Video ID: vSIbvJB4WdI
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSIbvJB4WdI
Added At: 13-06-25 21:18:23
Processed: No
Sentiment: Neutral
Categories: Tech
Tags: smartphone, camera, iPhone, Samsung, photography, video quality, selfies, slow-mo
Summary
Bulletpoints: • iPhone 16 Pro Max has improved camera features, including a higher-quality shooting and better microphones. • Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra still lags behind in terms of video quality and noise reduction. • The new iPhone's slow-mo feature is comparable to Samsung's, but the overall video quality is slightly better. • For selfies, the iPhone has a more cinematic look, while Samsung's portrait mode looks better.
Transcript
this is the iPhone 16 Pro Max this is the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra when we compared the Samsung to last year's iPhone Samsung 1 with 6.5 points to 4.5 and so the question is can this new iPhone with its capture button faster and higher quality shooting improved Ultra wide camera and close-ups better microphones and a lot more software features reemerge as the king of smartphone photography or has Samsung with all of the updates since launch actually pulled even further ahead of the iPhone oh yeah and the phone that wins this test is the phone permanently switched to oh my God that's going to be me so let's start with sound quality you're listening to the Samsungs right now and it sounds good iPhones and Samsungs have been pretty neck and neck when it comes to this for years now but this year that changes cuz now you're listening to the iPhones Apple has upgraded to four microphones instead of Samsung 3 they're apparently higher grade studio microphones whatever that means but also Apple has paid particular attention to wind noise reduction and you can tell I mean this is is the best sounding audio that I have ever heard on any phone with the additional option now of selecting whose audio the phone focuses on since the thing now records 360° Sound by default so last time sound was a draw this time I feel very confident handing the win to the iPhone 16 Pro Max and while we're at it how's the video quality well the iPhone 15 Pro Max was already ahead of Samsung when it comes to video so now that that's been updated to the 16 Pro Max it pretty much smokes the Samsung on all fronts so so that's in terms of the ultra wide camera can you see how the iPhone is both wider so it gets more in the shot while also having the same amount of detail when you get up close even though you have to punch in more to get to it it's in terms of dynamic range the ability of your phone to evenly expose your shot so you don't have something that's too bright or too dark but look at the trees in the background here can you see that Samsung has kind of lost the information in them now let's be very clear the iPhone isn't always better we did find in a few scenes that the iPhone was trying to make things too balanced but to do that it had to make the dark areas unnaturally bright but it's better on average apple is also better when it comes to noise if you look at the brick work over here you can see that you don't even need to go to a night scene for Samsung to start looking a little grainy and soft and I actually could not believe the difference between the two phones here I think it's massive but the biggest thing for me is just detail like if you wanted to get in closer to see me having the time of my life on perhaps the most thrilling ride in existence it's not going to look very good on the Samsung both phones do also have an action mode for when things get really out of hand and they both make big strides in terms of smoothing out all of the absolutely insane acrobatics I was being subjected to on this roller coaster but the iPhones is slightly higher resolution and a little bit cleaner the only exception that I could find to this rule is 8k the Galaxy s24 Ultra shoots 8K video and when you get the right conditions it's actually really good and it definitely trumps the iPhone it's just you have to get it right you have to work around Samsung's other video shortcomings to properly take advantage of it to the point where I think most people will prefer how the iPhone's 4K footage looks to Samsung's 8K but things are changing when it comes to special modes and this is basically extras that your phone does that are fun but they're not part of the core camera experience so that's slow motion that's close-up macro mode that's any kind of cinematic video mode and last time I did this test I gave the point to Samsung because of its ability to shoot slow motion in 4k which was significantly better than Apple's 1080p but now the iPhone do 4K too and actually Apple's slow-mo is like when you're taking normal videos just less noisy than Samsung's it actually feels 100% on par with the quality that you get on your normal iPhone video mode and the iPhone has also had an upgrade to macro since the ultra wide camera on the phone has gone from 12 mapel to now 48 and macro uses this Ultra wide camera so now the iPhone does take noticeably more detailed close-ups in Samsung apologies for the slightly strange example but um you'd be surprised how Unpretty things look when you 2 cm away from them and then your portrait cinematic video is well I find pretty comparable between the two but the improvements to the iPhone and the other things are enough for this special modes category to swing completely from a Samsung win to an iPhone win one thing that only the iPhone does is space your video to watch back on your Apple Vision Pro but I feel like it's a little early in the day for mixed reality headsets for that to be any kind of substantial perk besides I feel like if you have a Vision Pro you're definitely an iPhone user anyway what about selfies well there's a couple of things to bear in mind first of all that both phones can either shoot narrow selfies for just you or wider to capture a full scene and when you choose to go wide on the iPhone it is wider I wouldn't say there's a tangible difference in detail between the two but I do find it so interesting how both of these phones have such a different style and interpretation of exactly the same scene and yet they both also kind of seem right when you take them so really this one's up to you but I do personally prefer the Samsung I just think there's something about the warmth of the skin tones the vibrancy of the scenery oh and also Samsung does a cracking job at portraits so portrait selfies look better the iPhone does now have some new photographic styles that let you tweak the skin tone in your shots to exactly your preference and I will say the way that Apple sold this the idea of you deciding how you want to look in your photos and then setting that style as your default and then always looking right from that point onwards is actually very enticing but it's just that in practice your skin tone is going going to look different in every photo anyway because of all the other factors and so if you really wanted to get this skin tone thing right you'd probably have to go through like every single photo ever taken of you and tweak each one individually which doesn't feel like a sensible use of time now the video from these front cameras is every bit as important anytime you want to record a little holiday Vlog anytime you want to make a Tik Tok anytime you video call someone these are the cameras that you're banking on and while I'm happy that what the while I'm happy that Samsung is paying attention to the hardware in their front camera they are definitely being let down with the software processing so have a look at this clip do you not think that Samsung looks more cinematic like I'm being filmed with a proper rear camera as opposed to a tiny little selfie camera it feels more professional compared to the iPhone's more basic setup but there are caveats the iPhone camera makes me look better for starters pretty consistently Samsung's got a real gritty vibe to it you know kind of like I'm filming the next Batman movie the iPhone front camera is less grainy too you notice Samsung really struggling when you're not in ideal lighting and it's it's such a shame because you know that they've actually put a better camera on the front of their phone but the biggest difference have a look at this I created a burner Instagram account with zero followers to see how well each camera takes footage directly within other apps and as you can see here Apple has done a really good job optimizing the Instagram camera to retain most of the video and audio processing that happens in its normal camera app but even when you're going straight onto Instagram Samsung not so much and I feel like at this point it's less of a Samsung issue it's more of an Android issue there's just there's too many devices on Android for Instagram to optimize for every single one both phones also shoot cinematic video on their front camera which is good I think it adds a lot of much needed depth to what could otherwise be quite a flat camera I think Apple shoots in higher quality but Samsung just gets portrait mode I really like the style of it but overall we have to give selfie video to the iPhone but one part of the camera experience that I feel like gets very overlooked is the camera app itself a good camera app is going to give you a ton of options it's going to make shooting fun and most importantly it's going to allow you to take what you want to take quickly and on that note the difference in shooting speed is now back to being large again Apple used to be far ahead and Samsung closed the Gap and now apple is far ahead again particularly when you're shooting using both phones high resolution modes so this is Apple's 48 megap versus Samsung's 50 megapix mode and it's not just that it feels fast it has a tangible impact on your photos like look here it's not just that the iPhone managed to stop the water earlier in its tracks but it has actually stopped the water you can see the texture inside of this stream which I think is absolutely insane and while you're probably not taking a lot of photos of frog fountains the same differences will also apply to photos of family where someone's constantly laughing or friends that don't listen to instructions and kids that don't sit still I would also say that the iPhone's app is a little prettier and a little more intuitive to use with one hand like pretty much everything you might need to use is always a swipe away as well as still being a little smoother and faster than Samsung's but then Samsung's got some stuff going for it too you get more settings more control over exactly what you want your camera experience to be but the big thing is really you'll probably have noticed this throughout the entire video that Samsung's display is super bright and the reduced glare that it screen picks up actually makes the photo taking experience tangibly better so I'm going to go for a draw on this one and yes you can control the entire Samsung camera app using just the S Pen and some air gestures which is wildly cool by the way but you just I mean you'll probably use it like once in your life and then yes there is also the new camera control on the iPhone which same if you want to hear my rant on this button or not button whatever you call it that's in my unboxing video but for the purposes of now I'm going to say that it adds nothing of note to the iPhone's camera experience and on the subject of the camera experience let's talk editing you might have seen that Samsung has full generative edit capability ities so you can pick up objects you can move those objects you can resize them and the phone will fill in the blanks automatically Samsung has sketch to image you make a little Doodle and then the phone turns that doodle into a real object in your image which is often fiddly and a little disappointing but every now and again jaw-droppingly impressive an Apple has basically nothing this is where you feel the consequence of Apple being late to the AI party as of right now the only AI editing feature currently announced is cleanup which is not bad but it's coming later in a software up date and based on the beta it doesn't feel as sophisticated yet as what other phones are doing and this is where I would say Samsung picks up a bit of steam cuz I would say they also win when it comes to zoom too I remember when the s24 ultra first came out not being particularly impressed by Zoom but it seems like updates since that launch have brought it back up to scratch both phones have a five times optical zoom lens but Samsung's five times is higher resolution and it also feels like Samsung knows what to do with it better it feel feels like they're not afraid to really dial up the software processing on images when you zoom in a lot which not everyone's going to love but I think it's what these images need we even tried a concert environment and can you see how when you get super up close that there's not actually much more information being captured on the Samsung it's just correcting the image way more aggressively and confidently and it makes it better not to mention that Samsung also has a second zoom camera at three times which just helps to keep Zoom shots high quality throughout the entire Zoom range and also as I've alluded to earlier in this video Samsung just gets portrait mode Apple was the first company to do any kind of portrait mode well but you can just tell that in the meantime Samsung has really invested energy into making sure that their portrait mode becomes something special it's got that magic combination of realistic background blur that doesn't feel like too much and gently gets more blurred as objects get further away with extremely good reliable Edge detection and colors that the key caveat is that these portraits were taken on the five time zoom cameras which favors Samsung because they've got a better one when you take portraits using the one times main camera then Apple does gain a big leg up cuz it can shoot 24 megap portraits instead of Samsung's 12 but I do think that portraits in general do look better when you're more zoomed in so this one's for Samsung now just before we get to the crowning of what is going to be my new phone we need to talk about core photo quality and Nightmare mode so the main change to photo quality with the iPhone 16 Pro is the new 48 map Ultra wide camera and it was definitely the thing to change since this is the one area that I felt it was weaker than the Samsung in but on first glance there's not really a massive difference between the two unless unless you specifically use Apple's high res 48 megapixel modes but if you do use that then yeah Samsung just can't keep up because its Ultra wide is only 12 at maximum Now using the high-res photo mode with which Apple calls Heath Max is not without compromise it means that photos take a bit longer to capture it means you don't get live photos anymore and high resolution photos also take up more space but here's what I think Apple's done really well I think the photos still capture fast enough and Apple's heat file format is actually so efficient that a 48 megapixel shot on this takes up like half the storage of a 12 megapixel shot on this so they've made it convenient enough that I will actually just keep Heath Max on by default and so the iPhone does become the much better Ultra wide camera for me and that's mostly true for the main camera too technically Samsung destroys Apple in terms of resolution Samsung's main cam is 200 megap Apple's is 48 but then when you really boil it down the best photo quality that Samsung can take without some sort of major compromise in terms of processing quality or capture time is 12 whereas Apple's default is 24 you can take every normal photo on the iPhone in 24 megapixel without needing to change any settings or think about it or sacrifice anything and that I think is a massive perk and yes you can if you want to take a 200 megapixel photo on the Samsung but it's kind of like the whole 8K video thing there are situations in which it will be amazing but only in absolutely ideal conditions more often than not I found that the iPhone's lower resolution shot will still look better so I'm giving the category of photos to the iPhone it's not a blanket win there are absolutely times when I think Samsung has made someone's face look better or has a nicer pop of color but if we're going on averages then 70 to 80% of the shots the iPhone takes I think are better now based on what you've seen so far you've probably guessed what happens when things get super dark like yeah Samsung's video becomes noisy that same thing that you noticed a little bit during the day gets exacerbated when the lighting becomes challenging like look how much grain there is in the smoke coming out of this fire Samsung also gets a little funky when it comes to color control like all of a sudden why does my sky look so deep blue that it's it's like I'm sitting in front of a blue screen or like when we tried walking to an area with lots of bright lights that weren't white lights Samsung makes those colors so intense that you are actually losing detail on what those lights are shining onto but the night photos are quite comparable this one was actually kind of shocking for me because this scene was so dark I could barely see where I was going and both phones rescued it the only key consistent difference that I noticed between these two phones is when things get dark Apple lets your images get a bit grainy Samsung will smooth your image to get rid of grain and then add sharpening back into the photo to correct for that smoothness actually this Zoom shot is like the perfect example of my point can you see how as we zoom into this tent to capture I'm left with two very different looking images in which neither feels wrong or better than the other it feels like the amount of detail being captured is pretty equivalent but the difference in video is enough to swing this night category into Apple's C so that means we have a complete score flip in the last test it was 6.5 to Samsung and 4.5 to the iPhone this time it's 6.5 iPhone 4.5 Samsung the new iPhone isn't the most exciting iPhone upgrade but the camera improvements they've made are important ones so this is now the phone that I'm going to switch to and you want to know why I've been completely comfortable propping my phone up in all sorts of weird places to take the shots for this video it's because of this the tauras oand 360° spin Cas our sponsor so this case is not just a case it's a case mag safe it's a kickstand and it's a grip it's all of these things in one and it actually does them all better than these separate individual gadgets with the case having raised edges to protect every part of the phone the grip being permanently locked into the phone and the stand working perfectly for both vertical and horizontal use but then they have the glasso X screen protector which applies perfectly almost every single time thanks to a mechanism that pulls out air from the center shortening the distance that air needs to escape escape from and it also perfectly highlights the new thinner screen borders on the iPhone while being compatible with most cases and resistant to both scratches and 12T drops oh yeah and I've managed to get I say full 20% off everything in the Tes store so link below to check it out