Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Blind Smartphone Camera Test 2019!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here and welcome to the blind smartphone camera test 2019.. So this idea really started last year when i wanted to do a test of all the best smartphone cameras really find out which one the best is, and i could have just done. Pixel versus iphone at the time, but i also wanted to throw in the new samsung phone, but then maybe people want to see like a oneplus and it eventually just turned into. Let’S just include them all: let’s just throw them all in there. So from that, the blind camera test was born and if you’ve been following along on twitter and instagram for about the past week, you’ve seen that we’ve done it again this year and the results, i think, are fascinating.
So the format is, as you may remember, we took 16 smartphones. We set up a bracket of all of them, sort of seated in a way and then got to work. So here’s the competitors this year we have google pixel 4 iphone 11 pro samsung galaxy. Note. 10, google pixel 3a samsung galaxy s10e, oneplus 7t, pro oneplus 7t huawei, mate 30, pro huawei p30 pro the 108 megapixel xiaomi mi, note: 10 sony, xperia, 1 redmi k20, pro lg g8x, then q, asus rog phone 2, asus zenfone 6 and the royal flex pi. So, as you can tell a pretty healthy variety of flagships from the smartphones that you’d probably consider favorites in a test like this down to some mid-range phones, some budget ones and just some random ones thrown in there and my favorite part of this is there’s. So many cameras there’s so many options that it’s impossible to like narrow it down to like. Oh, i know what iphone photos look like so i’ll vote for the iphone every time.
There’S no way for you to know it’s totally blind, so we went out and we matched them all up from the bracket and we took the photos with all 16 phones again, keeping in mind consistency and including things in the photos that people typically take photos of Skin tones for sure fabrics for textures, different colors, dynamic range with the sky in the background, a subject with a foreground and a background, etc, and every single one was just the default open. The camera tap a face, take a photo with the exception of the xiaomi mi note 10, which we’d open the camera, app switch to the 108 megapixel mode and then take the photo because that’s the whole reason we included it. So we assigned each phone a letter, a all the way through p, and then we started stitching them together and matching them up. So every single one would have a match up one round at a time. So we conducted the tests again, the polling on instagram stories and on twitter, so we’re thankfully allowed to use images in polls in tweets again on twitter, so shout out to them for allowing us to do that for this test. So four million instagram votes later and two million twitter votes later we have our winners, so this is the bracket.
So these are the phones that were behind each of the letters so without checking twitter. This is the fun part, go ahead and pause. This video and fill out this bracket march madness style the way you think it will actually go based on votes. You can even use your information about what happened in last year’s blind test to better inform your decision. So really this is your shot. Go ahead, fill it out. This is your chance and now without any further ado, let me show you exactly how it went down so round one just a photo of me: a human we had the asus zenfone 6 absolutely crush the oneplus 7t. Then we had huawei mate 30 pro defeating asus rog phone 2. Then note 10 plus easily beating the royal flex pi, as you might have predicted, and then the pixel 3a beat the lg g8x. Then, on the other side, galaxy s10e beat the 108 megapixel xiaomi. Mi. Note 10, the oneplus 7t pro beat the iphone 11 pro pixel 4 beat the sony sperry 1 and last but not least, redmi k20 pro beat huawei p30 pro.
So a very interesting start. None of these, interestingly, was even close. Every single one was a blowout, the closest one was actually the redmi over the huawei, which was about 150 000 to 90 000 on instagram, so pretty convincing in every single first round photo. Some of these i’d say were expected.
Some of these were definitely still in the category of upsets, but we’ll get to all that in a bit round two. So this is the photo of the hot sauce got some warm and cool tones in there there’s skin tones there’s a subject with a slightly blurred background and there’s some sharp text to read in the middle. So in this round, mate 30 pro narrowly beat the zenfone 6, then below that we had note 10 plus, which overcame the pixel 3a. Then, on the other side, samsung galaxy s10e moved on over oneplus 7t pro and pixel 4 beat the k20 pro.
So again, some interesting stuff. Actually before all of this even happened, i filled out sort of my own bracket of what i predicted. I thought would win and i had mate 30 pro carrying a torch to the end for a repeat of the finals like last year, but other than that. I got a lot of this stuff wrong and i feel, like you, may have too um weird stuff, but still kind of up for grabs on to the next one so round.
Three was the roadster die cast model photo plenty of colors on purpose, uh, the subject, and the background is a little out of focus again skin tones and or outdoors and in this round the samsung galaxy. Note 10 plus beat the mate 30 pro and on the other side, the samsung galaxy s10e beat the pixel 4.. Oh right, okay, so i guess this uh.
We probably should have expected this, putting essentially the same camera on both sides of the bracket. But i guess you could say we also did that with pixel 3a and pixel four, but literally we didn’t expect them to meet the finals. Maybe you did, but that’s what happened so the finals was essentially the same camera pitted against itself, which i i just took as a landscape photo out the window, not a whole ton of variety, because i sort of figured it wouldn’t matter anyway.
But the galaxy note 10 eventually ended up winning by a healthy amount here. So there you have it that’s the final bracket, some weird wild results mixed in, but a lot of the same principles from last year’s blind test were still on display here, plus one new one was interesting to see so last year. What did we find? Well, basically, that when you put two smartphone photos next to each other on social media, where everything is very much compressed, essentially sharpness now matters a lot less detail, matters less textures matter, less, even contrast almost doesn’t matter essentially, when all else is the same, and you Put them right next to each other, people are gon na just pick the brighter photo. This has not changed, and a lot of that explains the first two rounds of this really well, basically, in the camera app for all of these, we just tapped on my face very consistently for every single photo and some brought the exposure up a little more others.
Often the good ones brought it up a little bit, but kept more of the background in the shot with more dynamic range. So really just the ones that brightened me up the most tended to win. The weird fluke to me was the iphone 11 pro that i actually think lost because of white balance, for whatever reason, when the iphone 11 misses it’s more this year than ever before, it really goes cool and this one missed blue and we even took multiple photos From the iphone thinking, it was kind of odd that it was so blue like this, but that’s the way they all turned out and naturally the warmer more accurate photo from the oneplus took that round so again through round two.
The voting margins got a bit closer because the photos are in this controlled environment where they are closer. Looking but generally, the same theme prevailed if there was one significantly brighter than the other, it won by more votes, but then this is actually where i started to find something else. Something new starting in this round and people were actually starting to reply and type and comment that they were doing this people started voting for the photo that just had more in focus so in this photo mate 30 pros on the top note 10 is on the Bottom, not much of a difference in brightness or color, so people started pixel peeping a little bit and you can clearly tell the background is more blurred in the top photo? You know the color chart my sneakers, the green chair behind me. All of it is blurrier behind it, which made people vote for the bottom. This is kind of backwards because we generally like a soft out-of-focus background.
That’S a more expensive! Look. That’S typically coming out of full-size cameras with much bigger sensors! That’S why we have portrait mode on these smartphones to sort of fake that look with the tiny sensors we have in these, but even among smartphone cameras. Some sensors are bigger than others, and so, if you know huawei stuff, you know they’re one of the ones to stuff a massive sensor in their phone, which is why even without portrait mode on the subject is in focus the same way and the background is more Blurred than some other smartphone sensors, so now you know when you put two photos next to each other. Comparing them brings up these tendencies in people where apparently, the masses decided that they would select the photo with more in focus as better, even though, technically speaking, it’s in theory. Worse, because it’s a telltale sign of a smaller sensor. If we look at the other side of the bracket, you can see the same thing now in this case. The s10e on top is also a bit brighter than the pixel 4 at the bottom. So that’s going to give it a bit of an advantage off the start, but even still putting these photos next to each other, where the pixel 4 at the bottom clearly clearly took a better photo. It’S more neutral, there’s more accurate, colors, more dynamic range! There’S! No blown highlights on the red of the roadster more accurate skin tones and a softer shallower depth of field to top it all off, but people picked the top photo 140 000 to 80 000 on instagram.
Now i do have to give some of you photographers and fellow youtubers and keynote people some credit, because you did see that clearly the bottom photo was better and you couldn’t believe that the top photo was winning and i’m with you, and even though i knew which One was which, even if you looked at each individual photo by itself, you can tell clearly the bottom photo was better. So, of course we know you and me. We definitely know that when you’re, comparing a high quality photo versus a slightly lower quality photo the bigger sensor, the one with the blurred background, that’s something to look out for, but you know not not everyone, not the four million voters.
You know they might not know that so anyway, that gives us our finals, that’s the galaxy note, 10 plus and the galaxy s10e, and what happened here? What what exactly went down that a landscape photo from two nearly identical camera suites gave us such a dramatic winner. Well, actually, it’s pretty simple: i was taking this photo through a window. I took it on the silver galaxy note, 10 plus and the pink galaxy s10e. And if you look at these photos, the s10e photo is kinda. Magenta shifted at the bottom half because it’s literally reflecting the pink phone back at me that i’m taking the picture with now. If i didn’t have that glass in front of me, who knows what else people would have looked for to pick a winner between two? Presumably nearly identical photos, but to be fair to give you guys credit, you did see that good spot.
So what did we learn from all this? Well, one people still like brighter photos. Two, when presented with two photos of similar brightness people, tend to prefer the photo with more in focus. You know it may seem like more detail, but it’s essentially a sign of a worse photo, but people didn’t care and then three people make some fascinating decisions and observations when presented with side by sides like this so either way. That’S been it congrats to the samsung galaxy note: 10, plus your winner of the second annual people’s choice, blind smartphone, camera bracket, um and yeah.
Maybe maybe we’ll feel even a little bit different about this later this year, when twitter’s, now stopping compression of jpeg photos and full-size photo viewing, you never know, the landscape could be shaken up again, but either way until the next one catch you guys later. Peace, .