2022 flagship phone camera battle royale showdown
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Contenders, and how we score
2022 Flagship smartphone camera shootout
They say the best camera is the one that is with you all the time. For many of us, that refers to the camera (or cameras) on our smartphones, which we rarely leave home without them.
In fact, it has reached a point when camera performance sometimes dictates which smartphone you buy.
Typically, the best cameras are found in the latest flagship smartphones. As such, for this smartphone camera shootout, we choose only the cream of the crop.
Choosing our contenders
Here is how we came up with our current selection of 2022 flagship smartphones to battle it out.
We selected only one appropriate model from each brand, even if there were multiple flagship-level launches within a year for the same brand. The models we selected are launched and sold in Singapore officially on July 2022 or earlier, since that's when we embarked on this comparison. Options via third-party retailers were not counted as official support options aren't available even if they were to excel.
Also, the chipset and the phone must be of flagship quality to discount any shooting limitations that might pose from not having top-tier processors. In other words, they would have to be armed with high-end processors such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 (for late-2021 releases), the first-ever Google Tensor or Apple A15 Bionic.
As a result, we have these nine flagship smartphones that meet the above criteria. And they will be vying for HWZ's nomination for the best smartphone camera.
| Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max | Google Pixel 6 Pro | Huawei P50 Pro | OnePlus 10 Pro | Oppo Find X5 Pro | |
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| Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra | Sony Xperia 1 IV | Vivo X80 Pro | Xiaomi 12 Pro | |
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Unlike in previous shootouts when most of the smartphones were released the year before, we have almost all contenders being released here this year instead of 2021.
Only the Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max was launched last year and while would love to have had the iPhone 14 be part of this showdown, we couldn't align it to our preferred time of embarking on this big feature. Meanwhile, the likes of Google Pixel 6 Pro, Huawei P50 Pro, Xiaomi 12 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra were released in Singapore earlier this year (2022).
In fact, we have the latest flagship models from Chinese smartphone makers, such as the Vivo X80 Pro, Oppo Find X5 Pro and OnePlus 10 Pro.
We also have the Sony Xperia 1 IV crashing the party instead of the Xperia Pro-I, which we initially shortlisted. In the end, we felt the Pro-I is a niche handset for specific users, and in its place we've included an equally premium yet more consumer-friendly Xperia 1 IV model instead. That decision was also helped by the Sony Xperia 1 IV having a true optical zoom of 3.3x to 5.2x (Most smartphones have fixed focal length cameras for optical close-ups, and also crop the images for digital zooming into focal ranges in between their fixed lenses).
Finally, while we initially hoped to get the Xiaomi 12S Ultra for this shootout, it was made available in mainland China, like its previous Ultra models. We brought in the Xiaomi 12 Pro instead, which rocked cameras that look impressive from its spec sheet.
Scoring the phone camera
The main camera is usually the bread and butter of the smartphone that most people use predominantly. It's only when users are not satisfied with the composition or distance from the subject that compels users to consider the ultra-wide-angle camera, or telephoto camera.
This understanding of the main camera's role in phones has also led to smartphone makers packing it with the most optimisations by default. As such, we'll be judging the main camera's overall imaging performance by drilling down to core basics and expectations in digital imaging, such as image sharpness, colour rendition, detail retention, image noise, and so on, with the help of a daytime landscape photo.
That said, you are paying a lot of money for these flagship smartphones. Thus, we will also test other aspects of the smartphones' secondary cameras. These include comparison shots taken with telephoto, ultra-wide-angle, low-light (or night), macro, and video performance, which users use on a fairly regular basis when different scenarios call for them.
For individual cameras that address specific shooting needs, we looked at the performance of each smartphone's corresponding camera (e.g. ultra-wide-angle camera and telephoto camera). For night photography and video performance, or for shots where the phone lacks a dedicated camera, we go back to using the main camera.
In addition, we will also test the front-facing camera (selfie camera) this year.
To achieve consistency for this shootout, we only use the native camera app with auto high dynamic range (HDR) turned on for all the smartphones and their cameras.
Photos are taken in 4:3 aspect ratio, whenever possible, in JPEG file format. For selfies, we turned off all beautification features as well as other enhancements to ensure every phone camera is on a level playing field.
Images and videos were taken handheld regardless of shooting conditions. In other words, we try to mimic what everyday smartphone users do when they whip out their smartphones to capture the moment they desire.
All the photos for each category are taken in the same position and in quick succession with each smartphone to ensure the lighting conditions are as similar as possible. The photos are then judged on the same colour-calibrated monitor to ensure fairness.
We judged photos based on the end result only. This takes each phone's software-related tuning into account, like the amount of help rendered via computational photography, checking for overzealous image noise reduction, verifying edge distortion in ultra-wide-angle photos, and looking at stabilisation in videos. Again, this is considering how a typical user would actually use their phone as intended.
This time around, we award a point to each phone that we found competent in the test scenario/category. This is in consideration that camera phone photography has progressed tremendously over the years and the differences among top-tier phones are fast narrowing. As such, our new scoring method would allow every phone to score points in areas they are strong at, thus allowing us to identify phones that are suited to a specific style of photography.
Head over to the next page to see how the phones fared in our main camera test!
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