Feature Articles

iPhone 8 Plus vs. Samsung Note8: which has the better cameras?

By Alvin Soon - 16 Dec 2017

Videos, and Mac

iPhone 8 Plus, f/1.8 with wide-angle, 1/17 sec, ISO 100.

Updated 6/10/17: Added additional digital zoom comparison.

The Note8 also does the same zooming ‘trick’ that the iPhone 8 Plus does. Both cameras can override your decision to shoot with the telephoto lens, especially in low light. When you tap to shoot with the zoom lens, what the phone really does is snap a photo with the wide-angle, then crop and enlarge it instead.

It’s not great that the iPhone 8 Plus does a digital switcheroo on you without telling you, but at least the cropped results (left) aren’t too far removed from one I did myself in Photoshop (right).

I can understand why the iPhone 8 Plus does it, after all, it only has OIS on the wide-angle and not the telephoto. But the Note8 has OIS on both cameras, which should help to stabilize the shot. And the effect on the Note8 is noticeably poorer; image artifacts smudge the details resulting in a lower resolution photo.

The digitally cropped and enlarged ‘zoom’ image from the Note8 (left) is heavily compressed, here it is next to one I did in Photoshop (right).

Our resolution chart test shows a clearer image of what’s happened. Comparing 100% corps of a digitally zoomed image from the Note8 (below), and a digitally zoomed image from the Note8 done in Photoshop (above), we see that the Note8 image has been sharpened, perhaps overly so, which results in image artifacts smearing the fine details.

The iPhone 8 Plus gives you more options when shooting video; it shoots up to 4K/60p/30p, and even has an option for 4K/24p for film buffs (24fps is the traditional frame rate for film). At Full-HD, the iPhone 8 Plus shoots at 30p/60p, and slow-motion video at 1080p shoots up to a whopping 240fps. The Note8, on the other hand, shoots 4K, 1080p and 720p video at 30fps, with slow motion video at only 720p/240fps.

The iPhone 8 Plus’ videos tend to get noisy in low-light, but in good light they’re fine. Rolling shutter is reasonably controlled, and there’s some warping if you move around a lot. Otherwise, the optical image stabilization (OIS) on the wide-angle camera does a good job at keeping the shot steady. Unfortunately, the telephoto doesn’t have OIS (the iPhone X’s telephoto camera will) which results in shaky cam.

The Note8’s image stabilization is jerkier than the iPhone 8 Plus and results in jarring footage. Like the iPhone 8 Plus, the videos get muddy in low light. Both phones are good at automatically changing exposure when you move from dark to bright areas of a scene and vice versa. If I had to pick one for shooting video, I’d pick the iPhone 8 Plus, just like last year.

iOS 11 brings one more advantage to the iPhone 8 Plus; it saves images and movies in new file formats; HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) for images and h.265, or HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec) for movies. These new formats cut files sizes by as much as half; JPEGs are an average of 4 to 5MB, while the same images in HEIF average 2MB.

Movie file sizes depend on resolution, subject and length, but I have a 20 second Full-HD video that’s 67.7MB, while the same video in HEVC weighs 30.8MB. My biggest 4K movie file takes up 337.8MB of space in the older h.264 codec, and its HEVC counterpart is less than half the file size at 153.6MB.

If you use Photos on macOS High Sierra, they’re transferred over in the new formats, saving you storage space on your iPhone and Mac. When you share these images and movies, however, iOS 11 is clever enough to convert them to JPEG and h.264, so other devices can read them.

Plus, you can create the same effects for Live Photos using Photos on macOS — Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure — as you can on the iPhone, as well as edit Portrait Lighting. If you work on a Mac, owning an iPhone just makes more sense.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.