The Best Smartphone For Photographers in 2024

welcome back Peta pixel viewers to our phone Fandango today we're going to be comparing the Samsung s24 Ultra versus the Google pixel 8 Pro versus the iPhone 15 Pro Max because we have now reviewed all three of these phones they have very similar characteristics and so we're going to put them to the test against each other today now I know after all these phone videos lately you might need some reminding that yes we are still indeed a photography videography Channel but you know what photographers and videographers use smartphones all the time for Creative uses and so we are going to be looking at this in terms of how we would use these for photography and videography there's so many intricacies into the different os's and the way they handle and speed of processing stuff we're not really getting into that we really want to talk about the cameras that we have here the fact that all three of these cameras now feature five times lenses we're going to talk about that as well image quality overall portrait mode night photography mode we really want to focus on these core values that all of these phones share I know there's so many other phones huawe xiaomi vivos and stuff but again we just don't really carry these in North America so we're sticking to the big three okay so we're going to start things off with lenses and cameras and we'll get the easiest ones out of the way first it's the ultra wide cameras on these phones uh so you know we actually have a tie here before we go any further and you could call it tie for second or tie for last tie for worst or tie for worst if you really want to be mean like Jordan there on these Ultra wides he really doesn't like them very much and that's understandable CU they often don't take very good images so to TI for worst Jordan we are looking at the Samsung s24 Ultra and the iPhone 15 Pro Max so both of these have a roughly 133mm equivalent they're both f2. tws and I mean look they have their place they can be fun they can give you a very Dynamic wide- angle look and you can actually get quite close almost to touching the lenses so you can do need Ultra wide macros but both are limited to 12 megapixels the corners often get a little bit rough looking they're just not going to deliver the best results out of the cameras so that makes the winner the Google pixel 8 Pro this actually has quite an updated ultrawide camera so first off this is a 48 megapix sensor not a 12 megapixel sensor it starts off with a wider 11 mm fullframe equivalent so it gets you a little bit more dramatic kind of look still focuses nice and close and it's an F 1.95 so it's even faster than the competition so you know I still find that I don't use this lens that much but of all three this is easily the best okay now on to the main camera this is pretty much our most important camera here our largest sensor our best image quality in third place and this is highly subjective but I'm going to give it to the Samsung s24 Ultra look all three of these phones are very close the Samsung does have some unique factors it's a nice fast f1.7 aperture 23mm fullframe equivalent nice and wide and most importantly it is a 200 megapixel sensor now on that note when you shoot the 200 megapixels you can only do that for jpeg there is a slight advantage in overall detail but it's very slight and honestly I think given the larger file sizes and the fact that most of the stuff is going to be used for social media applications I don't really consider that a big Advantage my main knock against the Samsung files is this although I can get some beautiful images out of the camera it seems to be that as I'm shooting different locations I'm getting just kind of different color balances different effects everything always looks maybe a Touch Too Vivid a touch too oversharpened I mean you can see on our sample the Samsung sensor is very contrasty but it's clearly oversharpened and it doesn't actually have a lot of in arent detail just a lot of edge sharpness as if somebody cranked the clarity slider so in my opinion I like to go with something a little bit less processed looking in second place it is going to be the iPhone 15 Pro Max we got a really nice sensor F 1.78 aperture 48 megapixels uh with the iPhone what I would say about it is although it has very similar detail to what the Samsung delivered it doesn't do the overprocess as much I also really like the fact that the iPhone's colors tend to be a little bit more consistent across the board little a bit more toned down nice warmth I find with their color balance which I usually find pretty pleasing and if I want it to be more processed and sharpen it up I always have the option to do that instead of having it baked in like the Samsung so first place it's another win for the Google pixel 8 Pro with its 50 megapixel sensor F 1.68 aperture 25mm fullframe equivalent this is a fantastic main camera as you can see in our samples with the Google seems to have is just more inherent detail than the other two sensors without overprocess it the other thing I will say here is when we were looking at our files that we shot across many different locations the Google just seemed to have the nicest most neutral color balance and then from there you can take it whatever Direction you want if you choose to shoot your heaths and your raw files okay so finally let's talk about the five times lenses that we find here on the phones and again I just keep moving benches because Jordan keeps saying new camera new bench so okay this is a different bench so in third place it's going to be the iPhone 15 Pro Max this was one of the new changes to the pro Max was to add a new five X lens and you know it's a nice range I love the focal length it's an f2.8 lens for sure but it's only 12 megapixels and you actually do see that difference and you see it here compared in our charts it just does have far less resolution in detail than the other ones are going to have now that all being said I get that for social media applications this isn't going to be a big deal but if you want to use this 5x lens to shoot Landscapes are still alive and you want to get the best detail the iPhone is not it okay in second place it's the Samsung s20 for Ultra but there's an interesting backstory before we get into the lens itself up to this point Samsung was famous for 10 times lens I mean that was their claim to fame and people really got used to that extra reach the extra distance still pretty good Optical quality and then with the s24 Ultra Samsung decided to get rid of it go to a five times lens and there is some logic to making the switch because now behind that five times lens you have a new 48 megapixel sensor and thus with a crop you can still get that 10 times range with basically the same megapixels that we had before still it is upsetting a lot of people but when we're talking about this actual five times lens in comparison to the other companies it does give good resolution I do like the fact that it's optically image stabilized very well I didn't have any problems handholding it but it's got a slower F34 aperture it's also worth pointing out that Samsung s24 Ultra also has a three times lens it's a 10 megapixel sensor that operates to 12 megapixels and frankly it's nothing to really write home about in the end we're really just going to stick to that Ultra wide Main and 5x lens and in first place another win for the Google pixel 8 Pro you know their five times lens has a big 48 megapixel sensor it's got great image stabilization a fast f2.8 aperture so it easily dominates the field here but we also should talk about why the Google pixel 8 Pro is winning all of the lens and Camera categories and that's because Google really made a big effort with this latest phone to increase the sensor size across the board update the Optics we really saw some big Hardware changes whereas the iPhone and the Samsung really they just updated the new five times lenses otherwise they basically borrowed a lot of the exact same Hardware from their older phones okay so our next category it's portrait mode something that I use all the time on a smartphone and although this phone won all of our lens camera categories it's going to be third place when it comes to portrait mode it's the Google pixel 8 Pro basically Google just hasn't refined this process very well so one big Quirk I'm going to look at the main camera first you don't get it with a one times camera you get actually a 1.5 times range so it does change your background a little bit in perspective I mean compared to the other two cameras but it works fine the problem here first around the hair it just still can't handle it I mean it just kind of blocks it out it it has a weird kind of halo around areas that it struggles with and in general your subjects tend to have bit of a cardboard cutout now we also wanted to push it with pets and see how that does for a lot of people pets are their favorite portraits that they take and again the Google lags behind so so here licking my dog penny with that 1 and 1 half times focal length it's the same issue I mean we just get these weird Halos it struggles with the hair and how to deal with it but another problem it tends to have is just how it renders the areas that are INF Focus to out of focus properly with depth maps I find that there's certain areas that should be soft focused but are still in Focus we also notice as well you can see this porch that we took of Jordan here where it does strange things this piece of grass the head of the grass is still in Focus but the stem is out it just gets confused in a lot of situations I also want to do an example at the five times lens because this is where I would shoot a lot of portraits with the Google pixel 8 Pro it's interesting that you cannot actually shoot the 5x lens in portrait mode what I had to do there was just shoot the 5x lens normally and then apply a portrait effect and so here we can look at my daughter Maddie and it's a similar story here you can really see on her ponytails where it's just struggling to know what to do with that situation and the rendering just doesn't look very natural so in second place it's a Samsung S 24 Ultra and when I first reviewed this phone I was actually blown away by how good the portraits are and I really want to elaborate on this I think it's important but what I soon realized and why these side by-side comparisons are so handy is looking at them side by side what the s24 ultra seems to do when dealing with difficult hairs or FlyAway hairs or having to render the distance from hair in front to hair in back is it tends to really blur any sort of errant hairs now if you're doing a portrait of for example Ben here who runs this very slick cleaned look no problem does a great job and the other people I shot jiren and Jordan they both have close cropped hair so even if it did chop any hair off or blur any hair right out it looked pretty natural with my daughter Maddie we're not getting any Halos or anything like the Google does but what it's basically doing is artificially blurring out hair that should still be in focus and so you really notice it more there otherwise though with the one times main camera I really like the result of how it handles the natural rendering of INF Focus to out of focus that's nice and natural you know she doesn't look like a cardboard cutout and then when I shot my dog Penny similar result here we're getting a more natural rendering of the subject against a soft background so I think Samsung still has a more refined look than Google when we look at the five times lens it's the same story I like the natural rendering but again it does chop that hair off in a sort of awkward way in a social media post you might not notice it that's why it gets our second place but there is a better one out there so our first place winner it's the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max so so first off looking at the one times lens it just has a very natural rending you'll see that the hair is rendered nicely uh you know my daughter she just Blends into the background effectively I like what it does with her arm in the foreground out of focus the leaves beside her it just looks the most natural and here with Penny on the Apple iPhone again it's a really nice look I think this is the best phone for taking pictures of pets you can see things like how her the hair on her chest is a sof Focus but as it goes further back her body just goes more naturally naturally out of focus in a very realistic photographic way and apple I think is just doing the best work with their depth maps but also they said they specifically trying to mimic the look of particular photographic lenses known for good bouquet whatever they're doing it seems to work and now here let's take a look at the 5x lens my only caveat here it has the most natural rendering absolutely still the best depth maps but it is only at 12 megapixels so it's not going to have the same sharpness that you're going to get out of the other two cameras but I still think the better actual portrait look more realistic bouquet is more important than the megapixels and again in most social media situations it won't even be an issue okay so we got this beautiful light but it's going down behind the hills it's going to be dark soon so this seems like a good time to talk about night mode so in third place it is the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max I mean iPhones kind of struggle with their night mode they did improve it on this latest iPhone 15 series of camera phones but it still needs some work I find that first off you're limited to 12 megapixels you cannot get any more resolution than that as well it still is the noisiest out of of the three cameras and on top of that the thing with the apple is you can choose whether to engage or not engage night mode but it's up to the camera to tell you when that's even available it'll only unlock night mode as an option when it's dark whereas the Samsung and Google I can use night mode even on a bright sunny day and that can actually sometimes be very useful to get better Shadow detail or deal with strong contrast in second place it's the Samsung s24 Ultra with their night mode that they call natgrapher actually does a pretty good job with dark situations first off uh it is limited to 12 megapixels and they are overprocess the hell out of it but I actually like the way it looks so here's the thing first off compared to the iPhone at the same 12 megapixel resolution I feel the Samsung just has more inherent detail as it is and definitely less noise they're certainly getting rid of the noise with noise reduction but their sharpening is working so much so that when we're going to talk about the Google next I actually found the level of detail to be actually very similar and had a hard time really deciding which one was naturally better I had to take a second look in the end I think if you can do it without over processing the image that's better but kudos to Samsung for actually delivering pretty effective sharp detail Rich night photos at 12 megapixels and so in first place it's no surprise yes it is the Google pixel 8 Pro with their night sight night mode and we've always been impressed with nights side I mean even the older smartphones it was really good theyve managed to stay ahead of the curve even up to this pixel 8 Pro Series their night sight Works fantastic I mean first thing that's a big benefit you're not losing any resolution you get the full 50 megapixels out of that main camera also I like that we're getting good detail without having to do any oversharpening and any noise reduction here is still quite mild so we're just getting naturally less noise we're getting good detail and then we can always push those files further and still have all that extra resolution all right it's Jordan to talk about the video rankings for these and before we get started I just want to mention we are just talking about the default video apps that are built into these you can expand all of these phones with some third party apps but then that gets really complicated and I don't want to subject you to that so in third place it is going to the Google pixel 8 Pro now the big reason for this is looking at the video I did find it doesn't have a lot of detail and it is extremely oversharpened as well any of the digital stabilization has some of the weirdest warping of any of the three phones I just felt like the video was very artificial coming off of this and as just a personal note it's doesn't offer 24 Fram per second recording straight out of the camera and that's my preferred frame rate so it was destined to lose second place is going to go to the Samsung Galaxy s24 here we get quite a bit more detailed video than what I saw in the pixel 8 but more importantly than that because we have such a high resolution sensor it's capable of capturing 8K video and I did see a noticeable Improvement in detail when we jumped over to that mode this also gets US 24 frame per second recording and easy access to manual controls this is the best Android phone that I've used for video so it's clear number two first place is going to go to the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max because I've been complaining for years why is all of our phone footage so gross and overprocessed and contrasty and Apple has introduced their own log format with this now it's only available when you're recording prores takes up a lot of space unless you use a third party app but I've got to say the image coming off of this is comparable to like an apsc camera tons of dynamic range and most importantly I can get rid of that oversharpened oversaturated look you can get beautiful footage out of this if you record log and even if you don't you're still getting nice consumer friendly video with very easy to ous tools for years Apple has been known for having the best smartphones if you're interested in video and that is going to continue moving forward okay so we tally up our scores here and it looks like our overall winner is the Google pixel 8 Pro and that does make sense I mean we gave a lot of weight to how this camera operates for photography and it really does seem to have the best sensors and the best lenses involved that being said you know we also really like the fact that the Google pixel 8 Pro has great neutral color and it seems to give the most raw untouched detail for a photographer to work with afterwards you also do need to download any extra apps to unlock anything on the Google pixel8 pro you already get access to all your manual controls right there in the camera app however it's also worth pointing out that if you're into videography it scored the lowest and if you're into like AI based editing like portrait modes and stuff like that it's also quite poor and the cloud-based AI Google's introducing with its Gemini product just isn't quite there yet it still looks very unconvincing and very rough our second place winner is the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max and this is an interesting camera because first off what Apple's really doing is they're aiming the camera at the more casual user they want to have easy convenient fun things like great portrait modes for example and nice color which the Apple delivers if you do want to unlock more professional capabilities you're looking at downloading an extra app like highlight or something to really unlock some of the features of the camera camera if you're into videography this is absolutely your choice especially you get the black magic video app the other thing I want to point out too is HDR I mean Samsung and Google are starting to do that looks like Google's made their own proprietary HDR format and Samsung is heavily borrowing from that but the Apple HDR format is not only more Universal working across many more displays both for photos and video but they just do a better job with the HDR processing they get much better image quality out of it whereas Google and Samsung still have a ways to go Okay so Place goes to the Samsung s24 Ultra but again these are just point rankings let's keep things in context the s24 ultra actually won the most second place finishes I mean it really is a fantastic allaround camera and phone and it does a really good job you also have some nice unique features like the stylus which would be really handy not only for work outside of Photography but also for making selections for drawing around subjects and for even using as a remote timer Samsung though seems to be borrowing a lot from Google and following the pack it's weird that they kind of let go of what made them unique with their 10 times lens and are really trying to copy what the competitors are doing and because they're boring a lot of Technology they can never really be ahead they can only be the same or lower the other issue I would say if I had any complaint about the Samsung s24 is that although casual users might absolutely love the vividness and the look of the photos a lot of people who were more enthusiastic or wanted to have more control found that there was a lot of processing baked into the s23 ultra for example and they were really hoping that that would go away when we moved up to new phone but looks like Samsung hasn't really changed anything they've really stuck to a lot of what they saw in the older phones and that's unfortunate they had an opportunity to kind of shake things up and evolve their cameras and they kind of did more of the same I'm sure you'll have a lot of comments and a lot of disagreements so let the comment Firestorm began you can find that right below subscribe to the channel if you still like us that'd be really nice and always listen to our podcast it's on the exact same YouTube channel you can watch it here or you can listen to it on all your favorite podcasting apps thanks so much for joining us we'll see you soon with more episodes in petapixel and for a long time they won't be smartphones I hope the s24 ultra and the

Channel: PetaPixel

Views: 104,408

Keywords: PetaPixel, Jordan Drake, Chris Niccolls, Chris Nichols, Jordon Drake, iphone 15 pro max review, google pixel 8 pro review, samsung galaxy s24 ultra review, best android phone for photographers, best smartphone for photographers, best smartphone for video, best smartphone for youtube, samsung galaxy s24 ultra vs google pixel 8 pro, iphone 15 pro max vs samsung galaxy s24 ultra, iphone 15 pro max vs google pixel 8 pro, best smartphone for portraits, dpreview, dpreview tv

Id: x8t51GEnJyw

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024