Two years behind the curve: The Xperia 5 continues Sony's tradition of making poor camera phones

For a company that makes some of the best CMOS sensors in the world, it's amazing how Sony also manages to put out smartphones with pretty bad camera performance. When the Xperia 1 was launched earlier in the year, Sony claimed that it had removed the shackles that held back its smartphone cameras and now had its  Alpha line engineers working on its smartphone cameras. 

That hasn't been very effective.

The Sony Xperia 1 was put through the works at DxOMark and failed rather stupefyingly, earning an overall score of 94, a figure on par with those of two-year-old flagships like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro and iPhone 8 Plus. Sony released the Xperia 5 almost six months after the Xperia 1 and one would expect to see improvements but that doesn't appear to be the case either.

For one, the Xperia 5 flopped hard at our camera tests, with the reviewer having this to say about the phone's cameras:

The Xperia 5 has also made its way over to DxOMark. So far, only the phone's selfie cameras have been evaluated, and they fail to impress. The phone earned a selfie score of 79, just one more than the Xperia 1's score of 78. Again, one would expect better improvements than that, but Sony apparently just doesn't care.

A selfie score of 79 puts it on par with devices like the Google Pixel 2 and Samsung Galaxy S9+. Both of which are also effectively two-year-old devices at the point. There's a pattern here.

We're not sure why Sony completely fails at delivering competitive cameras, but the Japanese company will have to work on that if they're to ever regain any semblance of mainstream relevance in the flagship space.

Buy Xperia 5 now on Amazon