Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The New Best Smartphone Camera!”.
All right yall have waited patiently for this. Once again this year, we’ve run our blind smartphone camera test scientific style. You know we always think we know what the absolute best smartphone cameras are, but do we actually know like what if we wanted an objective answer straight from Real World data literally every time I review a phone there’s some people in the comment section saying: oh, I You know iPhone photos are the only good ones or I only like pixel photos or you know. Samsung is the only one who does good portrait mode, but what? If we put that to the test, what if we took a bunch of the best smartphone cameras on the planet and took them out into the real world and took the exact same photo with each and every one of them and then strip them of all their Labels and then had you the public vote on which one’s photos you like the best that should reveal the best actual smartphone camera. So that’s exactly what we did this year, we took these 20 smartphones updated all of their software charged them all up, got their batteries to 100 %. Then we went out and took this same three photos with each one.
One daytime photo one low light photo and one portrait mode photo. Yes, it is surprisingly hard to stay perfectly still for 20. Identical photos to be taken in a row, but I did it for you. Then we had to go in and import all the photos from every single smartphone camera Harder Than You Think strip them of all their exf data and then upload them to a site that we’ve built that lets us put them side by side. For you guys to vote on head-to-heads millions and millions and millions of times which you did, that should give us a statistically significant winner and loser we’ll get to that, and the results this year were kind of interesting a little bit. I almost didn’t make this video, but I can tell people have been waiting, the competitive tension is high and the actual results might be a little surprising to some of you. So let’s get into it.
So the data, our site, spits out all comes in these text. Files with matchup ratings for every single combination of smartphones, we actually had them coded by letters of the alphabet. You can see a through T, but that little number number that one right here is the most important that is the ELO rating. You know the system that ranks chess players or tennis players, basically anything head-to-head with enough matchup information.
We can sort of sort through all these letters based on who they beat and who they lose to and creative Power Rankings, and that will give us our winners. So the question you probably all want to know who were the winners and so we’ll go we’ll go category by category because, like I said there were three different scenarios, daytime low light and portrait mode. So, let’s go one by one so daytime for the regular daylight photos we kind of had it set up with just me sitting in front of this window here, but there’s a lot to this photo. The strongest light is from inside the room, but then the window light is actually a good test of dynamic range and then there’s also a variety of colors. There’S my skin tone. There’S the orange chair next to the blue Pillow a few other things.
This is on purpose, there’s no individual variable that can dominate this test. So every single phone we try to frame the exact same way way from the exact same spot, holding one of them up as a reference, so we can get as close as possible and everything is fully auto. We just open the camera app make sure the lens is clean and just hit the shutter button. We don’t even tap to focus just point and shoot it takes about 6 minutes to go through all 20 phones, like I said it’s kind of hard to sit still for 6 minutes straight, but we did it so for this regular daylight photo situation. The winner with the highest ELO rating, is the pixel 7A. That’S pretty impressive, so this this is the photo that you guys for the most part voted as the winner in most of its matchups, pretty neutral photo to be honest, not too bright, not too dark.
Pretty excellent dynamic range and it’s also not a fluke, because the second highest ELO rating came from the pixel fold, so the fold took a very similar photo and then finishing up on the podium. Was the OnePlus open one of those high-end folding phones? So I will say my personal favorite photo and the one that actually won for me when I blind tested myself was this one. This is the fourth highest ELO rating. This is the OnePlus 11. It’S definitely a little on the contras, your side, but a little more confident with nailing the exposure and having dynamic range. Nevertheless, it’s definitely interesting here. A lot of people pointed out that the sun behind me, you know, looked a little different in each photo. It might have been setting, so the background was a little different, which is a little bit true, but it wasn’t late enough in the day for that to actually affect the photo. I think the fact that the 7A is the only one with this little lens flare is actually just a coincidence and then fun fact in dead last with the absolute bottom lowest ELO rating for this daytime photo is the iPhone 15 Pro, not a terrible photo. I mean you can’t really get a horrible photo in normal, looking lighting for most of the smartphones, but when you put it up against the others, it’s mostly just the darkest one, and so when you put it up side by side against these much brighter photos. People just picked the brighter one, almost every single time. Funnily enough, though, you can absolutely overexpose for this competition as the second lowest.
Elo rating belongs to the Galaxy s23 Ultra for producing this weirdly Overexposed Masterpiece. So here are all the photos side by side with their ELO ratings feel free to pause it if you’d like to make some more observations. But let’s move on to the nighttime photos so low light low light is a much more challenging shot for a smartphone camera, especially with a tiny sensor and Tiny Optics trying to take in as much light as possible. But you know: computational photography has come a long way and even in this pretty dark rooftop, where the only light source was like 40 ft away from me.
These cameras still manag to do a good job and, if you’re ready for the plot twist, the highest overall ELO rating for the low light photo comes from dead last from the daylight photo. It is again the iPhone 15 Pro with another totally reasonable photo now following it very closely. In second place, was the pixel 8 Pro and actually the pixel 7A coming in third, and to be honest, I fully agree with all of these. It’S kind of it’s starting to get ridiculous.
How much some of the other smartphone cameras started to pump up the light, like literally the second you get outside the top four you get straight into bad HDR. Territory like this is the this is the fifth place photo from s23 Ultra, which is definitely too bright, and also you can see this little HDR haloe effects starting to show up around my head and then, if you scroll all the way down to the Oppo X6. Pro just my God, what happened like these cameras are going nuts. It looks like in this one they literally painted sloppily over me and just dragged up the exposure matter of fact.
Yep see that’s exactly what it looks like the Zen phone did this too, along with a few others, and I honestly think the OnePlus open not only made me brighter, but then it also identified the sky and made the sky darker, which just then starts to look. Look ridiculous. I mean real life. Looked nothing like this, so here are all the nighttime photos and their ELO ratings pause it. If you need it, and now we can move to the last, but not least, category portrait mode, so portrait mode kind of turns out to be the hardest test like this to run, because they all kind of do portrait mode a little bit differently. If you just open the camera app and switch to portrait mode, some of them do 2x. Some of them are 3x, some of them say 1X, but they’re actually like 1.5x, it’s kind of weird. So we tried to just keep it simple for this test and just open the camera, app switch to portrait mode and then move our feet forward or backward to try to match the focal length with all of these shots.
It kind of worked – and you know they all kind of also have different Boca levels. Some of them are adjustable. Some of them aren’t but, like I said, we’re just going with the default the point and shoot that most people will get when they do it and the portrait mode point and shoot winner with the highest ELO rating is the pixel 8 Pro. This was followed pretty closely by Samsung Z, fold 5, which I actually think had a better cutout and then the Third highest ELO here was the iPhone 15 Pro which I think had the most natural looking blur.
But basically, all of these Podium finishers have relatively subtle portrait modes, nothing too dramatic and then pretty good detail and overall balance in just the rest of the photo. I say this because the losers here in this particular category were nothing like this. They were some of the wonkiest weirdest photos in the entire competition and the loser with the absolute lowest ELO rating for this category and actually in any category, was the Sony Xperia 1 Mark 5 with this photo with that. That’S the photo like okay.
This this one looks like a mistake. We all actually thought it was a mistake as we shot it like. This can’t possibly be right right. We clean the lens, we take it again, it does it again and then it did it again and again so I mean I guess, for whatever reason, this $ 1,200 Android flagship phone in its Auto Port portrait mode just could not handle this lighting.
It had some weird issues anyway: here’s all of the portrait mode photos and their ELO ratings you’re welcome, I’d like to give out some awards now that we have all of our matchup data and all of our voting and all of our ELO ratings from across every Single person for what you guys voted for for more than 20 million total votes, there’s some pretty interesting stuff here. So we have our winners and losers in each of the three categories, which is cool, but if you average it all together, we have have the highest overall average ELO rating, we’ll call this one, the people’s champ and with the highest average of 1660, that’s pretty competitive. It was the pixel 7A, so this one won the daytime photo, as you probably remember, but then it also came in third place in the nighttime photo and fourth place of all 20 in the portrait mode photo. So that’s pretty strong, but here’s the kicker, the second highest average ELO rating was the pixel 8 Pro and the third highest average ELO rating again this is your votes. Is the pixel fold, so pixel pixel pixel, it’s a perfect pixel Podium. So here you can see the whole list from top to bottom, the three pixels at the top – surprisingly in Reverse price order and then bringing up the rear for total ELO is the Sony xer 1 Mark 5 and the xiaomi 13 Ultra. Then I also had to bring back the bang for the buck award, which I did this last year. Also, it’s basically just most votes from you guys, divided by MSRP at launch, so most votes per dollar basically, and so your winner again is going to be the pixel 7A.
This was a phone that launched right around 500 bucks. It did incredible on the tests, but in second place in votes per dollar is the nothing phone 2, it’s a pretty good performing phone and it actually launched like upper mid-range price. So this is a good phone bang for the buck wise and then in 3A, 3B. Right next to each other, under underneath these two, you have the OnePlus 11 and the zenphone 10 and then impressively.
Actually, the Sony is not dead. Last in this category it is expensive and it did perform horribly, but not worse, bang for the buck wise than a super expensive, folding phone, the Z, flip 5 overall average uh did worse for the dollar, the more you know. So what did we learn with all this? Well I’ll. Leave you with this.
First of all the pixels killed it. They had the 123 finish they’re great bang for the buck. It was weird that they’re in RSE price order, but fine, but also there’s a lot more to a smartphone camera, of course, than just a sitting down staged photo of a person. We learned a little bit about how it shoots my skin tones there’s a whole bunch of other things. You might care about from autofocus speed to the UI to the actual file format, how editable it is to videos like there’s a there’s, a bunch more to it, but at the end of the day, I think we were still pretty not shocked by the slightly brighter Photos being the slightly less bright photos, and maybe we’ll run it back again next year and learn something new either way thanks for watching this one catch, you guys next time, peace, .