Who makes the best camera phone in 2018? iPhone X vs Galaxy S9, OnePlus 6, Pixel 2, P20 Pro and more

The camera is one of the best reasons to choose a high-end phone rather than another. Most are made of glbad and metal. All have more power than most of us need, and vivid and vivid displays.

Among at least Android phones, this is the camera that turns an outstanding phone into one of the best of the year. We went down the streets of London with a professional photographer to find the best camera phone in 2018.

How we tested

The photos you will see in this section were taken by Charlie Surbey. Professional photographer with 20 years of experience, he has traveled the world in filming for WIRED, producing images for brands such as Rolex, and capturing portraits of important personalities, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

The tested phones are 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 small changes in rotation and cropping.

Who wins? The good news to start is that they are all very good. "My first digital SLR, which I used for professional work, would be far from the detection capabilities of all 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 is not upset by some of their extras.

Charlie Surbey

"I was not impressed by any of the zooms," says Surbey. "There's always a crunch," a "halo around highlights," leading to images that seem "a bit digitized or compressed, outdated." Instead, he says, it's better to move rather than trying to rely on the zoom.

You can see some in action in the snaps of the Nokia 8 Sirocco we took near the fountains of Kings Cross. Nearly all "zoom" phones use lower quality sensors and lenses for their secondary cameras, which leads to compromises on image quality, especially if they go beyond their field of vision. Even with a "lossless" zoom, you offer some quality.

The LG G7 ThinQ's wide-angle camera is a different case, however. We used it to shoot views of London Bridge. "It gives you a little more creativity, controlling the composition of an image," says Surbey. "This opens you to composition options, you can get closer, you can go down."

Zooms are perfect for casual photographers looking for convenience. But a wide angle allows you to play with a sense of scale much more, by making appear buildings that overlook you or objects that seem to extend in front of you.

Portrait Gallery

Surbey is especially impressed by the portrait patterns of phones, especially those of the iPhone X and Huawei P20 Pro. It is there that a phone emulates a wide aperture lens, so that the background or foreground is not clear for your subject to explode. more.

We spent a bit of time at Borough Market, shooting images of stalls and a street musician. The blur algorithms of Huawei and Apple are excellent nowadays. They can deal with fairly complex objects and use a progressive blur so you do not end up with a sharp subject and just the same level of blur applied to the rest of the scene.

"The two portrait features were brilliant," says Surbey. The Nikon D800E is one of the cameras that it currently uses for professional filming. A pro or pbadionate photographer could buy a Nikon 58mm f / 1.4G lens for this type of depth-of-field photography, and that alone costs £ 1,500. That Surbey is impressed by what these phones are doing with software is a good sign.

Cell Phone Problems

Charlie Surbey

This first part of the shoot was where we are fell on the first numbers, although, in the Huawei P20 Pro. After capturing a large portrait of a busker playing the accordion, his chow chow sleeping at his feet, "the same phone has become a little too smart for his own boots, in a sense," says Surbey. "When I took a picture of a sunny blue day, a little thing appeared" blue sky fashion "and he went crazy with too much blues done."

This is part of Huawei's new "AI Photography" feature, which recognizes objects and scene types, modifying the processing accordingly. In this case, the sky appeared much bluer than it was in reality.

"I understand where this is going, but the problem is that you do not have as much latitude to edit," Surbey says. The images may look good on social networks, but the color saturation eventually flatten the gradients in the brightest tones. This is similar to the overexposure of the image, where some parts become flat areas of white that can not be recovered after shooting. Try to shoot these bruises and you risk losing the subtlety. Huawei allows you to disable the AI ​​mode, which is a good idea if you want more natural pictures and easier to mount.

Do you see what you get?

The most common problem we have seen is not really about the results, but how these phones relay the type of photo you are going to capture. And it's something that 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 is not the case with most other phones tested.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco has a supersaturated OLED screen that makes the photos livelier than they will appear on a calibrated monitor. The blues of a cbad boat moored by the Kings Cross Cbad and the foliage bed on the water seemed far too saturated on Sirocco's screen.

Many of these phones also give a bad review of the dynamics of the final images, on the screen. Taking a photo of pbaders-by on the Kings Cross Mezzanine, the preview of the HTC U12 + and the Sony Xperia XZ2 made the picture look much worse, breathtaking, than it was.

The OnePlus 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S9 do a good job here, but the iPhone X is the best. "It's so much more user-friendly, you see what you get immediately," says Surbey.

Sony Xperia XZ2 is by far the worst on this front of usability. We have noticed some occasional shifts and glitches in the preview image, and the dynamic range on the show is drastically different from that of the results. Street art images in Shoreditch looked in part like almost black blocks on the phone screen. The final photos? Perfectly well.

The HTC U12 + also has a problem with some types of lighting. We took a few pictures of the Kings Cross underground bridge and his photos had a strobing effect in the final images. It's probably his multi-exposure technique butting heads with the cool light rate. It looks a little strange.

Phone reviews tend to focus on the kind of pictures that they take. From one point of view, it makes sense, but the experience of filming is important. And in this area, the iPhone X is still hard to beat.

Low light

Charlie Surbey

A sunny day is a good way to see what these phones are capable of. But he does not tire to their limits. For this we need a low light shoot.

At this point, there were no complaints about the speed of shooting, little concerning the quality of the image. But the iPhone X and the Huawei P20 Pro seemed avant-garde thanks to their superb photos and portrait modes. They gave us the best pictures of the day.

However, I then took out some pictures prepared in ultra-low light conditions to see how they behave under very trying conditions. What did Surbey think? There was a clear winner. "It's light and sharp, there's your winner, 100 percent, it's not only the brightest but the cleanest, neutral tones too, gray and white," Surbey says.

He's talking about the Huawei P20 Pro. "The low light is a different level from anything else … If you're shooting in the dark or indoors, it's your phone," says

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This is thanks to Huawei's standard portable low power mode. It quickly combines a wide range of images with different exposure settings. The result is the equivalent of a long exposure that you can use without a tripod. It works portable. But it takes time. Our indoor shooting took about five seconds, but the Huawei P20 Pro can take even longer if the light level is lower.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 and the LG G7 ThinQ are fighting for second place. LG's SuperNight mode is surprisingly effective, making the scene bright without obvious destructive processing. Samsung's shooting is darker, but sharper at the pixel level.

The OnePlus 6 attempt is almost as strong as these two, but takes a yellow cast and there are fewer shadow details. Where is the iPhone X? "The iPhone is in fifth place," says Surbey. "It's like a watercolor" up close, sharp lines spring into an indistinct mess. But, as he admits, "it's been great everywhere else." Apple must work on its performance in low light.

Google's Pixel 2 image is soft and yellow, showing how much the bar has been raised since the launch of the phone in October 2017. She was hailed for her nighttime performance at the time . The image of the Nokia Sirocco 8 is way too dark. And the Sony Xperia XZ2 died last, looking even darker. Displaying levels in Photoshop only reveals excessive color noise and a complete lack of fine detail.

Who wins?

Charlie Surbey

So, which phone wins in general? Surbey places the iPhone X and the Huawei P20 Pro on top of the rest. "It's these two, definitely … They're knee-to-elbow."

Surbey says that if Apple had done better under cloudy conditions and even second place for low light shooting, then it would have been a global winner. However, Huawei's low light performance took him by surprise. "It's great," he said at the time.

Everything the phone does is not great, of course. The Huawei P20 Pro's AI Scene Modes tend to beautify the color in a way that will not please purists. Apple iPhone X also has a more intuitive camera interface, and nails items like the preview and preview image better than any rival. However, the P20 Pro is the one to beat in terms of performance in a wide range of lighting conditions

The Complete Results