Sony Ericsson Z750a Cell Phone Review - Imaging

The Sony-Ericsson Z750a's camera impressed us, especially for an entry level device. The stills camera had good resolution and decent color, but fell down in low light situations with noise. It was also reasonably speedy. The video capture was very good and we were quite pleased with the presence of both video and photo editing features.

Resolution (6.30)
To test the resolution of the Sony-Ericsson Z750a's camera we took photos of an industry standard resolution chart and used Imatest software to analyze it. Imatest produces a score called line widths per picture height (lw/ph), which measures how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start running together.

Our resolution chart as seen by the Z750a.

The Z750a performed well in this test, scoring 1191 lw/ph horizontal and 1124 lw/ph vertical. This is similar to the score put up by the Sony-Ericsson W580i and better than any of our other comparison phones, as you can see below. We were quite happy with the Z750a's performance in this test, it's amongst the best we've seen from a two megapixel camera.

Cell Phone	Sony-Ericsson Z750a	Sony-Ericsson W580i	Razr2 V8
Score	6.30	6.35	4.29
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	1191/1124	1195/960	982/982
Image of Resolution Chart

Cell Phone	Nokia 6555	Samsung M520	T-Mobile Shadow
Score	1.90	0.32	2.28
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	675/701	266.9/200.2	741/746
Image of Resolution Chart

Color (5.41)
To see how well a phone's camera captures colors we take photos of the industry standard GretagMacbeth color chart. We then use Imatest to analyze the results. Imatest compares the captured colors to the originals, producing the chart below.

Imatest compares captured color to ideal color.

Imatest also produces a second chart, which gives you a more visual indication of how accurate colors are, displayed below. The square indicates where the ideal color should be while the circle indicates where the captured color was. The longer the line between the two the more inaccurate the colors.

Long lines in greens, yellows and reds are the biggest problems.

You can see that the Sony-Ericsson Z750a had a few problems with yellows, greens and reds, but we've seen worse from other phones like the Razr2 V8. The Z750a's performance here was above average and reasonable for a cell phone camera. You can see below that it's in the same range as most of our comparison handsets.

Cell Phone	Sony-Ericsson Z750a	Sony-Ericsson W580i	Razr2 V8
Score	5.41	5.61	4.41
Color Checker Chart

Cell Phone	Nokia 6555	Samsung M520	T-Mobile Shadow
Score	5.94	5.45	5.61
Color Checker Chart

Noise (0.22)
To test noise we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four different lighting levels and use Imatest to measure noise at each level. We consider both total noise and consistency across lighting levels in our score. The Sony-Ericsson Z750a's performed very poorly in this test, although you can see from the scores below that no phones do particularly well. The Z750a's poor performance was almost completely due to particularly terrible noise at the lowest lighting level. At the three highest lighting levels noise was actually pretty good. What this means for you is that any photos you try to take in low light are probably going to come out looking terrible.

Live Preview (5.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a's live preview is very similar to that of the W580i. Unfortunately the interface does not take good advantage of the screen real estate. The top of the screen is taken up by information bout the zoom, brightness, photo size and save location. There are also two tabs that allow you to switch between the still camera and the video camera. Below this is a blank grey bar and then the labels for the soft keys. In between you'll find the live preview window, which ends up taking up only about half the available screen real estate. We much prefer phones that use the entire display for the live preview. What you do see does a reasonable job, with good color accuracy and not very much trailing when panning, but we wish it was larger than a postage stamp.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (6.06)
We were able to go from phone closed to taking a photo in 3.3 seconds on the Sony-Ericsson Z750a. This is slightly better than average, but not as good as the performance we saw on the W580i, probably because of the extra time to open the phone up. It did perform better than the Razr2 V8 or Nokia 6555, however. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shot to Shot Time (6.81)
Here we look at how long it takes to capture a series of photos. This is important if you want to capture action shots. When possible we use a phone's burst mode, which the Sony-Ericsson Z750a does have. Using this mode we were able to take four photos in 1.76 seconds, which works out to 2.27 frames per second (fps). You can see below that this is significantly above average and amongst our comparison phones only the Sony Ericsson W580i performed better. One thing we should note is that like many burst modes for phones photos captured are only in VGA (640 x 480) resolution. This means the photo will be significantly smaller than the largest 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution available on the Z750a. If you want to take a series of full resolution photos you'll have to do it manually, which will take much longer. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shutter to Shot Time (3.57)
Shutter to shot time is the amount of time it takes for the phone to actually capture a photo once you've pressed the shutter key.  On the Sony-Ericsson Z750a this took 0.56 seconds. You can see from the chart below that this is faster than average but not as fast as some of our comparison phones. For most users it should be fast enough that you won't have to worry too much about changes in your scene as you wait for the phone to actually capture it. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Interface (3.0)
As we mentioned in the live preview section above the Sony-Ericsson Z750a's camera interface has a lot of wasted space. Not only is the top third of the display taken up by indicators, but there's also a completely wasted grey bar below the live preview. The menu system is also not very camera-like, instead it looks just like the menus elsewhere in the phone. We prefer a full screen view with overlaid icons and camera-like menus such as those found on the T-Mobile Shadow.

The camera interface doesn't take good advantage of the real estate.

Photo Album Software Internal (4.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a's album software  displays photos in a 3x3 grid by default but you also have the choice of a 5x5 grid, thumbnail list or just a simple text list. You navigate using the D-pad and the left soft key opens a menu where you can access editing features, copy, move, delete, send and assign photos to the wallpaper or a contact.

The album software does not support slide shows.

Sadly there's no support for creating a slide show. The software is simple and straightforward, however, and we like the different view options and the fact that you can mark multiple photos for move or deletion. We do wish that you could organize your photos into folders.

Manual Control (0.0)
There are no manual controls on the Sony-Ericsson Z750a.

Zoom (0.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a does have a 2.5x digital zoom, but not only is the zoom unavailable at the highest resolution, it's actually only available at the lowest. Since all a digital zoom does is crop and resize what you're seeing, which you can do on your computer later anyways, it's pretty worthless. You don't want to crop and resize a 640 x 480 pixel photo. As such we are not awarding points here.

Focus (0.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a has a fixed focus lens, which means what you see is what you get. We don't award points for fixed focus lenses, reserving points for auto-focus cameras that produce better photos.

Flash (0.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a does not have a flash.

Metering (2.0)
Metering controls are used to control from which point or points in a scene lighting is judged. The Sony-Ericsson Z750a does not have any metering controls, but it does give you a simple brightness control that you can turn up or down using the volume keys.

White Balance (2.0)
The Z750a has the typical presets for white balance including daylight, cloudy, fluorescent and incandescent.

Typical white balance pre-sets for a cell phone.

Image Handling (7.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a has some pretty decent image handling features. Within the album software you can choose the Photo Fix option from the menu, which tries to make adjustment to improve the photo automatically. You can also choose to open the photo in Sony Ericsson's PhotoDJ software. Here you have a wide range of tools, including auto levels, light balance, brightness & contrast, color balance and rotate. This is some of the best photo editing software we've seen on a device, much less an entry level phone like the Z750a. We were very pleased with the image handling features.

Video Quality (6.0)
The quality of video captured by the Sony-Ericsson Z750a was pretty good. The video was a little soft, and we noticed some artifacts in areas of high contrast, but there wasn't a lot of trailing when panning, color fidelity was solid and motion was picked up as well as you could expect from a phone. You certainly won't want to make a dvd out of the video and play it on a television, but it's certainly good enough for Youtube and significantly better than what we saw from the Nokia 6555 or T-Mobile Shadow. This is probably due in part to the fact that the Z750a doesn't use 3GP compression, which tends to destroy video quality pretty good, but instead captures in Mpeg-4. We also noticed that video was captured at 30 frames per second, this is twice the 15 frames per second we typically see on cell phones.

Video Resolution (9.59)
Backing up our impressions of video quality the Sony-Ericsson Z750a's performed quite well in our video resolution test. For this test we take video of the same industry standard resolution chart we use for the stills resolution test. We then run frames from this video through Imatest to produce a line widths per picture height score (lw/ph). The Sony-Ericsson Z750a scored an impressive 325 lw/ph horizontal and 295 lw/ph vertical. You can see below that this is much better than any of our comparison phones.

Video Compression (2.0)
As we mentioned above the Sony-Ericsson Z750a captures video in MP4 format, which is significantly better than the 3GP format used by most cell phones. As such, as an only option it's pretty good.

Interface (3.0)
The video interface on the Sony-Ericsson Z750a is almost exactly the same as the photo capture interface, which means not good. Once again the top of the screen is taken up by indicators while only about one half of the screen is used as a viewfinder. About the only plus we could find is that the blank grey bar found below the viewfinder in the photo interface is used for a timer bar in the video interface, which we guess is a slightly better use of space. We much prefer to see the whole screen used for the viewfinder, however, with icons and controls overlaid.

Manual Control (0.0)
There are no manual controls when capturing video on the Sony-Ericsson Z750a.

Zoom (1.0)
As with the stills camera there is a 2.5x digital zoom available, and this time it's available at the highest resolution level. Of course the highest resolution for video is smaller than the lowest resolution for still photos so the crop and enlarge you get from a digital zoom is going to punish your video quality. As such we only award a single point for digital zoom.

Editing (4.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a includes a VideoDJ application that allows you to do things like trim clips, join them together into a larger video, add text and even a soundtrack. This is significantly better than the video editing options we've seen on just about any other phone, although take that with a grain of salt since most phones have zero video editing options.

Modes (2.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a allows you to capture video specifically for MMS messages.

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