Sony Xperia J review: Junior league

The 5MP camera does OK

The Xperia J has a 5 megapixel auto-focus snapper and coupled with a single LED flash. It's capable of producing stills with a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels.

The camera interface features two taskbars on either side of the viewfinder. On the left you get four shortcuts to various settings, while the still camera/camcorder toggle, the virtual shutter and a thumbnail of the last photo taken are on the right.

The menu key brings up two pages of extra settings - scenes, resolution, smile detection, geotagging, image stabilization and focus mode among others. You can customize three of the shortcuts on the left (the shooting mode shortcut is fixed).

The camera interface

There are five capture modes to choose from: Normal, Scene recognition and Sweep Panorama. In Normal, you pick the Scene settings manually or you can enable Scene recognition and let the Xperia J take a guess.

The Sweep Panorama is business as usual - you press the shutter key and pan the phone across the scene.

The image quality is decent. There is plenty details and lively colors on the close-ups, but our unit had some kind of issue which prevented it from focusing properly on anything more than a few meters away. Even switching the focus mode to infinity didn't help, but we are hopping this is some kind of unit-specific issue and not something that every Xperia J user should worry about. You'd do well to check your unit before you buy it, though.

Sony Xperia J camera samples

Image quality comparison

The standard test shots from the Xperia J are in our Photo Compare Tool database. The tool's page will tell you how to work it and what to look for.

Sony Xperia J in our Photo Compare Tool

VGA video recording

The Sony Xperia J captures VGA video at around 27 fps, which is all we can expect from an Android smartphone with such specs.

The camcorder has the same interface as the still camera and some of the same settings.

Switching to camcorder mode

Videos are recorded in MP4 files with a bit rate of 2 Mbps and stereo AAC sound (133Kbps, 48kHz). The resolved detail is quite decent and the videos are smooth.

If you want to look closer at the video quality, you can download this untouched sample VGA@27fps, taken straight off the device.