Comments Locked

60 Comments

Back to Article

  • 5j3rul3 - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    mm²

    The best way to show real sensor size, and prevent any unit convert difference.

    IMX600 -> 1/1.73"?
    NO, IT'S 1" = 18mm rather than 16mm
    So IMX600 is 1/1.95", and IMX586 is 1/1.92"

    Same AS GN2, GN1, HM3, HM1, OV48C, IMX700...

    Just 1/XX" ÷ 1.125, so you can get real sensor size
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    This is complete nonsense, please read the article. I explain the optical format diagonal size as well as list the actual physical sensor sizes in mm / mm².
  • 5j3rul3 - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Thks for your correction :}
  • melgross - Tuesday, June 29, 2021 - link

    How come the iPhone 12 Max Pro isn’t there? It has a longer tele lens, plus some other differences. I notice two Samsung models.
  • shabby - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    ~37% smaller is the answer.
  • 5j3rul3 - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Anandtech's camera spec comprasion is great, this is what we expect

    I my point of view, Adobe LrC / Lr are better choice, because they are crossed platform software with great popularity.

    About DCI-P3 shot, vivo X60 Pro+, Find X3 Pro, Mi 11 Ultra, Pixel 5 have this function.
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Lightroom has bad support for Fuji X-Trans sensors demosaicing and isn't able to read out RAW metadata on the colour profiles, so it's not an option for me.
  • 5j3rul3 - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Thank you

    I hope people can see the ultra wide angle photo of XT-30 for comparison, it’s a good reference.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    Andrei needs to buy another lens then :)
  • Reflex - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Capture One announced they will be on iPad next year for those that want the option.
  • Jon Tseng - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Assume this is the iPhone Pro, not the Pro Max?

    If so might be worth looking at the Pro Max. Presumably the slightly upgraded camera with the funky Cirrus closed loop controller has some benefit?
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    I don't have that unit.
  • damianrobertjones - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Such a shame that Huawei cannot be included. If it wasn't for them, we might still be stuck with rubbish phone cams.
  • michael2k - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Apple had a 2 camera system in the 7 Plus in 2016, just like the Huawei P9.

    So it seems a stretch to credit the Huawei, unless you think in the 5 months between the P9 and the 7 Plus Apple revamped their camera from one to two because of Huawei? That seems improbable since Apple designed iOS 10.1's portrait mode around a two camera system.
  • quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    Technically the P9 was a dual camera system but their second camera lacked a color filter to improve low light and merge the cameras together. the LG G5 was the first real dual camera system with one being a wide-angle camera. I honestly would argue that LG started it but Huawei took it to the next level.
  • ottonis - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    "It seems a stretch to credit Huawei" - really? The Night modes were initially brought by Huawei - all the other companies followed suit.
    There is no denying that P10-P30 have been extremely igniting the advancemend of phone-camera technology and if it weren't for the sanctions they might still be relevant in that market segment.
    Right now, it seems that Xiaomi is leading the pack with the most advanced combination of camera hardware+software, but we will see for how long they will be willing to invest into further optimizing the camera experience.
    Sony seems to be back in the game with their upcoming Xperia 1 iii but there has been some disappointment among the camera-enthusiasts that Sony of all people have not embraced their latest and greatest sensor technology (e.g. their newest and purpotedly spectacular 1" IMX sensor). My guess is that Sony will take another year or two in order to fully catch up with the best in business (w/r to phone camera quality).
    In my opinion, the future of phonecamera-technology is not in multisensor/multi-module options but in one bigger sensor (anything around 1", give or take) and a variable optics before the sensor. Just imagine being able to change from e.g. 16mm to 35mm and maybe 50 mm while always having the same great large sensor.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    No, the name doesn't matter. Stacking started with Google's HDR+. Night mode is just stacking with slightly different parameters. And P20 which debuted the so-called night mode had such waxy results that most of the time it was better to just use auto.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    Here, see how everything looks like crayon? This is actually one of the better samples, some samples from other sites look even worse.
    https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/6436/P20_IM...

    This is the Pixel from back then, with HDR+, which retains far more natural texture:
    https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/6436/P2XL_I...
  • sonny73n - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    Phone camera sucks and iPhone camera is the worst. Take a picture of your wife with your iPhone and ask her how she looks in it.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    You could use the IQ4 150MP paired with the Apo-Digitar 120/5.6 to take a photo of you wife at f/11. I don't think she's gonna be happy.
    Flattering != high quality.
  • hemedans - Saturday, June 26, 2021 - link

    Thank Nokia for Camera we have today, pureview was mother of phone camera and even today Ex Nokians are the one who revolutionize camera in other companies like Xiaomi, Huawei and Apple.
  • rajuk - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Good review, can see the effort involved here.
    Like the idea of using reference camera. Could have been complete review if human subjects are involved to show the phones handle skin tones and textures. Majority of the pics at least half of the pics are use to capture people/human subjects. I noticed an issue with my s21 ultra even the slightest hand movement causes blurry pics. Where as my old pixel 4 xl is perfectly fine
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    No, better to take people out of the equation, failure to use models of every skin tone risks accusations of racism! 😪
  • Teckk - Monday, June 21, 2021 - link

    Fantastic article Andrei.
    What would you want from future phones in terms of camera upgrades? Also, do you see phone with higher optical zoom incoming anytime soon?
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    I consider the regular S21 great because it defies conventional wisdom, the Mi 11 also is very versatile due to it fully using its hardware that's designed with a balance.

    We don't need higher zoom unless it's on an additional module, filling the focal range with good quality results first should be priority.
  • Kangal - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    Looking at teardowns, it seems these 5-camera modules take up quiet a lot of precious internal space with some very questionable results.

    What do you think about a phone with only 1 huge sensor, and an internal (periscope) lens, that covers a wide focal range? Eg from macro, ultrawide, wide, telephoto, and zoom. In theory, it might take up slightly less internal space, be slightly cheaper to manufacture, and yield slightly better quality shots at every every stage.
    ....would that even be do-able?
  • s.yu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    Not doable. The periscope, due to thickness limitation, severely limits the physical size of the aperture, which means it could only stay clear of "unacceptably slow" if it covered a small frame.
  • sharath.naik - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link

    Agree.. best choice they have is a 3x..4x 48mp camera and a 8x 48mp periscope. this should have all the range needed by every one.
  • Fulljack - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    wait, no iPhone 12 Pro Max? while Apple fans would surely argue that it's the best camera, I'm just curious on how it compares.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    I agree, since they bought so many devices for review, might as well buy the one with the most hardware differences compared to the previous generation.
  • dragosmp - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    Awesome roundup, happy you took the time to explain the arc-second method of judging resolution and FoV all in one, it makes so much sense. I did studied optics once upon a time in high-school, makes it easier to understand. Looking at the number of comments it may just be this article didn't captivate the attention of the readers, big shame. In any case I hope to see this article receive follow-ups as new phones get released; maybe a Bench section could be added to compare effective resolution of various phones.

    Was looking to upgrade my ageing P20 Pro and I am in the habit of buying retail and am not ready to pay crazy money. Looks like the Mi 11 (Ultra) would be the best all-rounder quality/$ out there?
  • sonofgodfrey - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    If you really want to challenge a phone camera, try taking a nice picture of a full (or almost full) moon.
    Haven't found one yet that can do it.
  • Medstar1 - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    You've obviously never visited a Note 20 Ultra or S 20 Ultra site.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    Yeah, and it gets old, very fast.
  • vFunct - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    lol another Anandtech camera review without a single shot of a person, the most widely taken type of photo.

    Real geniuses here.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link

    your average White person is the least problem. Try doing a Black choir.
  • Cailin - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    I don't want to sound so condescending but I agree 100%.

    Given such a large percentage of photos taken on phones are of friends and family (or selfies) camera comparisons that don't include this are irrelevant for most people, even readers of this site.

    The processing of faces and motion are so different between manufacturers, even those using the same sensors. For me and many others this is what makes or breaks the camera experience. Not whether the shadows are too dark under a bridge taken through the zoom lens...

    I have a Huawei Mate 20 pro that takes some stunning photos of all sorts of different things and would review well here. However, it's absolutely useless at the family BBQ so I use my ancient pixel 2 to get good shots of the fam.

    Perhaps you want to keep the testing methodology as tightly controlled as you can? But surely a human subject wouldn't prove too difficult to include.

    In my opinion selfies, portrait and action shots of people should constitute 50% of the sample photos. To not have any at all is inexcusable.
  • ottonis - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    I respectfully disagree. Portrait photography is certainly important for some users but not for all.
    Of course it would have been great to have an assessment on skin color rendering as well, but this would have added a massive layer of complexity to this review - a task that would easily exhaust resources put into such projects. And Andrei clearly stated in his preface that he had to constrain this huge review to certain aspects, otherwise it could never have been finished.

    Just to give you an impression on how adding portrait shots would exponentially increase the efforts needed to complete a review like this: you would have to test for all rear cameras AND for the front-cameras. Then you would have to test for different light conditions and you would have to test for different skin colors as well. And a combination of all these factors.

    If you have a team of 10 people, then this is easily done within a week or so. But doing it alone.... good luck with that.
  • vFunct - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    If you’re going to review a camera, your bare minimum is people photos. That’s literally 90% of all photos, and probably 97% of all phone photos.

    You shouldn’t do a camera review if you can’t take people shots.
  • s.yu - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link

    Wow, arbitrary numbers. For reference people photos make up <1% of my phone photos.
  • s.yu - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link

    Bottom line, the "people" factor in photos actually translates to skin tones, and in that respect all phones should be fine since it's just a matter of color and the most easily repairable even from JPG output, so it's unlikely, with the exception of 1+'s artificial black crush, that skin tones would be mapped beyond the visible DR with all this automatic HDR.
    There's also the matter of accurately portraying skin tones, or automatically "enhancing" them making them subjectively more flattering, which is kind of beside the point of Anandtech reviews, which largely focuses on objective measurements and realism of the processing.
  • ottonis - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    For a state of the art review of phonecameras, this article is the reference in 2021.
    Incredible amount of work has been put into this meticulous comparison, and it shows.
    Hats off to Andrei and Anandtech and a big thank you for the great and truly useful work.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    Wow you've outdone yourself (and of course everybody else) Andrei! Next time you could add diffraction to the equation :)

    What I learned from this article is that Xiaomi now has a surprisingly robust night mode, and that Samsung finally gets the hang of properly utilizing that 108MP main, such that it generally matches the Mi11U.

    The darkest scene shows blotchy(in squares, or checkered) noise from the Fuji, which is new to me. It seems as though not even Fuji's own JPG algorithm could perfectly handle X-trans. You could try Fuji's own conversion software though, people who are serious about using Fuji can't go without it.

    I sometimes get the Exynos blurriness from my Gcam too, and some of the Pixel samples also seem to show that behavior(like the whole thing's out of focus, or the lens is decentered). I initially thought it was bad compatibility with my hardware but it looks like an inherent software issue now. It's not consistent, at least on Gcam, I could take multiple shots when the issue arises and would generally get a keeper.

    Minor addition though Mi11U's night mode switch seems entirely useless, not only does it automatically do night mode in auto, it automatically reverts to auto in night mode, the first night sample shows two nearly identical 1x shots from Mi11U, and examining the texture I believe they're from auto.
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    > The darkest scene shows blotchy(in squares, or checkered) noise from the Fuji, which is new to me. It seems as though not even Fuji's own JPG algorithm

    These are RAWs, not SOOC JPEGs, so the blotchiness would some of the CO noise reduction.
  • s.yu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    Oh! I thought you used OOCJPG for reference too. That's really weird because avoiding artifacts that exhibit a regular pattern (especially one that hints at x-trans specificity) should've been Fuji's top priority. It's a glaring issue. I thought the reference samples looked a bit too...refined, to be OOCJPG though.
  • Lilja - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link

    I'm again a bit disappointed that there's no comparisons of the RAW photos that these cameras produce :/
  • ottonis - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    I think you would most probably be disappointed because I don't think that all the HDR(+), night-mode and other multi-exposure tricks are actually baked into a single raw file. Instead, the software algorithms merge several RAW files into one final piece of output, and this generally a JPEG file.
    So, testing RAW files would certainly be a great test of the hardware -/sensor-performance but would barely do justice to the computational side of things. And we all know that the success of phonecameras actually relies more on their software algorithms than on sensor size.
  • s.yu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    Testing RAW the Pixel should win hands down, though it introduces another level of variation because Gcam results greatly vary from the metering, while the metering is not subject to manual control, and is not entirely predictable, and there's absolutely no telling what comes out until the file is saved and both ends of the DR examined with sliders in LR.
  • s.yu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    I want to clarify that metering for a lower luminance level, and metering higher but manually pulling down the slider on the right till the screen apparently shows the same exposure, do not yield the same results, the former will increase the likelihood of blown out highlights but provide cleaner shadows, while the latter will retain more highlights but sacrifice shadows. One can only attempt to strike a balance somewhere in the middle, but not have both by, for example, enlarging the shutter speed gap between long and short exposures in the stacking sequence.
  • Rοb - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    It great to see a thorough comparison that has some disagreement with DXOMark: https://www.dxomark.com/rankings/#smartphones-mobi...

    Where the dust usually settles is after a few updates of the Firmware squeeze the last bit of performance out of the hardware - on that front a couple of manufacturers do better than some others.

    I'm happy that my _old_ phone from a few years ago works well, and that in a couple of more years (hopefully my phone lives so long) we'll have new phones that significantly improve on these.

    Nothing like the convenience of a great camera in the compact size of a phone, now only if telephoto, HDR, and stabilization could be improved with computational photography to rival DSLRs of yesterday.
  • s.yu - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link

    There's usually some disagreement with DXO...
  • leastsmartestmanonline - Saturday, June 26, 2021 - link

    Thanks Andrei for this article. This is definitely more systematic than Dxomark.

    Could you please include Sony phone's next time? I always find their photos are closest to reality.
  • sharath.naik - Saturday, June 26, 2021 - link

    "a sign of the marketing department winning over common sense at Samsung" cannot put the camera choice of s21ultra any better. M11 ultra is a best(Not perfect as it missing the longer reach ) choice right now.
  • Alexo - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link

    > "Low-light photography is dominated by two-prone approaches"

    Two-pronged approach maybe?
  • kyuu - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link

    I looked really, really hard for evidence in the pictures of the OnePlus's problems with "black crush" or whatever... I cannot see it.

    This is my problem with many camera reviews... they show comparison photos, then give their thoughts on the different cameras, but I am unable to relate what they are saying to what the pictures show. I'm definitely having that issue here. Is it just me?
  • s.yu - Saturday, July 3, 2021 - link

    There's a lot of shadow lost in this:https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7999/OP9Pro...
    Compared to this:
    https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7999/X-T30_...
    Or even this:
    https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7999/S21Ult...
    You're not really cut out for this are you.
  • ericgl21 - Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - link

    Seems like the Samsung S21 Ultra and Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra have wasted potential, as pointed out by the author. Imagine what Apple and Google could do with those larger sensors approaching 100mm²...
  • darkforce82 - Thursday, July 22, 2021 - link

    I wonder if AT will ever do a separate review of Vivo X60 Pro+?

    Multiple sources say it's a serious contender of the best mobile photography tool of this year.
  • Jhonsmithcps - Friday, July 30, 2021 - link

    google pixel 6 will boomm this year
  • 1az2sx - Sunday, October 10, 2021 - link

    AI off or on?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now