Smartphones are struggling to deliver the technical photo quality of a decent consumer point-and-shoot camera. They are nowhere near the quality of even low-end enthusiast cameras, much less anything remotely considered professional.
The current best camera-phones, based on the DxO Mark (Mobile Reviews - DxOMark) are the Huawei P30 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S10 G5. DxO is the de-factor standard benchmark for camera image quality — if you’re interested, do read their full test report, because not every device with a higher score is better at everything it does.
They both have three rear, fixed-focal-length cameras. The P30 Pro has a main camera with an f/1.6, 27mm (full-frame equivalent) wide-angle lens, one of the new Sony 40/10 megapixel 1/1.7″ sensors (you won’t get 40-megapixel optical performance, but you’ll get a sharper image in bright light), a 20 megapixel, 1/2.7″, ultra-wide-angle camera at 16mm (full-frame equivalent), and a folded-optical telephoto camera, 8 megapixels with a 1/4″ chip at 127mm (full-frame equivalent). That last one’s a bit of a nutty choice since that’s significantly longer than the portrait camera chosen by most phone companies.
The Galaxy S10 5G adds a time-of-flight camera (for depth analysis) to the three imaging cameras found on other Galaxies S10. That includes a 1/2.55″ 12 megapixel main sensor with a wide-angle f/1.5-f/2.4 lens at 26mm (full-frame equivalence), a 16-megapixel sensor with f/2.2, ultra-wide-angle 12mm (full-frame equivalence), and a 12 megapixel, 1/3.6″ sensor with f/2.4 “portrait” (normal) lens at 52mm (full-frame equivalent).
As with most other premium phones, quite a bit of the quality of the imaging is based on artificial intelligence and computational photography, in both cases.
Now, if you’re actually asking this question, you’re probably asking the wrong question. No one with a good understanding of photography is going to a smartphone to get “professional” results, any more than you’d buy a Prius for the Indy 500. But for the non-pro driver, the Prius might be a better choice. Same with the phone.
The primary purpose of a smartphone is as a pocket computer. As such, there’s quite a bit of processing available that you don’t find on today’s dedicated cameras, and they’re adding more all the time. I don’t edit photos on my camera, I edit photos on my PC, which is many, many times more powerful than a phone, much less a camera. But for those who don’t know what they’re doing and want help, the features in the phone may be better for you to get better results. Don’t worry about professional results, because you’re not going to be taking professional photos with any camera without years of studying photography. That’s not what most people are looking to do. What you will get is a reliable camera that can react to most basic situations well enough to be fun and good enough for Instagram or Facebook. You can learn some of the elements of the artistic side of photography, knowing that your phone, as a photographic tool, has limits and makes some creative decisions for you. If you pursue photography, at some point you’ll understand enough, you’ll hit the walls enough to dump the phone for a camera. If not, you’ll be pretty happy with a phone as a consumer camera these days.
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| Samsung Galaxy S10 G5 |
