[Sony Xperia 5 II Real Life Review] chgr:
Here is an additional take on photo quality.

Main lens (wide angle) in

AUTO

mode (with standard / Pro apps):

Good:

- Noiseless pictures. Much improved from previous generation.

- Natural looking blur in out-of focus areas (ex: background). Can create natural bokeh for cats, faces, macro, etc.

- Contrary to what some people say, good dynamic range because the auto HDR mode turns on when needed in most cases. Note that in the Pro app, you can use touch metering and still keep HDR active, a nice addition.

- Good pictures in low light: very low noise and not too much unnatural brightening of scene.

- Mostly no lens flares on standard intensity lights. (improved from Xperia 5)

Not so good:

- Focus issues at night: lack of TOF and no pre-flash sometimes leads to focus misses. Solution is to use the Pro app with continuous focus ON (mode is not available in standard app). Most often this allows phones to acquire focus except in total darkness.

- Focus issues with far subjects, such as landscape. Sometimes the camera just won't focus at all. Solution is to use tap to focus (in Pro app, this means you have to turn OFF continuous focus)

- Focus issues with eye / face detection: it's just not always accurate. Again, much better results with tap to focus.

- Very bad lens flares (light streaks) when facing a brighter light at some angles. (much worse than Xperia 5). So much for the Zeiss lens!. This issue can sometimes be solved by placing your hand to block the strong light near the lens.

- Color temperature is a bit too cold. Especially visible in darker environments.

What about non-auto modes ?

Good:

- You can set everything as you wish in Pro app.

Not so Good:

- As in previous generations, you will get a lot more noise than in auto mode, esp. beyond 200 ISO. Makes is useless for me. One solution would be using RAW and applying your own denoising filters, but you loose HDR and I didn't get much better results anyways.

- Takes more time to adjust: not suitable for quick shots.

What about the other lenses ?

- Ultra wide gives ok results. Not worse than other flagships from what I've seen.

- Zoom lens is more noisy. Only suitable in daylight IMO.

- Selfie: never used.

My conclusion:

- With Xperia 5 II, you can get great pictures with a photographic look in the right situations. But some pictures may out-of-focus and some will get bad lens flares. Also it needs too much attention to settings for me.

- So I sold the phone and kept my Xperia 5 1st gen. Photos have a bit more noise, but it's more dependable in focusing and rarely misses a picture. Colors are also warmer and more accurate at least to my taste.

Note that Xperia 1 II may not have these focusing issues but I didn't try it.

Some examples:

Xperia 5 II: flares

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Xperia 5: no flare

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Xperia 5 II: bad focus at night

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Xperia 5: better focus at night

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Xperia 5 II: natural bokeh

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Xperia 5: not much bokeh

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Xperia 5 II: less noise

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Xperia 5: more noise

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Xperia 5 II: the 3 lenses:

Ultra wide

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wide

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zoom

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