We attended the Cape Town press event for the Sony Xperia XZ and X Compact smartphones this week. Now, the actual release information has been available for a while now, but the event did give us the opportunity to compare the camera to my personal Lumia 950.

So then, does the Sony smartphone blow Microsoft’s device out of the water? Well, check out the gallery for our very unscientific test.

The Xperia XZ does have a higher resolution 23MP camera though, compared to the 950’s 20-megapixel shooter. But it still makes for an interesting comparison. We disabled the 950’s Rich Capture trickery and set the XZ to capture in manual mode (without HDR or any other modes).

The Xperia XZ and Lumia 950 go head to head in a cross-platform camera battle

We stood on roughly the same spots when taking pictures, but the XZ was able to pack more of the scene into the shot. So the results won’t be completely identical in this regard.

On an unrelated note, it appears that the phone still suffers from the same infamous overheating issue as the Xperia X and the Z5 Compact when it comes to recording video. I was able to film six minutes of 1080p/60FPS video before the overheating message popped up. The more things change…

Anyway, check the results below (full-size images are available by clicking on the desired image).

Lumia 950 versus Xperia XZ Previous Image Next Image left right





















