Sony Xperia X review – the Z6 in all but name

Storage

The Xperia X comes with 32GB of storage as standard, but there’s a microSD card slot hidden away underneath a slot on the side in the SIM card tray, so you’ll be able to expand it up to 200GB if you have the requisite card.

Camera

You might need more storage if you plan on taking lots of pictures, as the Xperia X’s 23-megapixel sensor can produce some pretty large images. However, I wasn’t overly impressed with the overall quality of the photos I took, as the final images looked far too sharp and over-processed.

Admittedly, our outdoor lighting conditions weren’t great, but there was an awful lot of noise and visible artefacts when viewed at its full resolution, which rather spoiled the rest of the shot. Its colours and exposure judgement was pretty good, but it lost so much fine detail that smaller objects were practically reduced to a single block of colour.

^ The weather was pretty overcast when this picture was taken, but viewing it at full resolution reveals a shocking lack of detail

Indoors wasn’t much better either, as even in bright lighting conditions the over-sharpening continued. Colours had plenty of punch, but there was a lot of noise and some very smeary-looking textures, putting the camera as a whole dead-last compared to the LG G5, Samsung Galaxy S7 and HTC 10.

^ Colours look reasonably decent overall, but there’s a lot of noise and smeary, fuzzy textures

^ Switching on our studio lights didn’t help either, as there was still a lot of obvious over-processing in the final image

Conclusion

This is a real shame, as the rest of the phone holds up well to its closest competitors. However, if the camera wasn’t enough to hold the Xperia X back, its price definitely is, as it currently costs £460 SIM-free or around £32-per-month on contract. This puts it in direct competition with the LG G5, which not only has a vastly superior camera – arguably the best out of all of this year’s flagship smarpthones – but it also has an equally gorgeous-looking screen and bundles of speed. When you put these phones side-by-side, the G5 wins hands down.

Buy the Sony Xperia X now from Carphone Warehouse or see all of the best Sony Xperia X deals on uSwitch