[Xperia Z3 General] subhani:
Great observations on the metering. I need to learn more. LOL at cat's meal witty remark. I hope a couple of these shots will challenge the notion that the Z3 is a terrible camera and worse than even the iphone 5. It can hold its own against Apple's best. I will include some further observations below.

You are spot on with your guesses. As you two are from the many top posters on this thread, I have some revelations below instead of leading anyone on.

1a is iphone

1b is Z3

2a is Z3

2b is iphone

3a is Z3

3b is iphone

4a is Z3

4b is Z3 also!

Sorry for the curve ball there. You guys' feedback is always sensible but honest. Okay, so my observations are (as you both noted) that in shot 1&2, the iPhone somehow over exposed/metering wrong? It had more haze in shot one and two and colors were a little cooler. The whites on the Z3 were a little inaccurate, negligible hint of magenta is still barely there. On zooming and cropping, they are near identical on detail, with the Z3 unsubstantially a hair more detailed. In shot 3, the only light source was from behind me at the far end of the living room from a dim lamp at night. So scene was quite dark actually. Considering this, the Z3 produces the more visible image, but the iPhone produced a MUCH more detailed sharper image, albeit too dark to appreciate. The Z3 also is much smoother and the iPhone a LOT noisier. I believe this is a design choice by the respective companies, one favoring smoothness and illumination by sacrificing detail while the other preserves more detail at the expense of a lot of noise. This doesn't explain the darker image on the iphone though. I'm guessing the ISO doesn't go as high as the Z3. Someone (maybe juanmacasas or one of you two?) mentioned that using night scene or night portrait scene slows down the shutter speed in order to enable more light that way instead of increasing noise via high iso. I tried this with VERY steady poise but it consistently produced aggressively smooth low detail images. It wasn't blur, no. It was heavy artificial smoothening by Sony algorithms.

Lastly, the cat shot in 4 is just to demonstrate that the lighting makes a good difference to the definition in the cat hairs we can see in 4b. Despite this, when the cat is away from the light source in 4a, it still shows unexpected detail, when considering it was a cat, that it was taken indoors at night under an energy saving light bulb.

Last revelation is that for 1, 2 and 3 using the Z3, I probably took three shots for each and selected my personal best, whereas with the iPhone, it was point and shoot once. Actually, for the keyboard, I tried HDR for the iPhone but it didn't improve the image so I scrapped it. This demonstrates, that with more practise, i'll figure how to get it right with the Z3 the first time. Where the iPhone struggles, you probably should try more than one shot too.

In conclusion, I deliberately played on the Z3's weaknesses knowing that indoors, the Z3 does worse than usual. However, I hope I was able to demonstrate that the Z3 is certainly no slouch, in fact edging the ip6+ on more than one occasion. And the iPhone is a darn good benchmark. (sorry for the thesis guys)

You did good with that HDR shot, I always mess those up. And yes, the high ISO makes this phone almost see in the dark!