You love your iPhone 7 Plus and find the beautiful pictures you make with the camera is money well spent. But you may not have the best smartphone camera in your hands.
Before you get all defensive, put the rods and cones in your eyes to the test. Be willing to set aside your lifelong devotion to Apple and submit to a blind test of pictures from five smartphones with the best-rated cameras.
YouTube tech blogger Marques Brownlee of MKBHD presented this test with the same photos made from five smartphones: the iPhone 7 Plus, the OnePlus 3T, LG G6, Samsung Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel XL. Posted Tuesday, the video already racked up more than 1.1 million views.
Brownlee asks viewers to be patient and honest in the seven-minute video, which appears at the bottom of this post, and to avoid reading viewer comments ahead of time. Don’t skip to the end to see which camera was used in shots A through E, either.
“Smartphone cameras have gotten so good that the difference between the top five best, meaning the ones you buy because you take a lot of photos and videos, is so small,” Brownlee says in preparing the audience for the test. “It has gotten so small the difference is way less about objective differences in performance…. It’s more about personal preference, which one you think looks a little bit better, which one has some software features you like, maybe one has a different hue and looks a little better in the colors.”
iPhone 7 Plus camera versus Android’s best
Photo: MKBHD/YouTube
There is no denying the global popularity of the iPhone for its camera. If it has competition regarding this particular feature, it is because Apple set the bar very high for smartphone camera performance and picture quality.
Side-by-side comparisons of smartphone picture quality are nothing new, but Brownlee’s test is the best I have seen in terms of staying away from wonky technical matters and leaving the results up to the individual.
While differences in quality are small, each camera definitely offers vastly different looks in color, contrast and dynamic range. Brownlee picked challenging scenarios and subject matter that bring out these differences.
I was not consistent from set to set, picking different letters but then having to pause to consider how important those differences were before coming up with a decision on all-around performance. That’s all I will say about my test.
The results may or may not surprise you. And even if you picked a smartphone different from the one you have, there’s no need to run out to trade in.
Take the blind test and give us your impressions in the comments section below.
Source: PetaPixel
