It seems the original seek doesn't do very well with closeups and those objects being out of focus makes them look pretty bad.
I did get my XR today so I took some snapshots of the oven (we had pizza tonight) with the seek software using a Galaxy S3 phone.
Oven from a distance:
A bit closer (sorry, it's sideways):
Closeup of one of the knobs (with image smoothing like the previous two):
Turning off the smoothing on the same knob:
So it's not really the sensor, sure the software could be better allowing custom ranges. But the sensor is pretty good.
I wonder how much can the newer compact (non XR) focus into objects with the wider field of view.
Also not sure why the high resolution, maybe it scales the image to the phone resolution on the capture, but having two different sizes is weird.