With this post I would like to raise two distinct issues with the Z3 camera. I know the reviews have been mostly positive, but I think there are serious flaws in the resulting image, as seen when looking closer and comparing with similarly priced phones, and I have photos to back my claims up in a very measurable way. I also want to point out that this post is not meant to be a rant, but rather a plea for Sony to acknowledge these issues so we can have them remedied. The Z3 is a fantastic phone, but the camera is not living up to its promise. I have written several posts on the xda forums, and will summarize here.
Issue 1: Washed out photos
For some reason, the photos taken with the Z3 can look quite washed out, or watercolory, especially when taking photos of fine detail, like trees with colorful autumn leaves. To see where this comes from, one can convert the photo to the YCbCr encoding scheme. Here, the image is encoded in one Luminance and two Chrominance channels, and one can see that the channels containing color information are extremely blurred in all Z3 photos. Here is a quick look of a 1:1 crop of the Cb (blueness) channel for 6 different cameras (original RGB photos taken from this phonearena review http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-4-wins-our-blind-camera-comparison-iPhone-6-is-di... (make sure to open the image in a new view to see the actual size)
As you can see, the Z3 has very little information left. The Note 4 and the other Samsungs on the other hand are very detailed, which I presume is the way it should look like. The result of the blind test, from which I have taken the photos, speaks its clear language; the photos with the most blurred out chroma channels ranked last, namely Z3 and LG. The Note 4 came out on top, which is the photo with the most detailed chroma channel.
Here is a post I wrote about it, when comparing the Z3 and iPhone5s, and also locked versus unlocked bootloader:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=56291934&postcount=329
I have witnessed this chroma blur in each and every Z3 photo I have looked at, whether it's mine or something I pulled from the web. It is most certainly not related to my particular device. It is also something that is not evident in the competition, as evidenced above. This leads me to believe that it's a flaw inherent in the Z3 camera design.
Issue 2: "Cross hatching"
I don't know the technical term for this, but it manifests when taking photos of fine detail, such as leaves. It seems to be a result of oversharpening, but I'm just guessing here. Following are three 1:1 crops comparing the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with my Z3 compact. It is not a random occurrence, but shows up in every single photo I have taken, and it also shows up in photos I see online.
More 1:1 crops from the same photo:
http://i.imgur.com/5f0PbVQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Zy3hzJY.jpg
Next is a photo where I compare photos of the same scene between the Z3 and iPhone5s. You can clearly see that the iPhone5 has more real detail in its 8MP photo, than in the corresponding 20MP from Z3. The detail seem to have been destroyed by the processing which cause the cross hatching / over sharpened look. The Z3 8MP image is simply a resize I made to see the difference in another light.
http://i.imgur.com/PPl4wMo.jpg
Sony, if you read this, please adress these issues for the release of Android 5.0, if possible. There seems to be quite a few owners unsatisfied with the camera if you judge by forum activity, and it is generating very bad brand reputation. Also, I have seen many posts where people say they are discouraged from buying the Z3 because of the camera alone!
If you bring the camera up to par with the competition, the Z3 will pretty much be the best phone on the market right now, and I'm certain the coming Z4 will also benefit greatly from a truly competetive camera!
Thank you!
@bencfc wrote:
Yeah cant believe how bad the camera software is it needs improved asap! samung LG HTC Nokia etc all are miles better tham Sonys software and they use Sony sensors! unbelievable! no more Sony phones for me
I've actually started using "open camera", which seems to produce more consistent results than the official sony app.
I am not claiming I've tested all the apps on the market but the focusing seems to be better with open camera AND you can control the jpg quality level.
Again, I've not played comrehensively with open camera but I'm impressed.
The only downside at the moment is that open camera can only write the files to internal memory (a general problem with android 4.4.4).
The other (good) thing I discovered is that if you go into the phone system settings and look in the display menu, try turning off image enhancement. I found a noticeable IMPROVEMENT in image quality - i was getting jagged edges on some lines in photos until I made this adjustment. It's as if antialiasing has been turned off in a game - turning off image enhancement appears to reduce the prominence of noise / artifacts that I think the sony post-processing algorithms produce.
It would be interesting to get opinions on open camera from other long-suffering z3 compact camera users 
Gary
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