I have an $829 iPhone 12.
It has two rear cameras, but I also have a Galaxy S 21.
It costs $800 and has three rear cameras or more cameras better Or do you get better images for a little more money to find out?
I get both phones, good old fashioned for shoot.
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But let's just be upfront here.
I really don't think there are people really Deciding between the gaunt CS21 and the iPhone 12.
There will some, and those people probably aren't going to make their purchasing decision based on the cameras alone.
With that disclaimer said, let's get in to this camera compare.
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They're both really good.
Let's get nitpicky though.
There are three things I want to talk about when I look at these photos.
The first is the sharpness and I truly believe the iPhone just is a little sharper than the S 21.
I mean, both are good.
There's just a little more sharpness a little more detail.
In the iPhone one, here's another picture.
This is at a coffee shop.
Let's take a look especially at the menu there.
So here's the iPhone one, and here is the Samsung one.
There's just a little more sharpness and that's probably because the iPhone has a new lens this year, which is where that sharpness is coming from.
The second thing with my nitpicky is that Samsung renders a brighter photo usually not all the time, but most of the time the photos are brighter.
Some people really want bright photos and you're going to get that little bit of an edge from the Samsung phone.
I'm going to show you probably the most extreme example of the brightness difference.
Both of them have an HDR mode, iPhones called Smart HDR.
I think this is like their third.
If you're a virgin, but the iPhone here is going for a little more subdued Look, this is in large part aside from the rocks and the water is what it looked like in reality to me it was after sunset blue hour had been kicking in the extra one.
Hey, let's make it brighter.
Let's make it blue or let's make the grass greener.
But I do think it captured the The muddy river much better.
And the last thing less than pic I want to talk about is white balance.
And again, you're seeing this across the line.
Cameras are going to kind of hue one way or the other, right so the iPhone for last few years is skewed more towards warm colors especially there's a person in the shots.
The X 21 it's a little cooler.
It's a little brighter, it's a little softer.
But there's a giant window just casting all this light in so you can all this blue daylight right?
And the iPhone kind of correct for that.
I don't know if it's like, there's a person here must make it warmer, but yeah, and it's gonna come down to your preference.
Alright, so let's move on to someplace on both phones where we're gonna see a very big difference and that's the telephoto and the fact is the Galaxy S 21 has a dedicated telephoto camera.
So, even if it would just okay telephoto camera, it's gonna deliver better results than a cropped in image on the iPhone because it's just designed to go that way.
So, here is a photo at one x on the main camera of the iPhone 12.
Look pretty fantastic look really fun scene happening on this river here right and here is the Galaxy S 21 version of that same photo.
Now let's zoom in.
So here is the iPhone one x again, here is the iPhone with me pinching in and zooming to three x Again, this is just a digital zoom and this is a crop.
Here is 3X on the Galaxy S21.
What a difference.
My goodness.
It's like, yeah, okay, now it just couldn't get worse for the iPhone.
And slightly worse for the S 21.
But it's so far ahead in terms of this image quality and the iPhone is going to top out at five x digital zoom.
You can see here things are not great looking that's as close of a zoom as the iPhone 12 can get.
Let's back out to the galaxy S21 10X here is really, really pretty decent I would say.
It's kind of right on par with 5X on the iPhone 12.
Maybe even a little bit better there, especially if you look at the water there.
Then here's 20X.
All right now things start to look more like a painting right and here is 30X.
I don't know why you would use this Unless you really like my God, my kids performing with Lady Gaga and I didn't know about this happening and they're three blocks away and I want to zoom in, like maybe that's the only scenario that this would happen.
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Let's move on to night mode.
Both phones have night mode.
Both night modes are pretty fantastic.
So where are the differences here?
We'll start with the iPhone 12.
So here is a red light building, pretty great.
Here is the river.
We're gonna get back to this.
I think this is just gorgeous the way it rendered it.
Here is this really cool empty building on the river.
That beautiful reflection look at the clouds.
love how the iPhone can really nail it sometimes.
But one of the problems that plagued the iPhone and this isn't new to the iPhone 12 I think it's been going on since at least the iPhone 11 series And then I feel it's across all the models on the 12 this year that I've seen this, it has a reflection problem.
So if there's a light source, it just reflects, I don't know if it's like the lens coating, if it's the compactness of the lens, what's causing that reflection, but it's there and if you look at this photo, you might like I don't, I don't see much reflection at first.
I'm gonna have you look at the middle of the picture here, and you're gonna see that the clouds have some Writing and then there's this this for weird reflection.
And I don't even know where that one's coming from, but I guess it might be like, the top here.
I don't even.
Where's that coming from?
Look nightmare.
It's solving a problem and it's pretty amazing.
So something like that is a trade off but you got to think about that.
The other thing I noticed with the iPhone is it tends to sharpen the photos a lot.
So let's go back to the empty building.
And let's take a look at the bricks here.
So here's the iPhone version of this photo.
And here's the Samsung photo and the iPhone one just without even zooming in, you can see that the bricks, the details, just more crunchy, it's a little more gonna make it sharp you know, and, Some of that might be that lens.
And some of it might be the processing.
I think it's the processing.
Whereas the Samsung, this is where I think it finds a better neutral place with a detailed list Ricks, but Samsung also has some issues.
And I think sometimes it's the brightness issue.
It just wants to push that brightness just maybe a little bit further than I would like.
Not horrible.
Also, Samsung does a little more noise reduction on their night mode photo.
So if you take a look at the clouds here, it's just like so smooth.
It's kind of like someone made a beautiful painting of those clouds.
Doesn't look bad.
Doesn't look bad at all.
But let's take a look at the clouds in the iPhone one, they still have some of that detail and texture.
There is a little bit of noise in there, but I think it actually adds to that.
So it gets all, this is down to aesthetics, but this is what I see in night mode.
And this is from the iPhone and you know what?
The galaxy did a hell of a job too.
I would dare say it's even smoother.
And I think some of that noise reduction as well, I want to show you though, two more photos before we leave the night mode section.
And that is actually.
To do with portrait mode so one of the neat features of the iPhone is night modes on all cameras now and you can take night mode portraits or portraits and night mode, whatever the label is.
So I did that.
First let's just address the pose here.
It's a sassy pose.
I didn't need to have a sassy pose but this is taken,
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with a rear camera and there was no light on me, this is like, there were maybe half a block on either side streetlights and I just love the way it renders it, I love the way it cuts me out.
I mean, if we want to get critical here, the color on the back here misses that detail It's better than nothing and it's better than what you're gonna see from the Galaxy S 21.
So here is the gadget 21 and just remind you, you can do a medium wide shot on the iPhone but because the Galaxy S 21 has a telephoto camera you actually have Different look to the medium one.
So, here is a Galaxy S21 portrait taken the night with the close up features of telephoto, and here is the wide one so not horrible.
It reminds me maybe like, back in the day like before, like people could afford Photoshop licenses, you would If you would go to like the used to be a copy place called a copy and print place called the kinkos.
And you would like cut out someone from a photograph and then put them on a background and Xerox copy it.
That's what this looks like to me.
If you're into night mode portraits, obviously the iPhone does that better.
I think that's fair.
All right, let's move on to selfies.
I wanna apologize you can see my face a bunch but pandemic times socializing you get the idea that being said, here is a selfie from the 12 megapixel camera on the iPhone.
and here is one on the 10 megapixel camera on the [UNKNOWN].
Okay there's less megapixel's but I think it just looks a little more crispy.
It looks a little more better detail.
What I think is happening is the fact that even though the [UNKNOWN] has only a 10 megapixel sensor on that camera I'm going to head over to the color palette, and then specify a hex value for a shade of pink.
And following that, well, I'll go ahead and make similar changes for the other social media platforms as well.
The specific selection of colors may be dictated by the theme which you have used within your presentation.
12 and here's one of the with the Galaxy S 21.
Again, the Galaxy S 21 is just a little sharper.
I like my skin in both phones but it looks a little softer, a little, out of focus but it looks just a little softer and the iPhone 12
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Let's get to one of my favorites Topics and that's gonna be video all the videos you saw that montage were shot in 4k.
The Galaxy S 21 can shoot 8k video and that right there for some people like.
8k is more than 4k.
Yeah, but I do think the image quality and some of the features you lose shooting 8k might not be worth it for a lot of people so get bigger files.
You can't zoom.
You can't use things like portrait video mode.
The Ak videos like the 4k ones do have more a or we call it the screen door effect where patterns kind of shimmer when the video is moving and it's a little more apparent on Ak.
Also Ak does not do well in low light.
for a few years now the iPhone I feel has been a step ahead in terms of video and specifically image quality and we talk a lot about resolution and In formats, 4k 60 all those things that is important, but ultimately is that image quality.
I think that's why a lot of people grab an iPhone for recording video especially if it's going to go into like a professional project.
That being said, the Galaxy S21 is pretty close But let me address something that might be on a few people's minds.
Now.
Last year the Galaxy S 20 series, specifically the AR 20 Ultra had some focus issues when it came to video.
The Galaxy S 21 I think does fine with focusing a video I didn't have problems getting focused, even just with the autofocus, like here's a shot of like a waterspout coming out and you can see it's going from the foreground to that, no problem.
But let's talk about shooting video at night.
This is probably the hardest thing for any phone out there right now.
And it's no surprise that both of these phones.
Don't do a great job at that, especially when you compare that to banknotes on their photos, right?
I don't think either are particularly great, but if I had to give a little bit of an edge and give it to the iPhone, there's just less image noise and less artifacts.
Then the videos are shot at night on the Galaxy S 21.
That being said, we're still haunted by some of those those light reflections that you probably see them more pronounced in a video on the iPhone than they do in photos.
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So let's wrap up here.
First of all, these phones are far more competitive than I thought.
I'll just be honest, I did not think they were going to be that close in so many different ways.
On the whole, I think the Galaxy S 21 is a more versatile camera.
But I think it's kind of like when people buy like a kind of like a, you know, a mid range SUV and they have all these features they're just never gonna use right And that brings me to the camera app, so many different options.
There's many ways to access settings of features and there are people who absolutely love that, but it just has this overall busy vibe.
I feel like even though I've been using a similar camera app throughout the years on Samsung phones.
That I just not get overwhelmed but it's just like, it just feels like a slog just to to avoid going into a different mode or organizing all that.
So let's move on to the iPhone 12 Final Thoughts of this number one is worth, I think the galaxy of 21 is trying to have something for everybody.
I think the iPhone is trying to make a camera that everybody can use, and that there's a difference there right for me the big things are gonna be the image quality of video I think iPhone still edges Samsung out a little bit.
And the other one is gonna be the night mode stuff like the night mode portraits, right?
Overall there's not an obvious winner for me between these two camera systems.
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