The Moto G (2015) Review

Camera

One of the most notable improvements to the 2015 Moto G is its new rear-facing camera. The 2014 Moto G used Sony's IMX179, while the 2015 model adopts IMX214. The sensor size increases from 1/3.2" to 1/3.06" and the resolution increases from 8MP to 13MP. The aperture is also much wider, moving from F/2.4 to F/2.0, which can help offset the lower sensitivity of the smaller pixels. An overview of the Moto G's cameras can be found in the chart below.

While the Moto G lacks the voice coil motor from the Nexus 6 which is needed to enable OIS, the rest of the camera stack is effectively identical. The one difference on paper is the Moto G's shorter focal length which will give images a wider field of view.

Coincidentally, the move from IMX179 to IMX214 is the exact same change made between the Nexus 5 and Nexus 6. Whatever differences there are between the image quality of the 2015 Moto G and the Nexus 6 in good lighting rests primarily in the hands of their image signal processors. The Nexus 6 will obviously have a low light advantage due to its inclusion of OIS to lengthen shutter times, and we'll get to the low light differences after covering image quality with generous lighting.

In this daylight scene the Moto G performs very well. The exposure is very good, although I feel that it underexposed slightly while the Nexus 6 overexposed slightly. The Nexus 6 definitely has an edge when it comes to the sharpness of grass and foliage, as well as the preservation of textures such as the walls of the building and the pavement of the road. It's also worth noting that there's some lens distortion occurring on the Moto G which is causing color fringing along the white edges of the building windows, although at a normal viewing size it's barely noticeable. I think the Nexus 6 took an overall better photo, but only slightly better, with the Moto G doing a better job than any other mid-range device I've tested during the day.

Low light image quality is where things start to fall apart on the Moto G. While it's difficult to see in the small preview above, looking at the full size image reveals a great deal of color noise throughout the entire image, which doesn't exist on the Nexus 6. The Moto G took a 1/15s exposure, while the Nexus 6 was longer at 1/12s. 1/12s actually isn't very long for a device with OIS, and the difference in ISO value was not very large between the two devices either which means that Motorola's lacking quality has more to do with a simple lack of chroma noise reduction more than anything else. Chroma noise is by far the most distracting type of artifact in photos, and unfortunately it makes the Moto G unsuitable for photography in low light.

Video Quality

Video recording is a great test of a device's ISP as there's only a very short timespan to do processing on each frame that is captured. Since the 2015 Moto G and the Nexus 6 use the same image sensor this allows us to take a look at the differences in video quality between the ISPs in Snapdragon 410 and Snapdragon 805.

The Moto G records 1080p video at 30fps. Video is encoded with an average bitrate of 17Mbps using the H.264 high profile. For this comparison I limited the Nexus 6 to 1080p rather than UHD recording to make it an apples to apples comparison.

The most obvious advantage the Nexus 6 has is the stability of the video. While one might think this is due to the inclusion of OIS, the Nexus 6 isn't using the OIS for stabilization, and this is really just a case of superior EIS enabled by the superior ISP. As for the video quality itself, it's clear that the Nexus 6 is sharper across the frame and has greater detail on the various types of foliage in the area. The Nexus 6 also manages a better exposure, with the Moto G's video being too dark, with muted and just generally inaccurate colors. It appears that like the low light photo scene, the Moto G's video recording abilities are hampered by its ISP.

WiFi Performance

Like almost all of the low end and mid range devices I've tested recently, the Moto G ships with support for 802.11n on the 2.4GHz band. This single spatial stream implementation has a max link speed of 72Mbps.

The Moto G's WiFi speed is roughly the same as all other mid range devices. The Zenfone 2 is once again an exception to the rule, but I don't think anyone buying a device like the Moto G will have adopted an 802.11ac router at this point anyway due to cost reasons. I really hope we start seeing 5GHz support in mid range 802.11n phones though, rather than the ever increasingly crowded 2.4GHz band.