I should probably put my glasses on for this video. Should we test some cameras? Wait, let me put it in fast mode. You ready, Pete?
My sunglasses are in the back of the car, though. It's just a little video stabilization test. We've got the new iPhone 24 Ultra and the Pixel, the big three some would say, and we're actually on our way to Bristol now. All the camera comparison. So in front of me here I've got my timeline that's an hour and 45 minutes long.
I promise this video won't be that long but I'm just gonna go through all the photos and videos or a bunch of them that I've taken to see how they compare and of course this is just my opinion and to help make the photos and videos a little bit more consistent between the three i've put them in this little makeshift trident i've built here which actually does a really good job it's actually mounted on insta360 stick and it means i can quickly take a photo on each although you do get a few looks in public walking around with one of these and if you go to a house party and say can everyone just stop what they're doing and pose for three different photos in night mode well they may laugh at you a little bit anyway we'll come back to low light and nighttime stuff a bit later on couple of housekeeping points to start with. Firstly the 16 Pro and Pro Max share the exact same camera system now there is no more 3x zoom option on the smaller one. iOS 18 also brings some updates including a pause video recording button for the iPhone finally as well as a clean up tool in the photos app again now catching up with Android although this does require Apple intelligence so you may have to wait a little bit longer and the results currently are well there's room for improvement. Other big upgrades for the new iPhone 16s include the revamped photography mode, which is actually very good now when I found myself using it. Another feature exclusive to the new iPhone 16s is audio mix.
We've got 4K 120. Here is a delicious slow motion pizza. Although, of course, don't forget that Samsung can also shoot in 4K 120 via the pro video mode, although it's not actually as good, but we'll come back to that a bit later on. The 16 Pros also have a new 48MP Ultra Wide up from 12MP and the main sensor is also faster so you've got a quicker shot to shot especially when taking ProRAW or Pro Max photos.
You can see here it's taking almost twice as many photos in the same period as the iPhone 15 Pro Max. And they also said that they've added a new anti-glare coating to all the lenses on both the 16s and the 16 Pros. However, putting it against the 15 Pro Max here, well firstly the quality doesn't seem that much different at all just generally, but also I'm still very much seeing that little green ghost following me around. So anyway, here are the full specs of the new iPhone 16 Pros, which I'm focusing on this video, compared to the Pixel 9 Pro XL, both of which have three lenses.
But then, of course, we've got the S24 Ultra with its 200 megapixel main camera and four lenses. You've got the 3X and the 5X. But let's start this video with a bit of a blind test.
Which do you think took which photo? And also, do you immediately have a preference? Is your eye...
drawn to one and which one say would you post to Instagram straight away? I'm immediately drawn to the left. It's brighter, it's punchier, it's not necessarily the most natural looking especially compared to the other two.
Anyway let me put you out of your misery. Here are the three. You've got the S24 on the left, iPhone in the middle, Pixel on the right.
Did you guess correctly? So over the past week or so I've taken over I think a thousand photos on each of these phones which firstly was an absolute nightmare to compile into a timeline. These videos always take Ages to make so if you do enjoy it and find it useful then a like and subscribe would be fantastic But don't forget there is a massive subjective factors this as well You may prefer the look of one over the other and that's absolutely fine So zooming in all the way to 25 times I say all the way that is as far as the iPhone will go the s24 can Go up to a hundred times, although that becomes a bit of a watercolor painting then but certainly even though they all have 5x zooms the Samsung is way out in front in terms of zoom quality.
I'll talk about portraits This was shot with the 5x portrait on the Samsung and the iPhone. Although with the Pixel, you can only zoom in to a 3x for a portrait mode shot, which actually is a bit frustrating. A big win for the iPhone is the fact that you can turn a portrait not into a portrait and vice versa.
Introduced with last year's 15s, when you take a photo, it captures the depth information as well. So in the app, you can literally turn portrait on or off, adjust the strength of the bokeh by changing the f-stop. Neither the Samsung or the Pixel have this option.
You can reduce the blur all the way- down to zero but it is still a quote-unquote portrait shot so it's not as clean and also the ability to add blur is artificial it's not using real depth data however i do quite like that both the pixel and samsung let you have this kind of portrait light that you can move around the scene and it changes the brightness of your subject so i'm sat on a bench here completely candid photos i'm sure you can imagine and there is a significant difference in the color between them. The Samsung consistently what we've seen so far is a lot more vibrant. The iPhone looks kind of dark and muted and I have to say I've never been that impressed by the iPhone's telephoto camera and I think the Pixel offers a kind of nice halfway house between them and then at the other end of the spectrum we've got a 0.5 or 0.6 times ultra wide and I'm leaning towards preferring the Pixel here.
The iPhone looks a little bit over sharpened the Galaxy is quite punchy but is just a bit oversaturated a bit too bright. I like the ultra wide on the Pixel here. Now with these guys playing cards on the grass, look at the sky, look at the color difference between them.
Again, the iPhone's actually a little bit muted. We've got the different skin tones of the ladies playing cards. They're quite different photos, actually. Which team are you leaning towards preferring?
Apple, Samsung, or Pixel? And then moving up to a 3X portrait shot, which is, as I say, as far as the Pixel could go, and we get to utilize the S24's first optical zoom before we go up to the 5X, and the Samsung and the Pixel definitely brighten the faces. Here it is. which I think makes it a more pleasing image.
Although in my testing, particularly with video, the pixel can go a little overboard trying to compensate for the brighter background and therefore brightening up your face. The color's completely drained out of me there. But going back to the girls in the park, you can see a significant difference in skin tones, particularly with darker complexions. In terms of what's true to life, I would say it's closer to the iPhone, although the image could do with being brightened up a little bit. I literally have like 500 photos in this timeline.
The difficulty with making these comparison videos is that A, you can cherry pick or someone can cherry pick the best results from each because sometimes they just take a bad shot What is really important to do is make sure you tap on the same subject to adjust that exposure Also the bigger question of what is a photo you can make so many changes in the edit afterwards and particularly with the revamped Photography modes we have on iPhone you can actually get away from that kind of traditional iPhone look and Save a preset that you really really like so as I say, I'm just testing these on standard modes at the moment and we'll dive into the photography mode stuff in a second. But there is an element of what photos you choose, are you having to zoom in and pixel peep to see the differences, and also just the subjectivity of it all. But have a look at this Banksy here in Bristol and more specifically that graffiti below it.
But what I'm finding both in bright and low light is that the iPhone's white balance is very aggressive and it can often turn colors away from their natural tones whiter essentially. Although I must admit with this Banksy example I really don't like the pixel as much. It's really brought up the shadows, we've lost a lot of contrast and actually the iPhone and Samsung with the 1X with the regular main camera are quite similar here.
Before we start testing in low light, let's have a little look at the video. This is shot in 4K60 on all cameras. Actually remarkably similar I would say, although the Samsung on the left, look at my pink jumper there it's very pink and also look how dark that shadow is on my shoulder compared to the other two and as i get right up close to the camera perhaps a little bit too close for comfort i'm definitely leaning towards preferring the iphone in terms of video quality in terms of stabilization all the main and telephoto lenses across the three phones here have optical image stabilization or some form of it and actually they're all remarkably smooth even walking down these steps. All three phones offer some variety of HDR video. For the purpose of this video, because I'm not mastering it in HDR, these are just shot in regular video mode at 4K60.
And in this very tricky lighting scenario, we've got the bright sun, the Pixel looks significantly noisier. Now, of course, I could have shot this in video boost mode where I'd have uploaded it to the cloud afterwards and I could have downloaded it and that would improve the quality. But for this, I'm just really testing what you get straight out of the camera. And also generally you'll get better low light performance if you shoot at 4K30 as opposed to 4K60. I'm also going to give points to the iPhone for still offering the smoothest transition between lenses.
The other two aren't far behind, it's much closer than it used to be, but for zooming in, particularly if you're going to use that camera control button on the iPhone, it is smoother on the iPhone. However, the video stabilization using the 5x telephoto does appear to be less smooth on the iPhone. Blur, Cinematic, Portrait. 4K30, 4K30, 1080p. Pixel is the lowest resolution of the three.
I do quite like the Cinematic mode on iPhone. For me it's always been the best ones. In terms of colour, how unfaked the blur looks behind you.
What do you think? I did kind of hope that they would improve the cinematic mode to 4K60 on the iPhone 16, but they've left it the same. I suppose for slow-mo, obviously you've got 4K120, but... No change to cinematic mode. But there we are.
Let's switch over to some low light shots and this is another example of where the iPhone is aggressively compensating for colors in the scene. So in this first shot I am actually looking at a blue screen on my phone and the iPhone's quite aggressive white balance is compensating and giving me a kind of whitey purple face as opposed to the more true to life blue that we get on the others. I think Samsung's done the best job here not just on myself although I will say that my face looks very over sharpened but the general color. even in the back of the frame. The wood fence, the grass, the pathway.
Although I think the iPhone does do a better job here where I have a more white screen in front of me and it has a really kind of moody cinematic feel to it which I do quite like. This is officially Tech Chat After Hours. Come on in the studio late at night. This is where I'm filming right now. This is where I do all my work and as I switch between the ultra wide, the main and the telephoto lenses, quite significant differences between them.
You may recognize Sylvie the cat if you're a regular on the channel I think the pixels coming across the most naturally the iPhone just looks like someone's dragged the Texture and sharpness slider in Lightroom all the way to a hundred and it's a similar story here I mean look at the texture of the brick wall on the iPhone. I mean at first glance perhaps it does look more detailed But actually it's just over sharpened. It looks kind of a natural I'm definitely leaning towards the pixel and the Samsung the pixel in particular Especially with how it handles the tech chap neon sign at the top right And again here, look how over sharpened that iPhone photo is. I just don't understand what's happening. And this is the case whether you're shooting in JPEG or the HEIC file format.
There isn't a significant difference. But particular credit to the Samsung's exposure here, how it's been able to handle the laptop and the screen and also the rest of the lighting in the room. Although back outside, you can see on the Samsung that the sky is actually quite noisy.
For me, I'm definitely leaning towards the Pixel in terms of low light photography. But let's finish up this low light comparison going back to that group shot from the start and what a difference I mean firstly the colors on the samsung I don't know why it's green the iphone looks like it's taken the clarity slider to 100 and aged everyone 20 years It's kind of horrible. Actually, the pixel is a little soft, but on balance I think it's produced the best low light group photo here.
But how about some super low light video? Well, I can tell you there is a cat here, but you don't even know that really from the iPhone and maybe the Pixel. This is also being shot at 4K30, not 6K because for low light, you kind of want to avoid that.
And I think the Samsung's probably in last place here. It's the darkest outside and also it's very noisy. And it gets even worse when we switch to the ultra wide.
I definitely think the iPhone is out in front here. But then switching to the front camera for a quick low light selfie, the latest Pixels do come with a much improved selfie and in this particular case it is wildly better. All three phones also give you a couple of different options for the field of view of the selfie so you can punch out a little further and the Pixel has the widest field of view so you can get the most in the frame.
And just in terms of quality, dynamic range, colors, in both good and low light, the Pixel has the best selfie camera. But what about selfie video? Well... Here we are shooting 4K60 on all three with the front camera.
Obviously, there's a little bit of a difference in the placement because of how I'm holding this little Trident rig. It's never going to be perfect for every phone, but we're doing the best we can. Now, I'm also going to be jumping between the audio again with the microphone so we can test that out.
Got the stabilization. Just looking at the actual phones, though, I can see that the Pixel definitely has the widest field of view. I'm holding this at arm's length.
Quite a bit more in the frame. Actually, I'll spin around, got lots of different lighting going on. This is Bristol Harbour.
It's also worth looking at how it handles my face when I go in and out of light. The pixel often sort of lightens the face when you've got a high contrast or a dark area. It's hard to see with these sunglasses on looking at the screens. But are there any exclusive features of each phone that maybe are enough to convince you to go for one over the other?
We'll start with the iPhone. As I mentioned a couple of times before, that ability to turn a photo into a... portrait really really like that. I also maintain that the iPhone is still the best for video both in terms of social media apps uploading at the highest quality in terms of being able to shoot pro res and log especially with the new file cut camera app. The iPhone 16 pros have introduced 4k 120 which you can then very easily slow down to a half quarter or fifth speed in the app which is pretty cool if you're a creator and you want some super sexy slow-mo.
But still 4k 120 pro res log fantastic stabilization So I would still say iphone is king for video But now we also have photography modes now This was actually introduced a few years ago actually, but I can't say i've ever used it And the difference here as opposed to using a filter is well, they call it like semantic understanding It's not just flatly laying a filter over an image. It's understanding the skin tones what's on screen. It's a smart filter if you will And to some extent it makes these camera comparisons a little bit pointless now because you can change fundamentally how the picture looks, the shadows, the tones, the saturation, the brightness, the exposure.
You can of course edit your photos in Lightroom afterwards and have a lot of these effects but you're doing it in post. These photography styles are much earlier in, as Apple like to say, the image pipeline. So it's also non-destructive, you can remove the photo style afterwards, you can add it, you can edit and then when you've made a preset you like you can save it and just always take that kind of photo so we're getting away from that traditional iPhone look.
It's a really big selling point for the iPhone even if let's say out of the box it's not my favorite photography camera. And we also have a new camera control button on all the new iPhone 16s which is fine. I've found it a little bit frustrating sometimes I've actually had to change in the settings so a double press opens the camera because I was accidentally opening it.
So yeah it's nice to have a shutter button option there something the other phones don't have but you could always just use the volume down. So yeah it's a nice extra, I don't think is a game changer. But I actually think one of the more underrated features is audio mix. This is coming to all iPhone 16s, although the pros do get the upgraded studio mics, but this allows you to significantly improve the audio of your videos. So now by default the iPhones capture spatial audio, so then you can go into the Photos app afterwards, edit your video, and then change the sound from standard mode to in-frame, which prioritizes what you're, well, framing in the scene.
to studio which I think I probably use most often. It can capture perhaps voices around the camera including maybe an interviewer behind it. There's a cinematic mode which is applied by default if you do shoot in the cinematic video mode and you can also just turn this off or not use it completely if you prefer but it does a pretty good job at cutting out wind noise, background sounds.
It's kind of like the audio eraser that we get on the Pixel phone and it basically will make your iPhone videos sound an awful lot better even just using the inbuilt mics. In terms of the pixel, well you've got like a billion different features to play around with in the Google Photos app. You've got AdMe, which is new for this year where you can take a picture of a group and then they take a picture of you as you get in the frame and it kind of splices it together. It works reasonably well. It's not flawless.
We also have Zoom Enhance, which kind of just a little bit upscales and oversharpens a long range zoom photo and perhaps improves an image 10% to a couple of examples of Taylor Swift here. It's not exactly a game changer, but it can slightly enhance your long range shots. And also I still think the pixels offer the best astrophotography mode. And also like the Samsung, we can actually shoot in 8K. Well, not natively.
When you tap 8K, it then enables video boost. And if you have video boost enabled, you actually get kind of a low quality preview version on your phone, but then it uploads it to the cloud. Google's wizardry with their AI and their cloud servers upscales it either to 8K or just improves motion or improves low light, but it can significantly improve the quality of your video, assuming you're happy to jump through those hoops. As for Samsung, well, clearly one of its unique features is that it has an extra lens.
You've got the One, the Three, the Five, and the Ultra Wide. We've also got Galaxy AI, which can do a good amount of what you can do in the Google Photos app, and actually speaking of which, quite a few of Google's tools can be used on any phone if you just open it within the Google Photos app. Not all of them, of course.
We also have the S Pen on the S24 Ultra if you want to do doodling and more precise sketching around areas you want to erase. But also you can use Gen AI to fill in the gaps. I also love the fact on Samsung phones that if you hold the screen while playing a video you've shot, it actually will slow it down and interlace frames between it to make it pretty smooth, actually.
And then you can save that. Essentially, you can make any video slow-mo. You do have a ton of features.
You've got director's view, you've got dual recording, you can switch between the rear and the selfie cameras while recording on the Samsung, you can't on the other ones. You can also shoot in 4K 120 although the stabilization is then rubbish. You've got 8K, similar problem as well, but you have those options.
You've also got Expert RAW you can download as a separate app which also then goes into the More tab of the camera and Samsung offer a good amount of photo editing tools afterwards and of course with Galaxy AI you can play around with image generation so you have a cat. on your shoulder and breathe. That was a lot to take in. I think the Pixel wins in terms of photography and also the selfie camera.
I think the iPhone wins in terms of video and also some of the extra features that I'm personally most likely to use. I also think the photography modes, the new implementation of it is a bit of a game changer together with portraits. But I think in terms of versatility, just the number of options you have and also playing around with a little bit with Galaxy AI, I think for versatility, the Samsung wins. But what do you reckon? Which one won?
Let me know in the comments below. If you enjoyed the video, a like and subscribe would be lovely. And I'll see you next time right here on the Tech Chat.