[Xperia Z5 Compact General] eng3:
I just came back from a vacation in SE asia with lots of sight seeing with a friend that owns and iphone 6. I also got a chance to use the camera alot.

1. I mostly used 8MP SA mode but did play around with other modes. During daylight the camera seemed great. Quick focus. I use to use "A Better Camera" and their DRO feature which optimizes the dynamic range levels. It would be nice of the sony camera could do this automatically, now I have to manually adjust levels sometimes. For example if its a sunny day and I take a photo of something in a shadow. The sky will either be over exposed or the shadow area will be too dark. I have to manually adjust the levels if I want to see both. Photos in general are a bit noisy but not so bad that it can't be filtered later with Noise Ninja. That's easy in batch mode. Adjusting Levels manually is very tedious

2. If I was far away and needed to zoom even a little, photos would look really crappy. I thought that the 23MP sensor would allow me to zoom alot better.

3. Night shots actually LOOKED great. Also using 8MP SA. My friend with an iphone kept saying that my phone takes better night shots. Ofcourse if I zoomed in, I'd see lots of ISO noise or it isnt a perfect focus. It still does focus really fast and at least I get a shot I guess

4. I found that for sunset shots, I'd get a really nice shot if I switched to manual and turned white balance to cloudy. My friend kept saying my phone too much better sunset shots.

5. No Burst mode? My friend would like to take "jumping" shots sometimes and on the iphone I just hold down the shutter button and it does a burst mode/timelapse then allowing you to save several photos. I couldnt find that on my phone, just timelapse burst which isnt the same

6. I tried 4K recording two things that I really wanted video of. I knew of the overheating issue so I made sure the phone was fully charged. I even put the rebooted the phone and put it in airplane mode an hour before to make extra sure there wasnt anything extra running. I did a 5min video with no issue. Then about 2hrs later, I did another 5min video, but this time it froze. Screen was frozen, no response at all. If I held town the power button, I see the menu flash on the screen really quick then disappear. Finally the phone just rebooted. I was very disappointed.

7. With such heavy use, I did notice the phone rebooted it self at least 3 times during the one week trip.

8. Panorama was annoying as there is no stop button. So all my pano shots had corrupted ends. I'd have to crop all of them manually

9. If I had the photos goto the SD card, I can't edit them. This was very annoying because I often had to rotate photos or crop them.

Overall, its a big improvement over my old phone (which isnt saying much). 8MP SA seemed to work well in most situations. It is very important to me that I can get good shots without lots of tweaking. Some tweaking is ok, like knowing to goto manual and cloudy for sunsets. But when on a trip 8000mi from home, you might want to capture a spontaneous moment and not have alot of time to switch modes, change settings, etc. The worst is looking through your photos at the end of the day and finding out you missed some shots and there's probably a high likelihood you won't be back to be able to take another photo in a long long time or maybe even in your lifetime.