Gadgetory

for the past five years the iPhone has had the smartphone camera to beat if you wanted a phone that took reliable and consistent photos your best bet was to go with whatever the latest iPhone was available in the past year things have changed the competition has really stepped up its game and other smartphone makers now have cameras worthy of consideration both Samsung and LG have released phones this year with really impressive cameras that give the iPhone some solid competition now we just saw the iPhone 6s get released and Apple's touting that we've got more resolution this time around better performance in low-light all with that same reliable container of taking pictures on an iPhone that we were always we're all familiar with so we decided to take it and sack it up against the best from Samsung and LG so we've got Samsung's best the galaxy s6 edge+ we've got LG's best the LG g4 and we put them up against Apple's best the iPhone 6s plus yeah I brought these out and I put them in a bunch of different situations low-light macro portrait landscape you know basically everything that you'd want these cameras to succeed in so first we've got a macro image here this is a beautiful flower and this image is really bright and vibrant but there's some real issues here and namely you don't really see them until you look closely but it's actually out of focus and we found this to be a pretty common situation with the iPhone right focusing up close to the iPhone is not necessarily the easiest thing to do you have to give yourself more space than I think most people would expect and even tapping the focus here didn't really help and then on top of that you take another look at some of the colors here these flowers is we're actually going to see our white around the edges but the iPhone really kind of bled that color throughout and you lose a lot of depth of the color so let's take a look at LG's version of this obviously a totally different photo it's a totally different photo much more in focus but it's also a lot duller we don't get as much of the pink here in the center of the flower as we did with the iPhone and then we take a look at Samsung's and Samsung's basically splits the difference between those two it's it's sharp we can see all the way down into this flower over here but it's also still very separated from the background so you get this really awesome depth and there's a lot of color I mean we're seeing dark pinks in here that we weren't seeing in the iPhone and we're seeing white really really light pink out here at the edges that we weren't seeing the iPhone so I mean color depth actual depth clarity this one definitely beat out all the others yeah I agree there's some weirdness going on around the edges here it looks like it may be a little over sharpened but it doesn't take away from the photo at all I think that by far Samsung one this one hands-down so next photo we're going to look at is one just right from the corner of Central Park we got some flowers and trees and stuff in the front nice landscape with some buildings in the background a lot of different competing light highlights and shadows what do you think we got the first thing I'm noticing here is that where we saw the sharpening wasn't really a problem on Samsung the image of the flower here it's kind of a mess you lose a lot of detail in the center here and a lot of detail around the edges because Samsung is kind of over sharpening and you know that's kind of counterintuitive to what most people want or think you want a really sharp image but when you apply it artificially it can look really bad if we flip over to what the iPhone did you know you can see everything is just more pleasant to the eye there's yeah it's not as harsh to look at there's more detail preserved in this area it's not blown out and the image doesn't look as as overly crisp to my eyes this is way less aggressive of an image just right from the highlights to the shadows to that sharpening detail and that's what Samsung's phone's seemed to do this when there's a lot going on in a photo that's when they're sharpening is kind of exposed if it's a nice simpler shot like that flower it's it's nice to sharpen it up a little bit it doesn't have a lot of stuff to play with but in a really busy photo like this we can see that Samsung's phone's kind of overdo it a little bit but yeah this is probably this is really Pleasant all the way to the shadows in this building - you can see these leaves in the dark up here but without blowing out these flowers this is just like exactly what you'd want to take away from that setting you haven't did a really impressive job here over here on LG I can't say the same you got blown out highlights here the image just kind of looks just harsh to my eyes it's it's kind of got a lot of the similar sharpening issues as the Samsung and the busy details here just make it unpleasant to look at unfortunately so here we've got a pretty standard forward portraits head and shoulders very common shot we are outdoors in daylight here this particular image is from the iPhone and for the most part it's pretty good there's plenty of detail here you got detail in your eyes or eyelashes down to our hair the color is a little weird though it's kind of got this green cast which we saw a lot with the iPhone photos and it becomes really dramatic when we check out the other photos from LG and Samsung colors way more natural here yeah you can really see it in her skin and then definitely in the hair over here it's kind of borrowing some of the blue from the background here but the green cast when you really pull back and look at some of the other pictures is what stands out here and we saw that in a couple of the other iPhone photos that we were taking it tended to if it got the colors wrong it got them wrong green and that's not really a great color to let bleed into pictures that shouldn't have green in this question it wasn't portrait yeah it's just going to make it makes the face look you know a little sickly or so otherwise it's not bad we've got some great detail here not too much compression or anything but one thing we did notice is that there's it sounds like there's not a big difference in the apertures between the iPhone and the other phones right iPhone has a 2.2 aperture and the Samsung has f 1.9 and the LG has an F 1.8 lens and that that sounds really close but it actually makes a pretty big difference he or she looks compressed against the wall almost everything's in detail or in focus but you look at LG and the Samsung image and there's some separation there between her and the wall there's some depth in this image and that little change in aperture actually makes a really big difference in a picture like this at least when I'm close to the subject I think I think the Samsung did the best job here as far as balancing the color the sharpness and the saturation what's interesting though is is the LG is really kind of almost a d saturated or flat image which isn't great for directly out of camera image but if you want to edit your photos or something like that after the fact this gives you a good base to work with yeah I look at a photo like this and I think about like all the different directions I could take it when I'm editing a picture whereas I look at something like the one that we got out of the s6 edge+ and I say you know this one's probably already good enough to post somewhere I don't really need to do too much to it so that's really kind of a matter of choice so I think most people are going to want to do less out of the camera and would like something like this so we just took a look at a portrait image taken in daylight let's take a look at something on the far end of the spectrum taking at nighttime lit by phone screen and we can see here this is the iPhone image we can see that green cast again a lot of green color in his face especially where it falls off from light to shadow and then we also see that the iPhone didn't really handle the exposure too well it's really blowing out some highlights here around his nose and this forehead up here so not really the best thing but you got a usable image this is a really challenging moment to get a picture it was really dark out even though you can still see a little bit of blue in this guy it's not bad it kind of reminds me of when you had a disposable camera and you took a picture of the flash it's a little harsh yeah and it's got that green tint where as you can see if we flip over to what Samsung did it's kind of like the exact opposite all the green has been replaced with this orange a yellow which is way too extreme in this case and I really dislike this image a lot the other problems that I have in this image is it's way oversaturated the green is super green the red is super red and even though it looks like there's more detail in some of the areas where the iPhone blew it out you can tell it's just smeared and there's no actual detail there so it's really interesting how the two cameras handled this similar situation differently and really the winner I think here is the LG you've got all the detail in his face as best as you can preserve it it sure is not too oversaturated and it's not overexposed or green this is like the perfect blend of enough sharpening to get some detail out of the image enough noise reductions that doesn't look completely awful and I think a lot of this is also due to the optical image stabilization on the LG g4 all of these phones have optical image stabilization which is great and helps in especially in low-light situations where you need a longer exposure but LG's is definitely in a different class from the other two phones I mean you can hold this phone and kind of rock it around a little bit up and down and the image won't move on the screen it's almost disorienting so for a picture like this where you need to be holding the phone there for the shutter to open a little bit longer to capture the image the optelec optical image stabilization on the LG really helped make this the best picture of the three yeah I agree so we just took a look at a nighttime portrait now we've got kind of like a nighttime landscape scene here this is a highway and so all three cameras use their optical stabilization to the best they all are going to drag the shutter quite a bit here so the cars are going to hit some blur but the rest of the detail should be sharp now this here is the iPhone the image and it's kind of cool there's not a lot of warm tones in here it didn't pick up the headlights as being warm and change its white balance to that whereas if you look at the LG here it's the exact opposite it's that's a really warm in comparison right it's kind of yellow it's really kind of unnatural I don't think this is a better image the other thing that you can notice here between the LG and the iPhone is in the sky the LG is doing a ton of noise reduction and blurring up there whereas the iPhone kind of just holds the green yeah it's a grainy but more neutral duller photo but you might the detail is at least not been touched and messed around with too much whereas this has definitely had some processing done already but this is a sharper image and I think it's again thanks to the optical image stabilization you look at you just follow the lines all the way down to the center of the image and you can just see a sharpness that isn't there in the iPhone and especially when you look at the sign that's way back here this green sign you can pick up way more detail than you can on the iPhone and I found it almost even looks farther away I think probably because it's a wider field of view but you can actually read it here on the LG and then I think even better we get to the Samsung image we have basically the happy medium you know it's not the walls aren't completely yellow with all that ambient light you still get some of that natural daylight that's barely still left up in the sky balancing it all out you've got this really kind of good movement from like blue to warm and then you also have a lot of really great detail you can see the trash all along the highway all the way down and you know you go back to the iPhone image and that's a lot harder to see here yeah but you still have some of the problems that the LG one has like you said you know you can see a bunch of splotchiness up here in the sky which is where it's doing some noise reduction for you but otherwise this is probably the best is the same deal we can see a ton of detail back here as well you can see the sign that where we couldn't see it in the iPhone but this is another case of like not one of these three is too much better than the other one they're all really kind of a matter of taste where I phone is going a little more natural a little less processing but the LG and the Samsung especially are going to give you something better out of camera and ready to post without doing any more work to it yep totally so I went into this expecting that I was going to love one phone more than the others but I and this really wasn't the most scientific test it was a very situational I was you know finding things that I wanted to take pictures of and just pulling these phones out of my pocket and one by one thing those pictures which i think is how most people shoot and i think we got results that reflect what most people shoot right and we reviewing them on this high-resolution large screen which really isn't how most people review their phone photos right they're looking at them on their smartphone they're sharing them to Instagram that they're viewing on the smartphone or Facebook or wherever it might be and the reality is that any one of those photos that you took earlier are going to look great on any one of these screens it's really hard to find those differences if we looked at these same photos on a phone screen it would be a lot harder to parse those differences on exactly and so well there's no real winner here there's no real loser either right all of these phones take great photos in a lot of different situations and they're all pretty reliable no matter what you want to do with it afterwards and that hasn't always been the case that's quite a bit different than it was a couple years ago yeah if we did this test if you like even a year or two ago we would see much different results and it would probably be the iPhone that was the winner and it you know it's it's these two other companies Samsung and LG that stepped up their game we were able to catch up to where the iPhone was at and really give people cameras that are just as good if not better in some situations then the iPhone has always been and so now really any one of these cameras on these phones is going to get you the image that you want to get right so now it's just up to us to take good photos