Sony Xperia acro S review: Daring droid

Daring droid

GSMArena team, 03 September 2012.

12 MP camera knows a few tricks

The Xperia acro S boasts a 12 megapixel camera with a back-illuminated Exmor R sensor and a single LED flash. It's capable of producing stills of 4000 x 3000 resolution.

The camera controls on the Xperia acro S are identical to those of the Xperia S - they are available on 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 new camera interface

There are five capture modes to choose from: Normal, Scene recognition, Sweep Panorama, Sweep Multi Angle and 3D Sweep Panorama. In Normal, you pick the Scene settings manually or you can enable Scene recognition and let the Xperia S take a guess (it's fairly good at it).

The 3D Sweep Panorama is business as usual - you press the shutter key and pan the phone across the scene. The resulting panoramic photo can be viewed in both 2D and 3D (on a compatible TV).

The Sweep Multi Angle is much more impressive - you take a photo in the exact same way, but the result is very different. It produces something like a lenticular card, providing a different perspective when viewed at an angle.

Tilting the phone lets you look at the object from different sides. A shot of a moving object looks like an animated GIF or creates interesting and sometimes comical distortions.Photos taken in Sweep Multi Angle mode are handled by a separate app called 3D album, and not listed in the regular gallery. And just to make it clear again - the Xperia acro S doesn't have a 3D screen, but rather cleverly relies on its sensors to detect the handset movement and it changes the on-screen image accordingly.

The Xperia acro S features a Quick launch option, which lets you customize the phone's behavior upon a press of the camera key when the phone is locked. The default option is Launch and capture - it unlocks the phone, starts the camera and instantly snaps a photo.

It's hard to frame the first shot right from this mode, but you can quickly take another photo as the camera reloads quite fast. The other option is to just unlock the phone and start the camera, or you can disable the feature altogether.

In our field test, the 12 megapixel shooter on the Xperia acro S has a serious claim to be among the top Android cameraphones currently out there.

Images turn out pretty good with good balance between contrast and dynamic range, nice color reproduction and fast focusing. Noise levels are generally good but raises its ugly head in the shadow areas.

Sony Xperia acro S camera samples

The Xperia acro S handles shooting on the macro level with ease, getting close to the best in its class. There isn't a macro mode on the acro S so focusing up close is done automatically. Check out the results below.

Sony Xperia acro S macro samples

Overall the camera on the Xperia acro S shows a tendency towards regaining the past legacy of Sony Ericsson as a good cameraphone maker.

Image quality comparison

The Sony Xperia acro S enters our photo quality comparison tool butting heads with its sibling, the Xperia S, and the Galaxy S III. Feel free to choose any other adversaries you wish - the tool's page will give you all the information on how to do that and what to watch out for.

Sony Xperia acro S in our Photo Compare Tool

Okay video recording

The Sony Xperia acro S captures 1080p and 720p videos at 30 fps, currently the upper limit of what you can expect from a smartphone.

The camcorder has similar settings to the still camera, including focus mode, metering, exposure value, image stabilization and so on. The layout of the shortcuts can be customized here, too.

The Xperia acro S camcorder features continuous autofocus. It may take a few seconds to refocus after you re-frame but that's better than repeatedly attempting to lock focus and ruining your video.

Switching to camcorder mode

FullHD videos are stored in MP4 format (20Mbps bitrate) and the frame rate nails the 29fps mark. The Xperia acro S videos come with stereo sound recorded at 131Kbps bitrate and 48kHz sampling - all pointing to slightly superior video recording compared to the Xperia S.

While numbers show a potential for high quality the actual result isn't all that impressive. The Xperia acro S produces smooth videos with good colors but the level of detail isn't anything special. Videos look good on the Xperia acro S's HD screen but on a larger monitor things take a turn for the worse.

Here is a 1080p video sample captured with the Xperia acro S.