It was in the first days of this month when Sony officially announced their Xperia Z5 series. Three phones integrate this lineup, the regular Xperia Z5, a smaller version called Xperia Z5 Compact and a larger version called Xperia Z5 Premium, which has a display with the highest resolution available thanks to its 5.5-inch 4K display. All of the devices use a similar design, but they differ in the materials used in their construction. For the first time, Sony has integrated a fingerprint scanner in their smartphones and it’s located in the redesigned power button. When compared to their predecessors, the Xperia Z5 series has an improved camera sensor, it has a little more resolution than before and it features faster autofocus.
Now, the camera module included in the Xperia Z5 phones has been tested by DxO Labs and it achieved such impressive results that it now has the first place on the DxOMark mobile rankings with 87 points. DxO has reviewed the image and video quality of over 9,000 cameras, lenses and mobile phones, in fact, yesterday they communicated the results of the newly announced Huawei Nexus 6P, which got a very high score.
Back to Sony, the new 1/2.3″ sensor on the main camera has a 23-megapixel resolution and it integrates technologies like a Hybrid Autofocus, combining contrast-detection and phase-detection to achieve autofocus speeds of 0.03 seconds, the fastest in any smartphone. The DxO test results for still images indicate that the autofocus is indeed impressive, claiming that it’s the best one tested to date. White balance, color reproduction, and detail preservation are also highlighted and low-light photography is said to be very good too, as the exposure and white balance when using the flash is good as well as the level of details, plus there’s not much noise under those conditions. Some negative points include some artifacts are visible in the blue sky and it can also be affected in high dynamic scenes. While using the flash, the corners might look a little attenuated. This made it score 88 points on this part of the test.
On the video test, they praise the digital image stabilization system and the autofocus, plus the white balance and color rendering, also details are well preserved and the noise level is not very high. On the other hand, they mention that some tremors can be visible even when using a tripod, some exposure issues and the autofocus might work a little slower on low-light situations as well as some color shading. It got 86 points on this part of the test. The Xperia Z5 dethroned the Galaxy S6 Edge, which is now the second place with 86 points.