Mobile Flagship Phone Camera Overview 2020 H1: Still Picture Battle

Conclusion & End Remarks

Today’s camera article was the biggest we’ve ever done and something I hope not to have to repeat again anytime soon, but I felt it was needed to bring proper context to the large number of devices that were released in the last few months.

Overall, if you didn’t notice in the text of the article, I only scratched the surface in terms of the collected camera samples so I hope it serves as a good resource for readers out there looking to compare the devices between each other.

Per-Vendor Verdicts

Like in the individual scenes, I think getting to an overall conclusion is something very hard to do. Instead, we can go over each vendor and cover their strengths and weaknesses.

Apple

Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro was a big leap for the company in 2019 and the phone still very much holds up in 2020. What Apple has been able to achieve in terms of exposure and HDR processing is just outright excellent and still gives the vast majority of Android devices today a run for their money, particularly on the main camera sensor.

The telephoto module while certainly not as far-reaching as some of the newer Android competitions, is still excellent in quality and is very consistent with the main camera module.

The ultra-wide-angle is also excellent, although here I do prefer Samsung’s processing and now also OnePlus has an edge over the iPhone.

In low-light, the iPhone essentially turns into a one camera module phone as both the telephoto and the ultra-wide-angle become unusable. Whilst the main camera still produces outstanding results in low-light, I find this to be quite too big a contrast between the capture experiences, and I hope Apple will manage to focus more on these two aspects in their 2020 phone.

In general, I consider the iPhone 11’s to be amongst the best cameras on a phone today, and Apple’s capture experience is just joyfully streamlined. The iPhone SE also punches far above its weight in its price range – but its simplistic camera system is also its one downside.

Google

The Pixel 4 still maintains itself as a good contender, but the problem is that this is a phone that actually was released after the iPhone 11’s – and it actually feels like it’s older than that. While Google has good processing, the iPhone pretty much beats it in the vast majority of scenarios. Google’s lack of vision in the camera module department means that this is also the only phone here lacking an ultra-wide-angle lens and that’s a big minus for the capture experience.

It’s a solid phone which produces good pictures, but I just feel it to be uninspiring against the competition.

Oppo

Both the Reno3 Pro phones here weren’t the company’s flagship products as we still have to get our hands on an X2. Still, the two phones were interesting to test today as they on paper represent the same “phone” although they differ wildly, one for the Chinese market, and one for the global/European market. The MediaTek version actually surprised me – we rarely have opportunity to test phones with these chipsets and it very clearly performed quite differently than any other phone in the tests, showcasing strong dynamic range and HDR processing. Still, both phones were far from perfect and just had a hard time competing against the flagship devices here.

Xiaomi

I had expected a bit more out of the Mi 10 Pro. Whilst the phone produced very good pictures, the processing wasn’t always on point against some of the other competitors. It was great to have the phone here today in the comparison as it meant we could have the two variants of Samsung’s 108MP sensors compete against each other, one in the Xiaomi phone and the other in the S20 Ultra. In daylight, as I had suspected, the 27MP colour filter variant found in the Mi 10 Pro I think is the better sensor, whilst in low-light, the 12MP unit found in the Ultra is likely better.

Whilst image processing wasn’t always Xiaomi’s forte, I do love what they did with the camera setup by including two telephoto modules. The 5x optical magnification with a “traditional” lens system particularly was actually quite impressive given the compromises the other vendors have to make with their periscope lenses.

Overall, the Mi 10 Pro does have the hardware to compete, I just hope Xiaomi works on the processing to give it a bit more “life” compared to the main competitors.

LG

LG’s smartphone business certainly has seen better days. The V60 doesn’t do things very differently to the competition, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In daylight, actually the V60 a lot of times manages to impress quite a lot and sometimes is amongst the best performers in terms of colours and HDR processing. This is something we’ve also seen last year with the G8 which was a “solid, but not great” phone.

I do like the V60’s usage of a 64MP main camera sensor which can act both as the main capture module at 16MP binned resolution, as well as crop in at 64MP for good quality 2x shots. Due to the resolution advantage, the V60 is actually amongst the sharpest cameras out there, both in the 16MP auto mode as well as the 64MP full resolution mode, as the optics are holding up well with the sensor.

The ultra-wide-angle is also good quality in daylight, although the processing could need a bit of more bite.

In low-light, LG is seemingly still amongst the vendors who don’t have an advanced computational photography night mode and that does put the V60 towards the end of the pack in low-light scenarios. I wish they would put more effort here to be able to better compete.

Huawei

I really do see Huawei amongst the initiators of this smartphone camera race. For years they’ve been innovating at a rapid pace, introducing new technologies both in software and hardware that put the other vendors to shame.

What the company does well is its sensor technology, which is still leaps and bounds ahead of anybody else, an advantage that’s particularly obvious in low-light conditions. I also like how they’re showcasing by far the best implementation of a lossless 2x zoom through the main camera sensor, something the other vendors should really take note of.

The P40Pro’s telephoto module is excellent and in many cases was the best performer in certain focal lengths. The ultra-wide on new Huawei phones isn’t really that ultra-wide and I wish they could go for wider optics while retaining their current sensor setup.

However as innovative they are and as great the phone hardware is, I’ve always felt they had huge issues in their software camera processing. The new P40 Pro here is yet again such an example because in many of today’s scenarios we’ve actually seen the older Mate 30 Pro produce better exposures and colours. It always takes the company several months of firmware updates to get the camera to an excellent state, and the P40 Pro for example for me isn’t there yet.

Samsung

Samsung’s cameras in 2020 are just a bundle of contradictions. Sometimes, the phones are able to produce amongst the very best images, sometimes they fall flat on their faces. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit there, but at least that’s how it feels to me. I still do like the company’s processing – when it works. For example, they still have among the best processing for the ultra-wide-angle cameras of any vendor, and sometimes this shines through to the other modules.

There’s still too big a divergence in processing between the S20 Ultra and S20+ and the Snapdragon and Exynos variants. It feels to me that even to this date the Exynos just has the much better processing, both in daylight and low-light.

The S20+ in my opinion has a very smart camera hardware setup that is quite unique with its two wide-angle modules. I do find it a pity that (at least my unit) the secondary module doesn’t have as good optics as there’s obvious light blooming on high contrast edges visible. Between the S20+ and the OnePlus 8 Pro, these are in my view the two Android phones I’d be able to recommend most easily.

The S20 Ultra I think is a travesty of a phone when it comes to its cameras. The 108MP phone’s sensor performance is good but sometimes actually loses to the S20+ in terms of detail. The phone has no viable 2x zoom method and quality craters here. The image fusion with the telephoto module in recent firmwares barely kicks in anymore and it didn’t trigger once in the 2x photos in this article. On the telephoto module, at 4-5x zoom the phone employs some horrible sharpening and processing that severely degrades the image quality, losing out to competitors such as the P40 Pro. Only at higher zoom factors such as 10x does this turn off and the phone actually shows that the hardware is capable of.

It feels like the only thing Samsung was aiming for when creating this phone is able to quote the marketing figures of 108MP and 100x zoom – both irrelevant and misleading metrics. The hardware is there but Samsung’s software feels like a year or more behind Huawei in actually making use of such a camera system.

OnePlus

The OnePlus 8 Pro was an enormous jump for the company. While in past years OnePlus phones were generally just “good” or “ok” in the camera department, the new OP8Pro really competes amongst the best devices out there on the market. We’ve seen significantly better processing and the new phone certainly now also has the hardware to compete with the big boys, employing a strong main camera sensor as well as ultra-wide-angle.

The phone produces excellent pictures overall and it’s only rarely that it trips over itself. The only negative I would say is that OnePlus needs to back-off on the purposeful darkening of shadows in order to attain more contrast in their pictures. This was something that was introduced with a firmware update last year with the 7Pro in order to copy the Pixel 3’s look. Well guess what, the Pixel 4 made away with that look as it was always an issue. Apple and Samsung have realistic shadow definitions all whilst retaining contrast, it’s not something the OP8’s need in order to compete.

Low-light on the 8Pro is also great, and nightscape also saw impressive strides in improving the quality. The strong UWA also makes photography here very viable. I would just add in that the 48MP capture modes probably don’t make as much sense as on some other phones because the optics here just can’t keep up with the higher resolutions.

The regular OnePlus 8 wasn’t quite as impressive. More often than not it had weaker processing, and also lags behind more in low-light. But it’s a lower priced phone so I guess I can’t complain too much.

The Road Ahead

All of the vendors still have a lot of work ahead of them. One thing I really do hope that vendors take to heart is following Apple’s methodology a bit more, in that they focus on bringing out products that are more refined from day 1. I’m quite disappointed in the rough shape some of these phones are in at launch, and it creates a ton of work that we have to evaluate new phones over several months of firmware updates in order to really get the best experience out of them.

On the hardware side, we need to avoid ultra-high-resolution sensors if the optical designs of their camera modules aren’t able to actually keep up with the increased detail capture abilities. Today we saw that most of the time these 108MP sensors were beaten by 64MP modules.

As sensor technologies and cameras also advance, there’s also increasing new software techniques that are enabled by machine learning. I think a lot of the vendors will have to focus a lot more on features such as deep fusion in order to really be able to properly compete in this new computational photography landscape. This again means taking the time to prepare a new device’s software more thoroughly to get it right. SoC silicon and camera sensors are evolving at a fast pace – the software needs to keep pace.