Is there a camera distortion issue with the Xperia XZ Premium and XZs? Sony responds.
Is there a camera distortion issue with the Xperia XZ Premium and XZs? Sony responds.
Every phone maker has to deal with problems experienced on its flagship smartphones. Samsung had to deal with the red-tinted displays of the Galaxy S8 and OnePlus had to clear the air on the zoom capability of its OnePlus 5 phone. Sony is no different; several users of the Xperia XZ Premium and XZs have reported distortion issues on the photos taken by their phones.
According to Xperia Blog, the distortion issues surfaced in April after the launch of the Xperia XZs. Due to the limited feedback, Xperia Blog thought that the issue was not widespread until the recent launch of the Xperia XZ Premium.
At the time of publication, there are over 18 pages of discussions about the distortion issues on the Xperia Support Forum while there are 8 pages on the same topic at XDA. Here at HardwareZone forums, there are about 13 posts discussing about the same issue on this thread and four users have stated that their Xperia XZ Premium handsets are affected by the distortion issues. During the course of our review, we did not notice any distortion issues on the two handset models. We actually had two of each model, that's a total of four handsets, and none of them exhibited any image distortion concerns.
Here are some selective discussion posts captured from forum:-
Sony Mobile is aware of the issue raised and has responded with the following statements:
“Sony Mobile Communications has received a small number of comments from consumers that they have experienced distortion in some images taken with their Xperia XZs and Xperia XZ Premium devices. We would like to assure our customers that with our new Motion Eye Camera we are delivering the best possible balance of image quality and advanced features. The comments experienced are familiar for a wide-angle field of view lens and accepted within the industry and we believe we are still providing the highest possible image quality whilst capturing more of the scene in the photo with its wide field of view.”
Sony Mobile developer ‘JensG’ also shared his thoughts on the feedback:
“We take this kind of feedback very seriously and this post actually resulted in an extensive camera test performed by our camera engineers. In summary a wide field of view (FOV) lens tends to have stronger distortion compared to a narrow FOV lens and in many cases (including example photos posted in this thread) distortion is to be expected. Phone cameras uses wide FOV lens to allow both landscape views and close-up shots in the same compact lens package.
“Our tests concludes that the amount of lens distortion in the Xperia XZs and the Xperia XZ Premium is approximately the same as recent Sony Mobile products (including the Xperia XZ) as well as competitor products. Photo quality is an area that Sony continuously improves and we will take all feedback in this thread to heart and continue to look for ways to help make your images better.”
In short, Sony Mobile does not think that it is an issue that users should be concerned about. It is unclear at the moment whether Sony Mobile will come up with a software fix to address this for the affected users.