Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iPhone 12 Pro Max vs Samsung Note 20 Ultra / Huawei Mate 40 Pro Camera Test Comparison.”.
All right, so these are pretty much the three best camera phones in 2020. So welcome to the showdown. We’Ve got the iphone 12 pro max, which has the biggest image sensor of any apple product ever as well as a couple of extras over the already quite capable iphone 12 pro camera. We’Ve got the galaxy note: 20 ultra, which is samsung’s pinnacle of refinement, really massive sensor, a crazy five times: optical zoom, and this new laser autofocus module to fix their one achilles heel, focusing and then we’ve got huawei, who, you could argue, have actually pushed smartphone photography Forward more than any other company, they were the first to develop a really powerful night mode. They were the first with a triple camera setup, they’re. Also, the company who almost every year seemed to manage to come out with an even bigger image sensor than the year before. In fact, this huawei phone has the biggest sensor of any modern smartphone, which is one of the most important factors in a camera. Okay, let’s see which is the best camera phone of 2020., so just taking photos during the day. We’Ve never had three phones that are this consistently brilliant, but at the same time it’s kind of incredible that you can point these three cameras at the same scene. They can capture all fantastic results in their own rides, but they’re also incredibly different to each other. The iphone shoots warmer redder, colors, samsung, cooler, blue tones and huawei well huawei doesn’t really have a consistent, color profile.
I’Ve probably taken 500 photos on this huawei mate. 40. Pro now, i still couldn’t tell you what its style is it just kind of takes each photo as it comes and treats them separately? Does this matter not really, it rarely looks bad, but what is really important is detail, and this is one thing that without fail, samsung wins at, which is not hugely surprising. While the iphone only has a 12 megapixel sensor, samsung’s is 108 and what was this 50? It’S a little bit ahead when you’re on auto mode, where each phone churns out roughly 12 megapixel shots. But if you use each camera’s full res mode, then yeah it’s a big jump, although i was kind of surprised to see that the 12 megapixel iphone keeps up with the 50 megapixel huawei.
Now. This is where we end up with a bit of a a moral dilemma. See apple’s camera philosophy seems to be: let’s keep it real. Let’S keep the scene looking how it looks to your eyes, but the more i use samsung and huawei’s cameras. The more i realize that they’re not afraid to adjust things a little bit so, for example, here’s a really challenging scene shot on the iphone and just because of how much brighter the outdoors is than the indoors.
It ends up overexposing it just like a professional dslr camera would. But if you take that same photo on the huawei, you can see that it detects that this portion is outdoors and it says okay, what we’re going to do is massively lower the exposure of that part so that you can see loads of blue in the sky. Instead of it looking blown out so as a result, even though this iphone does have pretty amazing dynamic range in extreme cases, you will find some overexposed bright areas which you probably won’t on the huawei, so that can make huawei’s shots. Look more aesthetically pleasing, but also in some instances, kind of fake looking and that’s where you might actually decide you’re tending towards samsung, because samsung sits about halfway between the two.
It’S a good compromise, but there are definitely times when this sort of super aggressive, dynamic range does play to huawei’s advantage. Let’S say you have a not very well lit, subject sitting in front of a really well-lit background, the iphone tries to keep the image, as is to preserve the way it really looks. But huawei’s just like this part, looks dark. Let’S make it brighter, and this difference is often even more pronounced on the phone’s ultrawide cameras, which aren’t as good at getting in tons of light, so they rely even more on the software.
I will say, though, that that is quite an extreme example. For the most part with the ultrawide – and i think this applies generally to all photos – samsung strikes a really good balance. It’S got the most detail, not just in your subject, but also in the fringes of your shots. Where distortion is exaggerated.
Huawei technically has the better quality ultrawide sensor and every now and again it does come out with a shot that makes you think, wait a second. Where did you come from, but it’s just not a very wide ultra wide camera. Oh also, i did mention that the sensor on the iphone 12 pro max is the biggest image sensor apple’s ever used on a phone by a mile and one of the coolest side. Effects of this is more separation between foreground and background than on the smaller iphone 12 pro, but just bear in mind that here in this comparison, it’s up against the big dogs between these three phones, the 12 pro max still actually has the smallest sensor.
So while it does get some nice looking background blur it’s not as much as samsung and huawei so far, then samsung’s in the lead, but this is where it gets a little complex stay with me here. So i talked about the image processing that samsung and huawei. Do on their photos that kind of bringing down of the exposure and making sure the skies always look blue? Well, this happens after you take the photo. This is called post processing and the important caveat to this is that you can’t do that in video in video.
You’Ve got to rely on what your phone can capture in real time, and this is where the iphone gains a couple of points. The chipset inside the iphone is actually built around being able to record two streams of video. At the same time, high exposure and low exposure and then blending them together, so the dynamic range it can capture in video, looks almost as good as it does on photos, whereas for the phones that rely a bit more on post processing, their dynamic range is worse. In video and samsung tries to compensate for this by dialing up the contrast, so it still looks good, but more often than not, there is less information here than on the iphone. Just take a look at the darker areas, like my jeans, for example, the huawei is such a wild card. Sometimes the video looks awesome.
The colors come out fantastic exposure on point other times, just just no really, and while all these are pretty stable, if you’re just walking around try running and wow, it becomes very clear that apple and samsung are in league of their own niche scenario. Yes, but i wasn’t expecting that much of a difference plus something that i can’t really show you through this video is the fact that the iphone also shoots in 10-bit dolby, vision, hdr or in other words, it’s filming in a way such that there’s a lot of Extra hidden, color information being captured and that’ll become really obvious. If you want to try and edit the videos afterwards, you might have noticed that samsung’s video is a tad crisper. You can see it if you look at the trees in the background here, but this isn’t something that’s fundamental to the camera.
It’S just samsung’s camera software whacking an extra layer of sharpness. On top of it now, one of the main takeaways actually had while shooting video on all these phones is that they focus fast. Both samsung and huawei. Have laser sensors to lock onto things and apple has their own lidar scanner, but take a look at this while apple is able to gently adjust its focus as objects, come closer and move further away and samsung can do this too.
It looks quite cinematic huawei’s. Focusing is just a little jolty. It gets there fast, but while you’re taking video, you don’t really want sharp movements like this and finally, samsung does have the option to record 8k video, but you probably won’t use it very much. It’S kind of janky and it just takes up a ton of storage.
Now there is something else as well as video that the iphone 12 pro max absolutely smashes, and that is portrait mode. For starters, it has a 2.5 time, zoom camera that is primarily there just to take portraits, basically zooming in when taking photos of people prevents you having to like put your phone right up into their face, which can distort their facial features so to try and compensate Samsung uses two times digital zoom for portraits, which is alright, but loses some quality and huawei just doesn’t zoom at all which, as you can see, doesn’t look as good. Also, what most fans tend to do in portrait mode is figure out what’s foreground and make it sharp and then figure out what’s background and make it blurry, but the iphone does a better job of subtly blending the two layers. So if you take a look at my jumper in this shot here, you can see that apple has understood that one of my shoulders is further back than the other one. So it’s a little softer looking also, this might be because of the new lidar scanner.
The edge detection is unbelievable, like this is such a complex photo, and yet i couldn’t point to a single thing that looks off samsung and huawei. They both also have a tendency to over beautify faces, but this is a personal preference. It is annoying that you can’t completely disable it, but hey i mean everyone wants to look pretty. You might like it now, while apple does have that 2.5 x, zoom camera, which is fantastic for portraits the other. Two phones are actually equipped with five time zoom cameras, and while you can’t really use those for portraits, because it’s so much magnification you’d be like taking your photos like this, the benefit of them is that, if you want to see far, you can do that as Soon, as you get past five times, zoom samsung and huawei are in a league of their own they’re way. Better you’ve just got to decide whether this is useful to you or not. Each of these phones can also take selfies, obviously um, and i’m gon na give this category to the huawei. I know i really wish this was simpler too. It’S very detailed, as detailed as you’re ever really gon na want a selfie to be. There is some face. Beautification going on here like with the samsung, but it doesn’t feel excessive and the real differentiator is the fact that this can go wide thanks to a second ultrawide camera on the front which is perfect for vlogging. If you did decide to do that, and to that end, it’s nice to see that huawei’s, finally paying attention to audio quality the microphone on that phone actually sounds pretty good. It’S not the best. I would hand that to the iphone, but have a listen for yourself. Okay, this is me talking on the iphone 12 pro max.
This is me talking on the galaxy note 20 ultra – and this is me talking on the huawei mate 40 pro also just coming back to the whole thing about beautification, i’m kind of curious. What is your opinion on it? Because we obviously love the idea of every photo looking 100 true to life and the iphone does the best job of that. But every now and again i can’t help but feel like especially with this new deep fusion software that really tries to kind of bring out the textures. It can look a little bit unflattering, hey here’s a throwback. Do you remember when slow motion was like the hot topic of smartphone cameras, when samsung, huawei and even apple were all fighting to have the slowest slow-mo on the front cameras as well as the back well kind of feels like companies just forgot about it in 2020.? That said, just the nature of having better camera sensors on these phones than ever before does mean that slo-mo has never been better. Huawei can get the slowest we’re talking, video, so slow that it can often look like nothing’s actually happening.
It does have some very interesting potential use cases, but for most day-to-day situations, it’s so slow that it’s often been described as kind of boring. Samsung can still get pretty slow while retaining decent quality, and then the iphone has the least ability to slow, but more often than not a slightly nicer looking output. So you might have started to notice a theme in this camera.
Comparison apple likes to control the user experience to give you a bit less flexibility, whether it’s zoom or slow-mo, but to make sure that everything you can take on this phone does look good, and i like that approach. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it does come with one caveat: the iphone camera is a bit less fun. I just think that, because samsung and huawei’s cameras don’t take themselves as seriously they’re, not afraid to have a few extra features that are just interesting and experimental, as opposed to necessarily being the most polished, i love huawei’s light painting mode.
For example, you can draw things in the dark or ai color, which turns the entire background, black and white or dual view which lets you capture multiple magnifications. At the same time, or even just macro, the phone uses its onboard ai to automatically switch to a close-up camera. When you get really near to something and it’s good quality. This isn’t one of those gimmicky features. You’Ll never use. You’Ve then got samsung.
You can take live, focused, portrait mode, video and, while i would say it’s, okay, in a best case scenario, it’s fun or probably as a better example, their single take mode, which is actually proven to be kind of useful. So you probably have a lot of situations where you know that you want to capture a moment, but off the top of your head, you can’t quite think of what the best way of capturing it is. So here you can just tap the shutter once and it takes everything it takes photos it takes videos, it takes ultrawide shots, it even gives you options with filters and music too. It’S quite cool every now and again just to try it and see what it comes out with. Oh and if you are enjoying the video by the way a sub to the channel would be spectacular. So i guess what i’m really saying is that the iphone 12 pro max camera is like the zenith of refinement, but at the same time it’s so laser focused on the standard photo and video features that it kind of feels like a missed opportunity.
But you could also argue that what it can do at night is very fun. Nighttime photography is what i was looking forward to the most for two reasons: one it’s where the improvements of the new sensor on this iphone should be most noticeable and two. It’S an area, that’s historically been dominated by android phones a couple years ago. The story was that huawei can take incredible photos in the dark. Samsung also has a night mode, but it’s hot garbage apple doesn’t even have a night mode, but i would say that narrative is changing while huawei’s improvements have slowed, then. Actually, this latest phone has ditched optical image, stabilization, which would have helped you keep your phone still for night mode.
Shots samsung and apple have made massive strides for some perspective. This is a photo taken on the iphone 10s max from two years ago. This is a photo from the 11 pro max. This is the 12 pro max. Apple is caught up fast fast enough that i’d say on balance, the iphone beats huawei and it actually ends up as a contest between apple and samsung. Sometimes the iphone wins like here take a look at the painting of the flowers on the right. It just nails the exposure and sometimes samsung wins like in this shot here, but i can’t believe i’m saying this more often than not. The iphone hits all the pillars of a good night mode photo.
It restores the actual daylight color of objects, it smooths out surfaces that would otherwise become riddled in artifacts or just noise, and it’s very detailed. I got ta say that the huawei didn’t impress me in some ways. It feels like they’ve kind of gone backwards, a little bit. The lack of optical image.
Stabilization does mean it’s kind of prone to micro movements while capturing and while its shots are generally bright. I think they would actually benefit from being a bit darker, because all this brightness is doing is exposing the amount of noise in them. You know something else that huawei used to be so far ahead of the competition at was shooting the stars astrophotography, but now i would almost side with the iphone. It actually seems to produce a slightly cleaner output, and actually that’s not the only advantage at night that the iphone has, for starters, portraits it’s the only phone that can take both night mode and portrait mode at the same time, which means just a ton more light And video thanks in part to having the widest f 1.6 aperture, it turns out less grainy, more detailed, but also better color corrected footage. So all of those videos you take in restaurants and living rooms and those kind of middle to low light situations. It’S gon na look better on the iphone so putting all this together.
It does lead us to a natural conclusion. Yes, there isn’t going to be one phone, that’s on top in every single situation, but the galaxy note 20 ultra overall, i would say, is the best photo camera you can buy. It’S got extreme detail, it’s got aggressive, but not over aggressive, dynamic range and just a lot of interesting options to play around with, but the iphone 12 pro max is the best video camera on a phone thanks to just really good quality dynamic range unrivaled consistency between The lenses and low light video that holds itself together surprisingly well, but this phone is actually also almost as good as samsung and photos too. It really wins some points back in low light.
If you really did like the flexibility of loads of different camera modes and fun things to play around with or if the main thing you’ll be using, is the selfie camera then consider the huawei, but on balance it is the weaker camera system of the three okay. If you enjoyed this video, i have spent an absolute age on it, so a sub to the channel would be just amazing. My name is aaron. This is mr who’s, the boss and i’ll catch you in the next one. You .