[Xperia Z3 Compact Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] rcbmulder:
so I bought it.... first impressions..

To give something back to the forum I'm posting my first impressions with this phone. I think I have some sort of shopping OCD as when I want something, I research and research until I finally get it then I'm either disappointed/happy with my purchase. Probably as the anticipation of something new and shiny often heightens expectations above and beyond reality.

So to recap - I have a iphone 4s. I tried a Z1 compact and a HTC one (last year) and the cameras on both were very poor in my opinion and I returned them. I'm not a fan boy of apple or android however I think on average, the cameras on iPhone are very very good and give pretty much excellent results in most situations... The only reason I switched from android to apple was because i wanted a camera that i could use on a day to day basis and be confident that it would produce shots that I would want to keep, print out, share, process etc etc.. anyway, so I've been waiting for ages for a compact android phone that has a good enough camera in it to sway me away from apple.. just because I want a change and on the whole, android gives me more control from my phone.

The Z3 compact is just about that phone. I've been taking shots with my iPhone 4s, Z3 compact at 8/15 megs superior/manual and to cut a long story short, the Z3 compact potentially takes better shots. Note I use the word potentially. For a phone thats what 3 years newer than the iPhone 4s, I was expecting something much better out the box. This was not the case...

Superior auto is not superior, that's the first thing. The downsampling to 8megs, the exposure and white balance gives a pic that is worse than the iPhone 4s. The Z3c over exposes in nearly all my tests.

Manual - 20 megs, exposure less one, multi light metering and touch focus or multi focus gives a better outcome. You also have to give it time to adjust the white balance (about a second).

What I don't like is that if you use the physical camera button it defaults to superior mode, whereas the camera icon/app remembers the last mode you used.

HDR is limited to 8megs or less. Why? and why can you only only toggle in Manual mode?!? what a crazy option... I use HDR nearly all the time for outdoor landscape shots as you get a better realism (no washed out sky etc) so I want a quicker way to toggle this.

So from a camera point of view, the Z3 compact I think 'can' take better shots versus my ageing iPhone 4s (which you'd expect) but only if you tweak the settings and learn how to use them in given situations.. For a quick point and click (say of your kids running around or something you want to quickly capture), then this isn't always an option.

Versus the Z1 compact, it's slightly better, although this is I guess down to the software algorithms applied. What I have noticed is that sometimes you take a pic and the immediate preview looks sharp, then about half a second later, it looks softer and the contrast isn't as good.. Is this because sony is post processing the raw file? If it is, then it's not doing a very good job in my opinion.

The colour seems too saturated in low lighting, and I've set the display not to use any image enhancements. Until printing the photos out it's hard to gauge whether this is the screen or over saturation of colours during processing.

Anyway, I'll update this thread as I spend longer with the phone and hopes it helps any readers sat on the fence.

In other aspects, speed, battery life, so far its fine...