[Xperia Z2 General] One Twelve:
Have noticed the Z1 in reviews sharpened a little better compared to the Z2. Its possible there were the same lens issues with the reviewers unit perhaps a little more subtle.

Its ridiculous to have to get not one but two replacements. These are the risks associated with being an early adopter. Hopefully these issues will be sorted out and not continue with later batches. and your experience might be instructive here as each replacement was better than the last.

Thanks for these pics they are incredibly helpful in pinpointing lens aberrations. And more importantly provide the basis to ask for a replacement. The subject you chose is good enough to illustrate the issue, would have been harder to see with indoors shots.

In short

- the first one is soft, you can see it pretty much throughout the picture.

- the second one is sharp in the centre but gets soft towards either end, only slightly though so look at the buildings in the distance at the top left end and tree branches at the top right end.

- the final one is sharp all the way through. Now we know what to look for.

Zooming in and comparing the roll of wire on the roof between the first pic & the last shows a big difference. There is no focus issue as the wire is clear but just soft so focus was set at infinity which means all of the picture should be as sharp as this tech allows. Comparing second & third its clear the second was taken when the sun was less obscured yet that roll of wire is still the sharpest all through in the third picture.

Looking at the flowerpots, window sills on the building on the left. You can almost see the texture of the white plaster on the building whereas its very smooth in the first and somewhat less smooth on the second but not as clear as the last one. Here is the problem, unless you choose the subject carefully and without having a frame of reference to compare with it can be tricky to spot a problem here, the first picture is hard to tell if there is a problem unless you had the Z1 to compare with. But seeing the last image one gets an idea of what the result should be like. This uniformly soft image is the hardest to catch otherwise.

however the shift of focus from sharp at the centre to the softer towards either end with subjects in the same focal range should set alarm bells ringing. Similar issues and a way to test for them i saw with the s4

here

. Bottle test can be done indoors.

I don't see any problems with exposure as you've made no manual changes, time of day is more or less similar, certainly between second & third. There is no possibility of camera shake with such high shutter speed (important), helped along by the sunny day. And that sunny day also means less noise (also important) in the picture. The choice of 20MP is apt as 8MP would have oversampled and masked the defects making them harder to spot. So defintely 20MP is the setting to choose for this test.

I would say these photos were adequate for comparison, given the subject matter and the originals provided for examination.

Artifacts are present in all and this is slightly worse on Z2 compared to Z1, the Z2 actually regressed on artifacts looking at DxO's test results.

But the point of your test was to check for lens aberrations and i think you did a might fine job with that here :)

Quality control with the g lens.