Gadgetory

we're trying something a little different with this camera review Motorola is releasing two new flagship phones the Moto Z and the Z force and unlike some other manufacturers there actually is a difference in camera tech between these two so we're going to pit them against each other in a friendly competition of stablemates buckle up folks we have a lot of ground to cover and I'm gonna move pretty quick first a little housekeeping the Moto Z features a 13 megapixel shooter with optical image stabilization laser assisted focus and an F 1.8 aperture the Moto Z force increases the resolution to 21 megapixels and adds phase detection to the focusing system we're unsure exactly what size these sensors are but both have 1.12 micron pixels and eagle-eyed viewers have already commented on our other videos that the force camera has a larger lens than the Z the apse between the two are identical we see similar performance in terms of image processing and we'll note in the bottom left corner which phone produced which images before jumping into samples we should point out that this review was produced on pre-release software and we encountered a fair number of gremlins in this camera app the worst in low-light situations that we expect this should be addressed in an update once the phone is actually available for purchase starting off with exposure and saturation like most phones these two are trying to produce bright and vivid images with ie pleasing color and there isn't a tremendous difference in how these to expose meter and finish off a JPEG blues and greens look vibrant and we mostly avoid that hyper teal band of sky near the horizon Browns and earth tones maybe feel a bit dull or muted we don't want rust to become orange but the dead grass here is starting to become gray yellows are well captured the camera's natural inclination is to clip brighter and warmer colors but we're keeping a fair amount of petal detail here Reds are always tough for digital sensors to produce accurately and the Moto falls for the same trap many others trip over in overexposing and over saturating these are two different colors of Bougainville blossoms one bush more red one more pink but pretty much everything here is a sizzling magenta this is super common for phone cameras but the Moto lacks any raw capture we can find too you better files to edit from lastly white objects in direct Sun are really tricky to meet her for properly but I was happy to see decent dynamic range here instead of focusing on the pedals I focused on the middle of this rose and it didn't completely blow the flower out well done there though it's difficult to test dynamic range beyond that point as mentioned before neither zphone is saving RAW files for us to push exposure recovery those finished JPEGs retain a decent amount of detail though z-force photos range from around four and a half Meg to eleven Meg moto Z photos range from two and a half to six and a half Meg per shot for video both phones record around a 50 megabit per second bitrate averaging under 400 megabytes per minute of UHD video now checking out some software Motorola hasn't always been known for providing the best camera apps but what the Moto Z delivers is a revelation compared to my old Moto X - the basics are well covered here once you feel out some quirks auto mode is fairly simple and we have slow motion and panorama modes as separate options and a fairly well featured pro mode with manual controls for those paying attention that pro mode looks an awful lot like what Lumias have used for their camera apps and the zooming action is a vertical slide instead of a pinch but of course imitation is the sincerest form of flattery though we are kind of bummed that impro mode the longest exposure setting we get play with is an anemic half second long so no fun streaking tail light shots for you now the Z won't win any awards for macro shots minimum close focusing distance is a little less than 4 inches away from the lens and in shots with busy backgrounds the only way to get the phone to focus that close is to set it up manually though even if for inches we get some nicely softened backgrounds when you can put a little distance between your subject and other items and for how similar these camera sensors are the slightly larger z-force camera sensor does seem to provide slightly smoother bokeh taking a look at the focusing neither phone is a focusing champ first of all there's a bit of a tweak to how the phone locks on a subject when just tapping to focus and refocus often the target will miss where your finger tried to tap what modo intends for is tap and slide to really hone in on the specific object you want the issue with this is sliding requires a slightly longer interaction where my fat fingers block more of the screen so it never feels quite as smooth or as precise as competing options from other flagship phones add to the fact that this focusing system is a little on the slower side and our pre-release motos both locked up on this test refusing to focus where I tapped and you end up with a perfect recipe for frustratingly long interactions for each photo I quickly got in the habit of really planning ahead for every shot I wanted to take and one area where these two did differ subtly was on white balance on the whole photos from the Moto Z were a little warmer than photos from the Z force and this was exacerbated in some of our HDR shots speaking of HDR they're inconsistent but these phones do try to rein in highlights while boosting shadow details like the sidewalk here night shots are even more inconsistent though sometimes we get great color boost but in lower light situations sometimes we get well nothing the auto mode on these phones actually has a pretty solid night scanning solution I don't believe HDR is a one-size-fits-all panacea for night photography and I'd be more inclined to suggest people use the more consistent night mode here of course moto also includes HDR for UHD video and they're just okay again it's just hard to predict what you'll end up with sometimes you get a great balance of light in color and sometimes the highlights and lowlights are just all smeared together in a dull mess of moving footage this isn't a setting I'd rely on unless you can take a couple test videos to see what you'll end up with and how about those panorama photos in a word awful Motorola limits you to about half the range of what other phones will allow you to scan through and when you do try to line up a good shot there are often numerous stitching areas like on this poll how did the camera mess up a poll this is very disappointing but what isn't disappointing is including a decent flash for the front-facing camera it's another wise normal flagship 5-megapixel selfie camera but that little spotlight can really help in darker situations now moving to nighttime photos on the old yzi force outperforms the regular Z our hypothesis since the pixel size is the same then the slightly larger image sensor on the force might be helping it soak up a touch more light also the higher resolution means that images look sharper and the noise is a little finer when comparing similar crops in similar scenes we also see some slight lens distortions on the Z when looking at the streetlamp above our creepy tunnel the lens on our force review unit is just a little bit cleaner in that regard where the Z was warmer with white balance and daylight under artificial light it's working a lot harder finding the white of this gate and ignoring the yellow security lamp which lights the scene and our walkway also shows when shooting Auto the night mode won't exaggerate color as much as HDR but that also reigns in noise and moving to video image processing on the force was consistently better than on the Z looking at similar scenes often the Z would feel duller or just not as crisp of course every now and then we'd see a mess of over sharpening on the Z force but overall we preferred the force video looking at video we can take a closer look at image stabilization and we're happy to see that while both phones have hardware optical image stabilization you are able to continue using software stabilization even when shooting UHD video now results here aren't as smooth as what we might see on an iPhone 6s plus but this is one of the only Androids which will allow us to do this so kudos for being one of the first motorola but checking out the zoom range zooming performance on both phones is kind of a hot mess the higher resolution force camera fares slightly better but while moto is advertising an 8 X zoom on this phone you probably won't want to use the full crop very often but audio capture here is very good even-handed noise and wind filtering helps improve the sound of your subject but constant sounds aren't reduced to that terrible warbling sound we've heard too often from competitors and checking out exposure transitions moving from dark to bright and back the image stabilization system did not like this lateral pan really big chunky jumps in trying to anticipate my hand movement the activating it helped smooth out the scene but this is a pretty twitchy exposure system rapid and jarring transitions are a bit distracting especially when the camera overshoots and you get a handful of really blue frames in an otherwise warm scene we're hoping this is tied to the low light exposure issues and is fixed in a future software update lastly looking at some slow-motion video it's a reasonable 720p at 120 frames per second at this resolution we wish we were saving a slightly higher quality image or that we had options for 1080p or 240 frames per second but it's fun to play with and adjust on the phone so let's wrap this up where does this leave us with the camera on these new Motorola's well hello moto what a nice little camera system you grown into especially on the Z force in owning the fact that we teased this is a versus in the title of the video we'd be inclined to declare the force the winner not just for more resolution but focusing performance was a little better and we see improvements to white balance low-light performance and overall video quality to be clear these cameras have some bugs which need to be sorted out but they are far more fun to use than on Moto's of years past Z cameras do a perfectly serviceable job of covering the basics and with a little coaxing can deliver some really photographic images but considering the competition and the launch prices for these phones we just can't position them in the top tier of smartphone cameras a little software tweaking would go a long way however so we hope to revisit these after they've had a little more time to marinate as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full moto Z and Z force coverage and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review