Sony Xperia C3 and C3 Dual review: Let me take a selfie

Average 8MP snapper

The Sony Xperia C3's camera uses one of Sony's standard-issue 8MP Exmor RS sensor. It shoots with a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels (8MP) in manual and Superior Auto modes. There is also a LED flash to help you with some low-light photos.

The Xperia C3 also has a hardware shutter key, which you can set up to unlock the phone and start the camera. It can also snap a photo or start capturing video immediately. This might come in handy for those occasions when you want to capture something quickly.

The camera interface consists of two panes and is unified with the camcorder one - you can snap a photo or shoot a video without changing modes most of the times. Depending on the shooting mode you're in, the video shutter key may be replaced by a still/video mode toggle.

Camera UI and camera modes

In the full resolution Manual mode you also get access to "manual controls" on the viewfinder, which sounds more impressive than it really is. There's an exposure compensation slider and a white balance selector. You can also control the ISO, metering and focus modes, turn on/off image stabilization, but those are buried in the settings menu.

Camera UI - manual mode

The Superior Auto shooting mode is what we've already seen in other Xperia phones. There are no settings you can change, everything here is done automagically. Unlike the 20MP Sony Xperia phones, the images taken with Superior Auto have the same quality as the one shot in Normal (Manual) mode.

Manual and Superior Auto aside, the Xperia C3 offers several other interesting shooting modes.

There's Sweep panorama but, unfortunately, panoramas come out with 5MP resolution, lousy stitching and uninspiring quality.

A panorama sample

Then, there are the Augmented Reality effects, which stamp one of several virtual worlds over your scene and you can even move around in this world thanks to some intriguing motion tracking effect (note that it needs real-life visual cues in the scene to track your motion). Children will love this mode, but us bitter adults are unimpressed.

Other modes include the regular Picture effect mode, which creates a 3 x 3 grid that shows all the available effects in real time. Sony has also included a mode called Social streaming, which can live-stream the video feed from your camera directly on your Facebook profile. That's certainly not something you see every day.

Timeshift replaces the regular burst mode, it captures 30 shots in just 2 seconds. The intriguing thing is it starts shooting even before you've pressed the shutter button.

Image quality

Both 8MP samples taken on Superior Auto and Manual mode came with underwhelming level of resolved detail when viewed at 1:1 magnification. The exposure, contrast and colors are good, which makes for nice looking photos when you view them fit on your screen.

But getting any closer shows that the noise reduction algorithm has taken its toll on the fine detail, while the noise still remains high in some images. Furthermore, there are significant oversharpening artifacts visible. The dynamic range is low, too.

Here are the 8MP shots we've snapped in Superior Auto:

Sony Xperia C3 8MP camera samples in Superior Auto

And here are a few samples taken in Manual mode. They have the same quality as the 8MP ones.

Sony Xperia C3 Dual Manual samples

The HDR more is a bit hard to find, but it is present on the Sony Xperia C3. You need to go to Manual mode first, then in the Scenes Menu and then you should select Backlight Correction (HDR). The HDR mode is conservative and rescues both the highlights and shadows without going to extremes. Unfortunately, the resolved detail is even worse than in the standard samples.

Here are a couple of HDR samples:

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

We've also snapped two photos with the front 5MP snapper. Unfortunately, the detail is also on the low side, the fixed focus isn't doing it a favor because most of the selfie samples (of the mouse) we took weren't on focus either.

5MP samples from the front cam

Still camera comparison

We uploaded the full resolution 8MP photos to our photo quality comparison database to compare against other high-resolution smartphones. The image quality - resolved detail, noise, colors and contrast - are below average.

Sony Xperia C3 in our photo quality comparison tool

Video recording done in 1080p at 30 fps

The Sony Xperia C3 is capable of capturing 1080p video at 30fps. The camcorder shares the same UI as the still camera. You can set a timer and fiddle with settings like exposure, metering, focus mode, etc.

Camcorder UI

For videos the Xperia C3 features a proprietary SteadyShot digital image stabilization, but there's a price to pay - the field of view (FoV) is reduced (it's how all digital stabilization systems work). The phone is smart enough to detect whether you are shooting hand-held or you have rested it on something stable but you get the reduced FoV either way.

If you go into video mode from the Manual shooting mode, you get an HDR option, as well as various preset scenes to pick from.

You can also snap stills during video recording but that's not of much use as you only get 1080p images, you might as well grab a frame from the video later.

The Sony Xperia C3 Dual's 1080p samples are nothing to rave about, but they are still better than the still images. The resolved detail is better, the noise reduction isn't that destructive and there is very little noise. The frame rate is steady at 28 fps, while the bitrate is good at 16-17Mbps with stereo sound recording with a bitrate of 128 Kbps and 48 kHz audio sampling rate.

Unfortunately, our Xperia C3 had some issues with its audio capturing during the video and it is rather unusable. Hopefully, this is just an issue with our (retail!) unit, not a wide-spread one.

The continuous autofocus is much too eager and triggers way too often as on other Xperia phones.

Here's a 1080p sample, which we've uploaded on YouTube.

And here is an untouched 1080p@30fps video sample for you to download.

The Xperia C3 is also capable of capturing 1080p@30fps HDR videos. The quality is the same as the standard video samples, the HDR effect is barely visible sometimes, and sometimes way too much.

You can also check out the HDR samples we've uploaded on YouTube as well.

Here is a 1080p@30fps HDR video for you to check out.

Video camera comparison

The Sony Xperia C3 captures mediocre 1080p videos. It manages to resolve good detail in our resolution chart test and under good light conditions, but there is lots of noise and artefacts when shooting in low-light rooms.

Sony Xperia C3 in our video quality comparison tool