Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Best Smartphone Cameras!”.
Hey, what’s up guys, I’m kitty HD here and for a while I used to always carry my smartphone in one pocket and my pocket camera the Sony rx100 in the other, just because the image quality is that much better and recently I had the sony QX lenses. Come in and i’ll be detailing my experiences with those very shortly on video, but honestly in a world where the best camera you have is just the one you have with you. Smartphone cameras have been getting really good recently, maybe not good enough to replace your point-and-shoot but good enough to make you think twice about taking it with you, so this list might be totally different in three months or something at the rate. Technology is moving nowadays, but this is my totally unscientific and totally unofficial list of the top five cameras that also happen to make phone calls. There are four categories to my totally unscientific test: number one is sharpness and detail. Number two is color accuracy.
Slash dynamic range number, three is video and number four is control so getting right into it at number. Five is the Samsung Galaxy s4. It’S obviously not the newest one we’re going to talk about here, but it’s no slouch it’s one of the most popular Android phones out there. Today it has a 13 megapixel sensor and it’s rocking an F 2.2 aperture. It does not have optical image stabilization, but then again most smartphones don’t have oh is, but it does have it digitally.
But, more importantly, it has an incredible software. Suite Samsung’s camera features. Let you change a ton of different things while shooting you get all these live filters, you get the burst mode to get HDR and you get all the different camera modes. Essentially that let you choose what sort of shooting experience you want and in fact I think this is the best smartphone camera experience. When it first came out when it was first available, it was easily blowing away every other smartphone out there.
On my scale. The galaxy s4 gets an 8 for sharpest in detail. Thanks to that 13 megapixel sensor and the image processing, it gets a 7 for colors.
On dynamic range, just because it tends to over saturate the colors a little bit a little bit too much where it looks maybe more pleasing to the real eye, but a little bit less accurate than it should in real life. It gets an 8 for video because the 1080p 30 frames per second video looks stellar. It might not have optical image stabilization like we said, which would make it a little bit smoother and less shaky.
But overall you can also take pictures while you’re recording it’s got a whole bunch of video features that you can use. So it gets a pretty solid video score. It gets a nine four controls because, like we said, that’s its specialty, it has an incredible software suite with a whole bunch of different controls over the shooting experience with all the different modes you get, and it might be a little bit difficult to use it first, Which is why I gets a point off because it’s a little bit spread out and has this weird menu on the top left corner, where it also has a menu when you hit the menu button. So it’s a little bit too spread out, but you’ll get to learn it and it has a 5-inch 1080p viewfinder. That makes it spacious enough to enjoy the shooting experience overall. That brings it to a total score of 32, so coming in at number, four is the LG g2, which is often seen as a direct competitor to the galaxy s4 nowadays, so one of the prettier phones that have been released recently I mean that bezel. Have you seen it? It’S pretty sweet and it’s also rocking a 13 megapixel sensor with optical image. Stabilization – and I don’t know if people realize how rare actual optical image stabilization is inside of the smart phones we have today because of how thin and small the smartphones were making are, but it’s pretty impressive when they actually pull it off and LG’s been working really Hard on their cameras, especially, we see the improvement from the lg optimus G camera a year ago, the g2 scores an 8 for sharpness and detail. Thanks to the 13 megapixel sensor and optical image stabilization, it gets a 7 for color accuracy and dynamic range because it tends to actually understand I need bit, but it also has decent dynamic range and it gets a 9 for video.
Thanks to that 1080p 30 frames per second recording and image stabilization with smooth out video a lot, and it also has a great mic. A lot of people don’t realize that, and it gets an 8 for the slightly less intuitive, but still full of features control. Maybe you could use a little organizational update through a software update, but it’s pretty good, so flip-flops the last two scores of the galaxy s4 and ends up with that score again of 32. So number 3 is the very new iPhone 5s and iPhones. As long as we know, them have always been hailed as brilliant camera, smartphone performers and this new iPhone is no exception and it’s actually an improvement over last year’s. Iphone 5 still has an 8 megapixel sensor same as last iPhone, but this new sensor is a little bit bigger.
So it’s going to give you bigger pixels, which is going to give you better dynamic range and better low-light performance, and it’s also rocking an F 2.2 aperture with the new lens. So it’s going to give you even better low-light performance, but what’s neat about the new iPhone, which is a little trick. It has a new dual tone flash on the back, so it has a white flash and an amber, LED, flash and it’ll basically evaluate the scene and determine which amount of each flash it needs to flash to get the most accurate, colors and skintone representation. So it’s a neat trick, so the new iPhone grabs an 8 for sharpness and detail. Thanks to the new sensor and excellent image processing, it gets a 9 for accurate colors on dynamic range plus. It kind of can cheat a little bit because the HDR button is right there in the viewfinder at all times which no other phone on this list has readily accessible.
So if you really want to turn on HDR, it’s always there and I found it to have some of the best color representation of any phone that I take pictures with. It also gets a 9 for video because not only is a 1080p video pretty good, it also has a 720p 120 frames per second recording mode, where you can basically slow it down and get super slow-motion footage of maybe action footage or whatever else you want to Shoot in super slow motion that you wouldn’t ordinarily get again. It doesn’t have optical image stabilization, which is why it’s losing a point and it can be a little bit shaky at times, but it does look pretty sweet and it finishes with an 8 for control. Because, honestly, you don’t get all that much control for the iPhone, but what you do get control over is very simple, very easy to use intuitive and just always works. The HDR is also some of the best I’ve seen again in any phone because it doesn’t over process or over exaggerate, the lows or the highs that it’s bringing in. So it’s a pretty good, pretty good camera that totals out to give the iPhone 5s a score of 34.
So number 2 is the beast: it’s the Nokia Lumia 1020, probably best known for its camera, and this is going to be easily the most favorite choice. Most popular choice among people who are used to using higher end cameras and DSLRs, and things like that. Lumia 1020 has a 41 megapixel sensor, a 41 megapixel sensor behind some beautiful, F 2.2 aperture Carl Zeiss glass, a real xenon flash, instead of just LED lights.
Turning on and off and has a focus, assist light and has the largest sensor physically of any of the other smartphones on this list, which means it’s going to get excellent low light performance and very shallow depth of field, which is unusual for a smartphone. The 1020 does have its faults, though mostly in the image processing. I found the biggest problems I had with it to be in the color representation. I consistently got strange colors, you know, y’all been taking ten shots with the Lumia 1020 and seven of them will be beautiful, perfect shots. You wouldn’t expect to ever get that out of a smartphone, and then three of them will just look awful because of their the color and the the image processing. So if I had any problem with the Lumia 1020, it’s how it processed the photos that it took with that incredible lens and sensor. So it’s a 10 for sharpness in detail. I mean come on. It’S 41 megapixels and even the oversampled 5 megapixel shareable shots that it gives.
You are extremely sharp, so that’s useful and plus you can crop down those 41 megapixel sensors for lossless zoom, and you end up getting like some really sweet shots. Even if you didn’t intend to take them from that far away, colors and dynamic range score is a seven just because of the slight color shifts and frequent processing problems I had with color accuracy. The video score only drops a point and it gets a nine because it’s pretty much gorgeous video.
You have a very large sensor for the shallow depth of field. You didn’t get a very close minimum focusing distance, so sometimes you tap to focus and it wouldn’t focus on what you wanted it to, but you get optical image stabilization. So it’s smooth video.
The microphone is pretty good, just the colors a little bit off and the control score is a nine. The pro cam app from Nokia is one of the most powerful, versatile camera apps in any smartphone period. To this date. It gives you full control manual control. If you want over every single aspect of the phone, even manual focusing if you want it now, the one point off of it is really nitpicking like there’s no built-in HDR, it can only take bracketing that you’d have to bring into Photoshop to make an HDI yourself And there’s other little things like that, like the viewfinder is only 720p, but overall it’s an excellent application. Plus you get the ability to crop with lossless no loss of detail afterwards, which is kind of just icing on the cake that gives the Lumia 1020 a total score of 35.
So that brings us to the number one camera on a smartphone which, on this scale, belongs to the samsung galaxy. Note 3. Those may be a little bit confusing at first because on paper that should be very close to the galaxy s4.
But when you look deeper into it, you’ll see that the performance and the experience increases you get out of using the note 3 are very crucial. It is indeed rocking a 13 megapixel sensor and an F 2.2 aperture, just like the galaxy s4. It might even be the exact same hardware, but the image processing is different.
I found the to actually be a bit better. The galaxy s4 sort of tends to overexpose just a little bit. The noise reduction was also a bit less aggressive and there was also more sharpening done so the photos looked more sharp, more crisp, more clean, so the sharpness and detail score is a nine. This thing takes incredible: highlight photos like outdoor photos and regular light photos. It looks just gorgeous on any display for colors and dynamic range. This grabs the 8, the same as the galaxy s4 did for slightly over saturated colors that look a little bit more vivid than real life, but yet still are not too crazy that they’re unappealing to the eye for video.
This thing is an animal now it already takes great 1080p video, but instead of the iPhone super slo-mo trick. The note 3 takes 4k video. It takes ultra-high definition, 4k video, a lot of people don’t realize the versatility of 4k. Video is the same as the versatility of a 41 megapixel photo.
Obviously, no one has a 41 megapixel monitor to appreciate the Lumia 1020 s photos in their full glorious resolution, but you can still appreciate them as being sharper and more detailed on no matter what display are looking at then your traditional photo plus you have the ability To crop down and keep a lot of that detail and make a better looking photo out of a portion of the huge photo you took that same advantage comes to 4k, so most people really usually don’t have 4k displays, although some people do, but you can actually See the difference between a 4k video and a 1080p video on a display like that at 2560 by 1600 display, but, more importantly, you can actually crop down and use 4k video in just a portion of that for a 1080p clip which I’ve actually done. On the note, 3 looks really impressive. The same way you would crop down a 41 megapixel shot to get what you want in the frame. You can do exactly that with the note 3’s 4k video to make a great-looking 1080p video. So all this would earn it a 10, but it doesn’t have optical image stabilization, so it gets it a night and in the control Department. It also is very similar to the galaxy s4 software and it gets a 9. Although there are some nice improvements, like you, get a much larger 5.7 inch viewfinder and you also get a better performance and more RAM for the longer burst shots. But what’s weird, is they actually removed the night mode and included a golf mode? Someone want to explain that it’s a little weird, but yeah gets a 9, so that gives a node 3 and overall total slightly more balanced, total score of 35.
So why the node 3 over the Lumia 1020, despite the same score honestly, it’s just a little more well rounded, and that makes a better package a lot of people, don’t realize the versatility of 4k video and as a video person, you’re doing videos on YouTube a Kind of internally weighted video a little bit more, but at the end of the day, it’s your money being spent. What’S your number one, what’s your number one smartphone camera? I will have links to everything. I’Ve talked about in this article all the smart phones right below that like button. So if you want to hit that up, but those were all be there, but also I’ll, also have all the full reviews of all the smart phones I talked about and then I’ll include some honorable mentions, because there are some smart phone cameras that were in the Top 5 that are still great, even though they didn’t make the list so I’ll, include those below as well, either way that’s been it.
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