The camera is one of the best reasons to choose one high-end phone over another. Most are made of glass and metal. All have more power than most of us need, and sharp, vivid displays.
Among Android phones at least, it’s the camera that turns a great phone into one of the best of the year. We took to the streets of London with a professional photographer to find the best camera phone in 2018.
Read our guide to the best Android phones for our current top picks
How we tested
The photos you’ll see in this feature were taken by Charlie Surbey. A professional photographer with 20 years of experience, he has travelled the world shooting for WIRED, producing images for brands such as Rolex, and capturing portraits of important figures, including London mayor Sadiq Khan.
The phones on test are the iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9, Google Pixel 2, LG G7 ThinQ, Sony Xperia XZ2, OnePlus 6, Nokia 8 Sirocco, HTC U12+ and Huawei P20 Pro. None of these photos have been edited beyond minor rotation tweaks and cropping.
Which wins? The good news to start is they are all pretty good. “My first digital SLR, which I used on professional jobs, would be nowhere near the sensor capabilities of all of these phones,” says Surbey. “The resolution is there, the dynamic range on some of them is amazing.”
“Everyone now, in their smartphone, has a very good, competent digital camera.” However, he’s not bowled-over by some of their extras.
Extras or gimmicks?
“I wasn’t impressed by any of the zooms,” says Surbey. “There’s always a crunch”, a “halo around the highlights”, leading to images that look “a little bit digitised or compressed, over high-passed.” Instead, he says, it's better for a person to move themselves rather than trying to rely on the zoom.
You can see some of this in action in the Nokia 8 Sirocco’s shots we took by the fountains at Kings Cross. Almost all “zoom” phones use lesser sensors and lenses for their secondary cameras, which leads to image quality compromises, particularly if you go beyond their native field of view. Even with “lossless” zoom, you're giving away some quality.
The LG G7 ThinQ’s wide-angle camera is a different case, though. We used it to shoot some views over London Bridge. “It gives you that extra bit of creativity, controlling the composition of an image,” says Surbey. “It opens up compositional options to you. You can get in close, you can get down low”.
Zooms are great for casual photographers looking for convenience. But a wide angle lets you play with a sense of scale much more, making buildings appear to tower over you, or objects seem to stretch out in front of you.
Portrait gallery
Surbey is most impressed by the phones’ portrait modes, though, particularly those of the iPhone X and Huawei P20 Pro. It’s where a phone emulates a wide aperture lens, throwing the background or foreground out of focus to make your subject pop more.
We spent some time around Borough Market, shooting images of the stall tenders and a street musician. Huawei’s and Apple’s blurring algorithms are great nowadays. They can cope with fairly complex objects and use progressive blur so you don’t end up with a sharp subject and simply the same level of blur applied to the rest of the scene.
“Both the portraiture functions were brilliant,” says Surbey. The Nikon D800E is one of the cameras he currently uses for professional shoots. A pro or enthusiast photographer might buy a Nikon 58mm f/1.4G lens for this kind of shallow depth of field photography, and that alone costs £1,500. That Surbey is impressed by what these phones do with software is a good sign.
Mobile phone problems
This early part of the shoot was where we stumbled on the first issues, though, in the Huawei P20 Pro. After capturing a great portrait of an accordion-playing busker, her chow-chow sleeping at her feet, “the same phone got a bit too clever for its own boots, in a way,” says Surbey. “When I took a picture of a bright blue sunny day, a little thing came up “blue sky mode” and it went nuts with over-done blues.”
This is part of Huawei’s relatively new “AI photography” feature, which recognises objects and scene types, altering processing to suit. In this case it made the sky appear much bluer than it looked in reality.
“I get where it’s going, but the problem is you haven’t got as much latitude to edit,” says Surbey. The images may look good on social media, but over-saturating colour ends up flattening out gradations in the most vivid tones. It’s similar to image overexposure, where certain parts become flat areas of white that can’t be recovered post-shoot. Try to bring those blues down and you may find the subtlety is lost. Huawei does let you turn the AI mode off, which is a good idea if you want more natural, edit-ready photos.
Is what you see what you get?
The most common issue we saw isn’t actually about the results, but how these phones relay the kind of photo you’ll capture. And this is something the iPhone X nails better than any other. “The preview on the iPhone compared to the final image is pretty much what you see,” says Surbey. This isn’t the case with most of the rest of the phones tested.
The Nokia 8 Sirocco has an oversaturated OLED screen that makes photos look more vivid than they’ll appear on a calibrated monitor. Blues of a canal boat moored by Kings Cross canal, and the bed of foliage on the water, looked far too saturated on the Sirocco’s screen.
Several of these phones also give a bad account of the dynamic range of the final images, on-screen. Taking a photo of bystanders on the mezzanine at Kings Cross, the HTC U12+ and Sony Xperia XZ2 preview made the photo seem far worse, blown-out, than it ended up.
The OnePlus 6 and Samsung Galaxy S9 do a good job here, but the iPhone X performs the best. “It’s so much more user-friendly, you see what you get straight away,” says Surbey.
Sony’s Xperia XZ2 is by some margin the worst on this usability front. We noticed some occasional lag and glitches in the preview image, and the dynamic range on show is radically different from that of the results. Images of some street art in Shoreditch looked, in part, like near-black blocks on the phone’s screen. The final photos? Perfectly good.
The HTC U12+ also has an issue with some kinds of lighting. We took some images of the colourful underground walkway by Kings Cross and its photos had a strobing effect, in the final images. This is likely its multi-exposure technique butting heads with the fresh rate of the lights. It looks a bit odd.
Reviews of phones tend to focus on the kind of photos they take. From one perspective this makes sense, but shooting experience matters. And in this area the iPhone X is still hard to beat.
Low light
A bright, sunny day is a good way to see what these phones are capable of. But it doesn’t strain at their limits. For that we need a low-light shoot.
At this stage, there were no complaints about shooting speed, few regarding image quality. But the iPhone X and Huawei P20 Pro seemed front-runners thanks to their great photos and portrait modes. They gave us the best shots of the day.
However, I then brought out some photos prepared in ultra-low light conditions for a view on how they deal with very taxing conditions. What did Surbey think? There was one clear winner. “That’s light, and sharp, there’s your winner. 100 per cent. That’s not only the brightest but the sharpest. Neutral tones as well, greys and whites,” says Surbey.
He’s talking about the Huawei P20 Pro. “The low light is a different level to anything else… If you’re shooting in the dark or inside, that’s your phone,” he says.
Read more: These are the best smartphones for any budget in 2021
This is thanks to Huawei’s standard-setting handheld low-light mode. It rapidly combines a wide array of images at different exposure settings. The result is the equivalent of a long exposure that you can use without a tripod. It works handheld. But it does take a while. Our indoors shot took around five seconds, but the Huawei P20 Pro can take even longer if the light level is lower.
The Samsung Galaxy S9 and LG G7 ThinQ fight for second place. LG’s SuperNight mode is surprisingly effective, making the scene bright without obvious destructive processing. Samsung’s shot is darker, but cleaner down at pixel level.
The OnePlus 6’s attempt is almost as sharp as those two, but takes on a yellow cast and there’s less shadow detail. Where’s the iPhone X? “The iPhone is about fifth place,” says Surbey. “It’s like a watercolour” up close, sharp lines dithered into an indistinct mess. But, as he admits, “it’s been brilliant everywhere else.” Apple needs to work on its low-light performance.
Google’s Pixel 2 image is soft and yellow-looking, showing how much the bar has been raised since the phone's launch in October 2017. It was praised for its night performance at the time. The Nokia Sirocco 8’s image is far too dark. And the Sony Xperia XZ2 comes dead last, looking even darker. Bringing up the levels in Photoshop only reveals excessive colour noise and a complete lack of fine detail.
Who wins?
So which phone wins overall? Surbey places the iPhone X and Huawei P20 Pro above the rest. “It’s those two, definitely… They’re neck and neck at the top.”
Surbey states that if the Apple had done better in murky conditions and come even second place for low-light shooting, then it would have been the overall winner. However, the Huawei’s low-light performance took him by surprise. “That’s brilliant,” he said at the time.
Not everything the phone does is great, of course. The Huawei P20 Pro’s AI scene modes tend to jazz-up colour in a manner that won’t appeal to purists. Apple’s iPhone X also has a more intuitive camera interface, and nails elements like exposure and the preview image better than just about any rival. However, the P20 Pro is the one to beat in terms of performance across a wide range of lighting conditions.
Full results
Huawei P20 Pro: Score: 9/10
- Amazing low-light performance
- Excellent portrait mode
- Greater zoom magnification than others
- AI modes makes photos look unnatural
- Quirky camera app
iPhone X: Score: 9/10
- Superb software and ease of use
- Very good exposure and colour
- Great portrait mode
- Not the best in very low light
Samsung Galaxy S9: Score: 8/10
- Reliable image quality in all conditions
- Fast to focus and shoot
- No secondary camera
LG G7 ThinQ: Score: 8/10
- Handy wide angle camera
- Effective ultra low-light mode
- Prone to overexposure
- Daylight images aren’t up to the best
HTC U12+: Score: 8/10
- Good dynamic range
- Pleasant day-lit images
- Image preview doesn’t always reflect results
- Some issues with light strobing
- Others perform better in very low light
OnePlus 6: Score: 8/10
- Terrific performance for the price
- Mostly faithful preview image
- Good low light performance considering cost
- Zoom is not hugely effective
Google Pixel 2: Score: 8/10
- Fast shot-to-shot capture
- Natural-looking images
- Good dynamic range enhancement
- Struggles in ultra-low light
Nokia 8 Sirocco: Score: 7/10
- Solid day photos
- Useful pro mode
- Low-light images appear too dark
- Screen makes images appear over oversaturated
- Zoomed images look processed
Sony Xperia XZ2: Score: 6/10
- Bold colour
- Wider view than most
- Camera preview image judder
- Poor ultra-low light performance
- Preview image doesn’t reflect results well
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
