Starting with the front cameras, which is probably the area that the iPhone has least improved on over the years, but still one thing that you do notice is this new found focus on skin tone. Its one of those things that you don't fully appreciate until you see the side by side where the Samsung shots in isolation looks brightish, but then you see the iPhone one and you realize, Oh yeah, my shirt was that color, and yeah, the boat was like that, and of course my hair is black, for now.
But at the same time, I do think the iPhone is severely in need of a hardware upgrade. Samsung has invested a lot into their selfie camera, and you can tell you get more natural background blur in the images and quite often some extra sharpness too.
Plus, I also think Samsung just takes more flattering photos across all cameras, which is not necessarily what you want. Let's say I'm taking a photo of you and you are that far away from me, but a selfie, if you think about it is a very intimate photo. You are very up close with your phone and so I think for those shots, most people would prefer the subtle brightening and smoothing that Samsung does to make you look good because the iPhone really does expose your flaws.
But if you have any dreams of vlogging, then the iPhone does take it in terms of video on the selfie camera. Not because the Samsung is bad, it's actually improved a lot in the last few generations, but its just the iPhone's high dynamic range is a little bit better, and it's also just much more resistant to grain. I think if you get into really dark areas, the Samsung can get very grainy very quickly.
Now, one of the new things quite literally on the table for the iPhone 15 Pro Max is Zoom. This is the first iPhone that I would actually say is a good option for trying to shoot the moon or take out to a concert. I was actually scrambling to get some tickets to go see Rick Astley live and test that theory, but since I couldn't, I decided to make Rick Astley at home.
This is our simulation of a concert and what that would look like on both phones. And see zoom is a complicated one because both of these phones go about zooming in a very different way. The Iphone has a single 5x optical zoom lens, the Samsung has both a 3x and 10x optical zoom lens and so you end up in this very funny situation in which both look very similar at 1x, Samsung looks better between 3x and 5x in that middle ground after Samsung's first optical zoom is activated but before the apple's has then as you hit 5x, apple looks better with not just more details but in a lot of cases more background blur too because it is a good quality 5x lens and then as you get to 10x Samsung takes over again, but its close this time, Samsung is definitely not twice as good like the magnification number might suggest.
But here's the thing, as soon an you switch to video, Iphone wins at every single magnification, even those points where Samsung technically has the edge in terms of its hardware. It's a product of the fact that this iPhone is the best iPhone for video ever. With the fact that Samsung phones in particular are quite sensitive to grain, there are times when they will shoot better zoomed content. Its just that a lot of things have to go its way for that to be the case.
More often than not with Max Zoom photos, Samsung is better but that is not always the case. Sometimes it is ambiguous and sometimes the iPhone takes it since its zoom camera has a much wider aperture that lets in more light. So on balance, I think apple has earned themselves a draw-in zoom for the first time in a long time.
Something I think is often underappreciated but still very important to the overall camera experience is the camera apps, so who does it better?
Well I have always found Samsung's camera to be more fun, it has historically been well ahead in terms of just the number of things you can do with it versus the Iphone and that's still kind of the case. You still got food-mode which makes your food look richer and tastier and Single-take which is this idea of taking one 10second clip and getting a whole load of different shot options out of it, but I do want to caviar that by saying that from the fun perspective, I don't think Samsung has kept up with other android manufactures who have come up with so many interesting experimental options and then from the practical perspective, its starting to feel a little dated versus the Iphone one because of the shutter lag.
It takes not as long as it used too but still noticeably longer than the Iphone to capture almost like its having a little think about it every time. You can on the Samsung also install the separate app called the camera assistant which has an option to boost shutter speed but I don't use it cos it does come with the cost of quality. The transition between lenses still feels clunky, in that its not immediate, and does also introduce noticeable slowdowns. Which feels like its on full show in this comparison because of how smooth those transitions now are on the iPhone 15, and then also while Samsung does have a lot of modes which on their own are all individually cool. I do think that the feature of the smart phone camera is more intuition, like less you having to think this is food, let me navigate to food mode, and more just your phone knowing that it is doing it for you.
And also the Samsung is a very two-handed camera experience, because all the controls are at the top, it's just not simple to change them all with the same hand that's about to take the photo. Now, the iPhone is not a perfect experience, either. It could also do with an injection of creativity, plus in the pursuit of trying to tuck every single eyesore away and only trying to show you what you need to see at any one time. You will spend a lot of time gesturing to adjust things, and sometimes those gestures can overlap with each other. It can feel fiddly, but on balance between the two, I do prefer using the camera app on the 15 Pro Max.
The new iPhone does also has this action button, which can get into the camera quickly and get shooting straight away, but assuming that you are using your phone for the normal photo in an upright position, it's not really any faster than the Samsung's double tap and then using the volume down to actually take the photo, so we can pretty much just disregard that.
okay we are pretty even in terms of score so far but moving up in terms of the order of importance, lets talk about audio,
so right now you are listening to me on the iphone, I am in a pretty quiet space and you can absolutely tell. Now shifting over to the Samsung again it just sounds really good ,
both these phones are very well equipped to pickup good sound from all direction, it is only as the level of the background noise increase that's when they start to diverge
So right now you are listening on the iPhone and as you can probably tell, very little is filtered out like you are very much hearing the background noise but the upside of that is that it is not interfering with the quality of my voice there's still that sort of natural richness to it.
But with the Samsung, the background noise is way reduced. It's just that in the process of trying to chop out the background noise, you also lose a lot of the lower tone in your voice. So little bit of the fullness is gone, but there is no real right or wrong here; it's just two different ways of doing things.
Okay, I love portrait mode. Anytime I am taking a shot that I feel like I am going to want to print out, or post somewhere, it just feels right to use it since its a one click way to doubling the production value of the shot and with the iphone15 Promax, apple's introduced both two massive perks and one massive conterdus, the cons is that the 3x optical zoom lens that we used to have and the 3x zoom lens Samsung still has is I would say the best balance between being a flattering angle by keeping you far enough away from the subject that the shot doesn't look like it has a fisheye effect on it but close enough that you're not having to leave the chair you are sitting in just to take it, and if we left it there, Samsung would be a bit of a no-brainer.
Samsung's portraits are punchy in a nice way, the edge detection is really strong, and that 3x lens is just convenient, and then there's those important perks that this new iPhone has. One that you now don't need to specifically go to portrait mode to take a portrait. you just take a normal photo of a person, and then afterwards you can apply portrait mode if it feels right.
And now less unknown, but Samsung can actually do this too, but since there is no debt information in the shot, what you can't do is refocus on, let's say, something in the background. And then the second thing that is really hard to ignore is that if you take portrait using the 1x main camera, Apple will shoot those portraits in 24 megapixels, 2x the resolution, and when something like that exists as an option, it becomes much harder to justify Samsung's 12 megapixel portraits, even if stylistically I prefer them, so we'll call this one a draw.
And now, Just Before the big three categories, let's run over special features, which is basically cinematic mode, slow-Mo, and macro mode. Both phone cinematic modes have come a long way since the feature's debut, which I was quite surprised to see on Samsung since the company is historically weaker when it comes to video and also just never really talks about this feature. Whereas Apple goes on about cinematic video a lot. Then you get Slomo, which is ironically also improving in slow motion every year, getting a tiny bit better as phones let in a little bit more light and have slightly better sensors, but honestly if only the tiniest bit of effort was put into it with the amount of computation power on the phones right now, it could be something quite special. Do you know what? I am just going to keep featuring slow motion in these tests just in protest because I just think it's wrong that it doesn't get more support.
I think Samsung takes it slightly, just in the sense that it has 960fps super slow-Mo at the hit of a bit more quality if you fancy doing that. Macro mode on the other hand is getting attention, and its great. I have to say I don't use it very often, but both the iPhone and Samsung are very equally capable at it, just with different styles.
The iPhone can technically get closer, and it kind of leaves objects looking a bit more natural, which is a bit less striking but easier on the eye, meanwhile Samsung processes very heavily, adding in a lot of sharpness to these macro shots, which you might like, you might find offensive. All of this is to say that for all of these special features, both phones can do them, but I will give the category to Samsung just because of that slight edge in slomo.
But currently, Apple is beating Samsung just like they are absolutely whipping us in the subscriber race, but when we overtake them, mark my words, I will build the biggest iPhone the world has ever seen, so a sub to the channel will be shutter-Ly brilliant.
Right, let's talk about video. Video was a category that used to be a no-brainer for the iPhone and it only actually since the Samsung S23 ultra that I have even had to even think about it and you know what, Samsung's video HDR is way better than it used to be and in a lot of cases, better than the iPhone.
Like if you look here, can you see how that building is really washed out on the iPhone but you can see it clearly here or like here when enter the cave, Samsung is able to retain the sky behind me in a way that apple just cant.
But there is 4 things in the iPhones court and they're 4 very important things. Look a little closer and you'll see that the detail is higher even though both are filming at 4k resolution, Samsung is not quite using all of that resolution, it is close but there's a difference, like you'll see it if you look at my beard in this shot, Samsung sometimes misses the mark with skin tones.
These new iPhone 15 in particular, it feels like they are able to latch on what someone actually looks like and just hold it no matter how much the scene is changing around them whereas it feels like Samsung is tweaking colors based on the scene.
There's both phones action modes/ super steady which are specific ultra stabilized videos that come at the slight cost of quality. There's actually another example of a phone features that I think should just become integrated like the phone should be able to detect when you're moving fast enough that you need it and just switch to it but for the time being going into this mode, the iPhone is the only one recording a clip that you might actually want to use somewhere, this is too much of the quality hit.
But I would say the biggest thing is just Samsung's grain in low light its enough to crinkle footage that apart from that grain honestly would be a strong contender for best smartphone video out there, but its just a pretty sever Achilles heel to have, again something that apple has specifically worked on to address on their new phone they are saying that the A17 pro chip inside the iPhone 15 is what allows an extra layer of noise removal. and yet some of these yearly camera improvements that you see they end up being negligible but this, this you can tell
I mean in this scene it was so dark I couldn't even see where I was going.
But that's kinda wild that both of these phones can, although the iPhone with a significant amount more clarity and this is also true for photos in low light. Now this is not as much of a blanket win as video is because the Samsung doesn't have have that noise problem in photos and in a lot of those middle light conditions, even though the phone has more shutter lag, I actually find its much easier to blur a photo on the iPhone. Something within the Samsung's image processing does a very good job at recovering from those slight hand spasms but assuming that you are holding the phone steady, there's three things that have improved on the iPhones since last time here.
First is the smart HDR which helps a lot in night scenes because they tend to be the ones that have to balance out really bright spots within generally dark images and to be honest I wouldn't say the HDR is now outright better than Samsung but it used to be noticeably behind, its not anymore, and there's a couple of times I notice something really clever going on which I will show you with a shot of the Microsoft store.
I took this because this is one of the most complex challenging lighting scenarios that you could possibly conjure up. Its got a mixture of warm light on the outside, cool light on the inside and the inside of the building is brighter than the outside.
Anyway, the smart HDR on the iPhone has factored in all of this and it has represented the image in a way that when I took it, and I was looking between the iPhone screen and the Microsoft store behind, it felt like it was spot on but then what it feels like Samsung has done is tweaked its overall white balance using an average of the image as a whole and by doing so you notice that everything on the inside including the Microsoft logo has a slight blue tinge over it and everything on the outside a slight red tinge, that wasn't actually there in real life.
The second thing is the resolution, so long as you are taking a normal photo on the Iphone and night-mode doesn't activate, which it doesn't seem to now actually get very dark, you are taking a 24MegaPixel shot compared to 12 on the s23. Now to make one thing clear, the end result is not as different as that number might make it sound, because really in a lower light environment, no phone today can properly use 24MegaPixels of resolution but you know, peak into the widows of a shop or a bright street lamp and the difference is also not subtle. And then the final tool that apple has is when night mode does activate while you do loose that 24MegaPixel resolution, you gain photonic engine which is basically apple speak for
"Tweak the color and increase the detail"
The thing is though, never are those things more important than when it gets really dark. It means you will see more stars in the sky, you will see objects rendered with more clarity you'll see grass and trees looking green as they should and not red.
If at any point you think that these images are doing a bad job by the way, just bear in mind that at this point, my eyes could see nothing, so there are both pretty good.
So what about day time? day time photos is the single most important category for most people and you know how I said that at night time the iPhone struggles to take advantage of the full 24MegaPixel, well that not the case anymore during the day, and its almost a bit weird that in 2023, it comes down to Megapixels but this one thing really does just completely take the win down in Samsung sales. Because yea, you still got the usual differences in style, Samsung is more poppy, its larger than life and its sometimes a little too much and your face looks like a Tomato and the upside of that is, it never under delivers on warmth. some situations where you need it, its better than iPhones.
iPhone largely leaves faces alone, Samsung gets involved and smooths things out. Its very hard to label either style as better or worse, my preference literally shifts from photo to photo and both are now vary well matched in terms of their ability to cope with challenging lighting and so on but what is measurably better is having 2x the amount of pixels to work with.
Pretty much anytime you zoom in to a daytime shot which you might do for a number of reasons, you might want to print it out and frame it, you might wanna crop into it cos you only like a certain part of it, you can tell the difference. You definitely still have to be looking for it but if you are, you will find it and we should clarify something important here.
The Samsung has a 200MegaPixel camera that does count for something, it means that when you really want detail, you have access to it but I don't think many people will use the 200MegaPixel mode. It takes far longer to capture, the photos take up 10X more space, you have to turn off portrait mode and the ability to capture a motion photo your dynamic range suffer and your ability to shoot in lowlight falls not to mention the processing time is ludicrous. And then even if you forwent all of that, the iPhone also has a highRes mode. Its only 48MegaPixel but the end level of detail is very similar to Samsung's 200, Samsung's is a little better if you have lots of light but then the iPhone's HighRes mode overtakes at a bit as the light starts to dim. I think both of these phones HighRes modes are off the table for most people and what's important about the iPhone's 24MegaPixel mode is that its the default option and that it comes with no extra compromise.
Now that advantage disappears when using the ultrawide cameras since both phones are using standard 12MegaPixel sensors and also the zoom as we talked about, but assuming that you spend a vast majority of your time on the main camera, this is a big step forward with the iPhone that I am hoping Samsung will be able to replicate with their next phone in 2024. Do remember that some categories are worth more than the others so even though this is a 6.5 to 3.5 to the iPhone, consider the things that are specifically important to you.
But Yes, if you pointblank ask me which of these two cameras is better?
I will tell you the iPhone15promax.
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