[Xperia Z3 General] radicans:
I don't know exactly how to interpret frame of reference here, but anything that looks "digital" or that has traces of a digital process stands out like a sore thumb to me. My particularly strong aversion to this is probably an occupational thing. As I mentioned before, I used to work with feature film production, doing digital visual effects, and spent a lot of time trying to make all things digital look as "photographic" as possible. We had to dirty down the digital content to make it look more like film, i.e. add blur and grain! I don't mind grain, as long as it looks like photographic film grain, it actually adds depth. My biggest beef with my first DSLR (Canon 10D) was how grain free the (daylight) photos were! They looked so sterile. I don't mind slightly blurry content either, but if there are traces of sharpening my eyes will bleed! It also happened that our supervisor was allergic to anything magenta, so I probably inherited that, he he!

The reason why magenta looks so bad i think, is because it's not something you can ever see in a natural environment. A miscoloring which is otherwise present in many photos is green cast. But for me that is ok to some extent, since there are many natural environments that can give a green cast, such as a forest or a lawn.

I definitely think that most other cameras have more of a photographic quality than the Z3, or if you look at it the other way, they don't leave as many traces of digital processing. I would even consider the last statement as a proven fact. And with a lot of my posts, I have tried to get a more solid understanding on why this is.

Agree. Would never go near a Windows Phone. Might casually use an iPhone, but for developing Android is the one for me! And I chose Sony because it has a strong GPU and OpenCL support. But that doesn't stop me from comparing cameras, out of sheer interest :)

The randomness is a problem in general I suppose. But for the issues I have with the Z3, they are more or less constant irrespective of settings, from what I've seen so far.

But as you say, testing every shot in auto, and also taking the time to optimize the shot with manual settings would be very helpful in any camera review. It's a small additional burden which is completely reasonable to take on. A few minutes extra for each shot would not add up to much if you only have some 10 evaluation shots. It's pretty much a coffee break :)

Ha ha, good one!

Well, as you say, frame of reference! It depends on what you look at, and who is looking. I saw another review of the 1020 and there it was clear that it had white balance problems. But this is easily rectifiable, whereas the problems I have with the Z3 are not. So 1020 camera over Z3 camera any day, but if you judge it from the perspective of the entire phone, it's never going to be windows phone for me, regardless of camera. But all the arguments and comparisons I've been making so far has always been from a camera only viewpoint, not about which phone to buy.

---------- Post added at 01:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:45 PM ----------

I wonder if part of the detail problem is that the Z3 has poor optical properties as a result of the wide angle lens. This was brought up by someone else earlier in this thread. And the oversharpening artifacts are just a result of Sony desperately trying to recover the lost detail through processing? Pure speculation of course, but RAW will tell, if we get it.

I believe that if there is something fundamentally flawed with the camera hardware/optics, Sony will never allow RAW support, because this would show the problem in plain view. And Sony, or any other corporation, would never allow such a thing.