odds with your active lifestyle.

    

The Xperia Z seems to have all the best technology currently available under the hood, so no wonder it's been at or near the top of our interest chart ever since it was announced at CES. And now, just one week away from its European release, we are about to see how likely it is to stay there for a good while.

Naturally, the Sony Xperia Z camera offers all kinds of features, including face detection, smile shutter, geo-tagging, touch capture and HDR mode. There's also the home-baked quick launch mode, which lets you select what the camera shortcut on the lockscreen does.

You can go for simply launching the camera in either still or movie mode, or you can set it to immediately snap a photo/start capturing video. This might come in handy for those occasions when you are worried that you might miss a shot, but is also useful for when you don't want to waste your battery keeping the camera interface constantly going (it's a real battery hog).

In the superior auto mode the Sony Xperia Z produces photos with pleasing, albeit slightly oversaturated colors. The resolved detail is hardly spectacular and the noise levels are only average, but the dynamic range is good and contrast is excellent. The results are pretty good overall, although we wouldn't say it has a significant advantage over the best 8MP shooters from last year. Matching their performance is still a pretty good achievement, though.

    

If you switch the regular auto mode, you get images that appear more natural and lack that overprocessed look. This gives you more headroom if you plan on post-processing your images, but resolved detail doesn't change significantly.

    

We also gave the panorama feature of the Sony Xperia Z a try. The smartphone produced a 5 megapixel image with few stitching errors, which had pretty punchy colors. It's not the best panorama we have seen, but it's certainly among the better performers out there.

The Sony Xperia Z challenges the best shooters in town and you can head over to our Photo quality comparison tool to see how it did. It did excellently on the first two charts, taking advantage of the superior resolution of its sensor to comfortably beat the 8MP sensor. Once we come to a more real-life scenario (third poster), the noise reduction takes its toll and the Xperia Z loses its advantage.

  

The Sony Xperia Z is capable of capturing 1080p video footage at 30fps, which is on par with most modern day smartphones. However, as a nice extra touch the smartphone also offers HDR for video capture, making it only the second one to do so after the Oppo Find 5.

What came as a disappointment for us is the fact that even though the Xperia Z is able to capture still shots while recording video, it only produces images with 1 megapixel of resolution. That's less than half the resolution of the individual frames in the video itself and not really good for much. Given that last year's flagships could capture full res stills during video recording, what the Xperia Z offers is inexcusably poor.

  

  

That's a minor thing however and what's important is the Xperia Z does the major things right. Videos come up with excellent detail and a solid 30fps framerate. Their bitrate hovers about the 16MBps mark, which is a decent compromise between quality and file size.

           

Enabling HDR doesn't do as big a difference as we hoped it will, but it still adds some detail in the highlight areas, which can make the difference between a usable and a poor video on some occassions.

Video quality comparison

The Sony Xperia Z enters the arena of our video quality comparisons. The 1080p video recording of the smartphone isn't quite the best we have seen, but it fares pretty well. It easily matched the Optimus G and the Galaxy S III in the first two charts, but came out a distant third on the third chart.