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The Sony Xperia Tablet S has an 8 megapixel main camera and a 1 megapixel front-facing camera. Given the reasonably high megapixel count, we were expecting solid performance from it, but were left disappointed.
The biggest problem isn't the quality of the pictures, it's the fact that the camera would regularly crash. This generally happened when launching it or switching between pictures and videos. We're not sure if this is a widespread issue or just a problem with our review unit, but it happened often enough to become seriously annoying.
Once you actually start taking pictures, things improve a little. There's no flash, but there are a handful of options to tweak, such as white balance, exposure and focus mode (it defaults to continuous auto focus, but you can switch to touch focus or auto if you'd prefer).
There is also a panorama mode and a few different scene modes, such as landscape and sports. It's hardly the most comprehensive set of options we've seen on a mobile or tablet camera, but given that a tablet is likely to be a secondary camera at most, it should more than suffice.
Image quality is a bit of let down considering the megapixel count - the results weren't really any better than those produced by 5 megapixel snappers such as the one on the Google Nexus 10. On the other hand, many tablets only have 5 megapixel cameras, so it still holds its own.
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The Sony Xperia Tablet S's camera produces OK images, but everything other than the immediate foreground tends to be a little low on detail.
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Landscape mode helps a little, but even then the background is far from crisp.
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Sports mode lessens blur on fast moving objects but fails to totally eliminate it.
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Close ups aren't as sharp as we'd like.
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The camera does a decent job of indoor shots as long as they're reasonably well lit, but as with everything else, the backgrounds lack detail.
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The Sony Xperia Tablet S handles panoramas as well as most of the competition, though processing them takes a good 30 seconds, so they're not exactly fast.
