This is the best smartphone camera of 2017

Note: This article was first published on 28th December 2017.

The camera in your smartphone is likely the most important one in your life, so it’s vital to find a good one. I put seven of this year’s flagship smartphones to find out which has the best camera, and this is what I discovered.

How we chose the lucky 7 contenders

There were a lot of smartphones that came out this year, so we narrowed our selection to flagships that cost approximately S$1,000 and above. You’ll notice that one flagship is conspicuously missing from our list, the Razer Phone, and that’s because early impressions of the camera were disappointing.

How we score

The tests are broken down into basics, like color rendition, detail retention, low light performance, and so on. I also test key features like HDR, flash and panoramas. The sample images you see have been saved for web to reduce loading time, but are otherwise unedited. Each section has a winner, and on the last page, the scores are tallied to pick our final winner (this year’s result may surprise you).

Here are our contenders’ key specs related to their camera systems:

The most user-friendly Camera app

The default Camera app’s user-friendliness is key to helping the everyday user get the shot. A badly designed one frustrates and hampers the photographer, whereas a carefully considered design reduces friction and helps to capture the moment.

Winner: Apple iPhone X

The iPhone Camera app’s UI (user interface) has stayed mostly the same for several generations, and it remains the easiest to use camera app for most people.

While the layout plays a part, the key feature is autofocus, which is fast and good at determining the subject. While using the other Android smartphones, I discovered that most of them focus in the middle by default, and only some of them have face detection to help focus on people. 

The Google Pixel 2 XL is one example; unless you tap to focus, it remains focused in the center all the time, with no face detection to shift focus to people who might be standing off to the center of the frame, resulting in back-focused shots. The iPhone X, on the other hand, can detect various subjects to a degree and refocus the camera on them, helping users get a properly focused image most of the time without having to tap to focus.

The Samsung Note8 deserves special mention, however, for its excellent multi-area AF in Pro mode, which is actually faster and more dependable than the AF in Auto mode. When using the AF in Pro mode, for example, the camera quickly switched to a non-human subject (so the AF switch wasn’t due to face detection) that was off-center but closer and bigger in the frame, but in Auto mode the camera stubbornly focused in the middle of the image.

But if you switch to Pro mode, you lose the ability to shoot in HDR and Live Focus, so it’s a tradeoff. There’s also an excellent tracking AF feature in Auto mode, which you have to turn on in settings. With this feature, once you tap a focal point, you can shift your camera and then it’ll continue to track your subject.

Otherwise, in the default Auto mode, the Note8 Camera app has buttons for Bixby Vision and Stickers that you can’t turn off. If you don’t use these features, then it’s just a waste of space, and I’d loved it if these shortcut areas can be swapped out for other settings.

Our favorite colors

This is a category that regularly gets me in trouble, because colors are so subjective. I’m going to nerd out and explain why in the next few paragraphs, so if you just want to know the results, skip to the section below.

There are three different factors that can influence color perception — habit, brightness, and taste. Habit gets in the way of our color perception more often these days — our brains just prefer hyper-saturated visuals, and if your eyes are conditioned to the overly vibrant colors on smartphones and TVs these days, you might find realistic colors dull.

Brightness also ties in with saturation; if one camera’s image processor determines the proper exposure for a scene to be one stop lower than the next camera, the brighter image will appear to have ‘better’ color, simply because it looks more vibrant. However, if you match the exposures in post, they might look more similar than different.

And that goes into taste — not just ours, but the image processor in the smartphone’s, and how it determines color balance, overall exposure as well as white balance. Even the one with the most pleasant colors, for example, can still get it wrong — at one angle, the white balance can be overly warm, but pointing at the same subject from another angle can shift white balance to be more accurate. And some people really like how one camera’s image processor boosts warm reds and yellows, for example, while others prefer more neutral tones.

(And for the photo nerds out there, because most people aren’t going to shoot in raw and process their smartphone photos afterwards, we almost always test our smartphone cameras in JPEG, using them the way most people would.)

Which has been a long way to explain that color is complicated. While there isn’t a smartphone that gets perfect colors all the time, there is a range of top performers that produces lovely colors most of the time.

Winners: Apple iPhone X, Google Pixel 2 XL, Samsung Note8

You could say that I just couldn’t decide upon all three of them, and that would be true — because all of them produce excellent colors most of the time. Not one performs perfectly all the time; sometimes one produces colors that are duller, sometimes one gets white balance wrong, but overall the iPhone X, Pixel 2 XL, and Note8 all render colors that look better than the rest.

The most details

Detail in a digital photograph exists in inverse proportion to the amount of light — the more light, the lower the ISO, the less image noise, the more detail retained. So we can’t really speak of image resolution in a vacuum, but since there’s a section on low light performance, let’s focus on detail in good light in this section, with an ISO range from 100 to 400.

Winner: Samsung Note8

The Samsung Note8 takes the most detailed images in good light. Previous iPhones have lacked image detail, and the iPhone X continues in that tradition — details are fine at the lowest ISO, but quickly smudge in mid ISO settings. Both the Pixel 2 XL and Huawei Mate 10 Pro can produce jittery edges, and both the LG V30+ and Sony Xperia XZ Premium are prone to image noise.

The least worst flash

On-camera direct flash never looks good, but sometimes you just need to use it. What a surprise then, that the Google Pixel 2 XL manages to make flash look, if not jaw-dropping, then at least all right. The other smartphones vary from average to okay, but I actually thought the iPhone X would do better than it did (more below).

Winner: Google Pixel 2 XL

The Pixel 2 XL manages to make on-board camera flash look like subtle fill flash, with just enough to brighten up the subject and not so much that it makes subjects glow (notice how it softly fills in the subject’s rear hand in the image below, without blowing up the rest of the subject). The Pixel 2 XL also cleverly manages to retain more of the background then any other smartphone camera here, making the flash look more natural than artificial.

The iPhone X is our fast second when it comes to flash photography, but it doesn’t manage to blend background and subject exposures as naturally as the Google Pixel 2 XL. The key advantage the iPhone X has over the Pixel 2 XL is its Quad -LED True Tone flash, which changes the color of the flash to match the ambient light. Even though the flash’s color looks more natural, its intensity is more overwhelming than the Pixel 2 XL’s.

The U11 actually does a good job of blending background and subject when shooting with flash, but it just doesn’t have whatever magical HDR the Pixel 2 XL is conjuring. The Mate 10 Pro’s camera flash looks just like most on-camera flash, which is to say, not good. The flash tends to overwhelm the subject, and the Mate 10 Pro is not as good at keeping the background in. The LG V30+’s flash is even more overpowering than the Mate 10 Pro’s.

The Note8’s flash can also be overpowering. Even though it seems to have the ability to shoot rear curtain sync, it doesn’t seem to use it all the time, which is a pity. The Xperia XZ Premium actually does a decent job of keeping the background details when shooting with flash, but once again, it can’t compare with how well the Google Pixel 2 XL does.

The lushest HDR

No surprises here, the Google Pixel 2 XL takes the best High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. That’s because the Pixel 2 XL’s core strength is in HDR, as it’s the only one that shoots HDR images all the time.

Winner: Google Pixel 2 XL

Google is doing something right with the Pixel 2 XL’s HDR images. They don’t look garish like some overly-processed HDR shots, nor do they look flat, like some HDR images that try to bring down the highlights and push up the shadows, ending up with dull mid-tones. The Pixel 2 XL camera is pretty sophisticated; it captures up to 10 images in the background as you’re getting a shot, and combines them into a single, best-of photo. Artificial intelligence even informs on the final tonal adjustments, so you get a natural-looking photograph in the end, not one that looks like it’s been through intense rounds of Photoshop. 

However, the Pixel 2 XL’s images suffer from a UI problem. The camera focuses and meters in the center by default, so images can turn out overly dark. Sometimes, you just have to tap on the subject yourself to get it properly exposed.

A special mention goes to the Apple iPhone X, which also shoots pretty good HDR images. Prior to 2017’s iPhones, Apple’s HDR images tended to be flat or unevenly exposed, but this generation of iPhones capture well-exposed HDR images with contrasty tone curves.

The Google Pixel 2 XL’s HDR photos offer a lot to work with

I’m going to geek out a little and talk about how the Pixel 2 XL’s images do in post as compared to non-HDR photos from the other phones. Because every photo is already an HDR image, there’s a lot more to work with — check out how much I could get out of the image below from the Pixel 2 XL, just from lowering the highlights, increasing the shadows, adjusting the exposure and tweaking the contrast in Lightroom.

While the non-HDR photos from the Apple iPhone X and Samsung Note8 have an impressive dynamic range in their own right, the Pixel 2 XL is the only one to retain highlight detail from the tree trunk. To be fair, the Pixel 2 XL produces more luminance noise in the shadows when you raise them, but that can be solved with noise reduction. The Pixel 2 XL won’t beat a raw file from a modern DSLR, but it’s impressive results coming from a smartphone JPEG.

Seeing in low light

Shooting in low light is one of the most challenging situations for any camera, but especially smartphone cameras. Their smaller sensors can gather less light than cameras with larger sensors, and the struggle can result in more noise and smudged detail.

Winners: Samsung Note8

The Samsung Note8 turns in an excellent performance when it comes to low light photography. It manages to retain image details, while keeping image noise to a minimum. The HTC U11 comes in a close second, but it produces more image noise with less detail.

As for the other smartphones, the Apple iPhone X continues its history of smudging details once the light goes dim. To its credit, its OIS is better than the Note8’s, keeping more low light images steady and sharp.

The Google Pixel 2 XL curiously falters in low light, with more image noise than the Note8. If you apply some noise reduction in post, however, they still look really good. The Huawei Mate 10 Pro manages to keep noise levels down but at the expense of fine details. 

The LG V30+ and Sony Xperia XZ Premium are plagued by loss of image details and high noise levels in low light, and the Xperia XZ is weakened further by its lack of optical image stabilization.

The widest panoramas

Panoramas are always going to disappoint you, and that’s because making a good one is hard. Moving people can turn into disjointed ghosts, a slight miscalculation can create disjointed seams. So take our best panorama winner with a grain of salt: it’ll give you a better chance of grabbing a good panorama, but no guarantees of a perfect one, and none of the seven can do a decent one in low light.

Winner: Samsung Note8

The Samsung Note8 is our choice for best panorama shooter. One of the biggest challenges when shooting panoramas is the wide range of exposures that can happen as you pan across a landscape; one area can be brighter while another can be darker. The Note8 handles these differences well and brings them together into a scene that just looks natural (see the header image above).

The Note8 processes moving subjects without too much ghosting, but to be clear, every smartphone will have problems with movement, some more than others. Ideally, panoramas are shots of still landscapes with minimal movement, but most people don’t shoot panoramas in ideal environments.

The Apple iPhone X actually handles moving subjects well, keeping ghosting to a minimum. But it can struggle at balancing out the overall exposure.

The Google Pixel 2 XL’s panoramas does fine with overall exposure and moving subjects, but the panoramas are riddled with disjointed seams.

The HTC U11’s panoramas are full of double images, and it’s one of the few that can’t take vertical panoramas.

We’d give the Huawei Mate 10 Pro third spot when it comes to panoramas. The images are full of detail, but suffer from more ghosting artifacts than the iPhone X.

The LG V30+ doesn’t handle overall exposures very well, and there are odd ghosting artifacts to be found as well as blurry areas in its panoramas. One alternative on the LG V30+ is to rely on its super-wide angle secondary camera to capture a single wider field of view shot than its normal wide-angle main camera. However, you'll still have to put up with ultra-wide angle distortions at the corners that accompany such shots. Still, it's a reasonably decent and fast option than panning to capture a panorama shot and put up with the odd exposures we've noticed.

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium’s panoramas can be unevenly exposed, with soft details and ghosting artifacts.

The best Portrait Modes

In this section, I’ll focus on the smartphones that produce faux background blur using dual cameras, also known as Portrait Mode or Live Focus. Specifically, those are the Apple iPhone X, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and the Samsung Note8.

I focus on dual camera systems because single camera phones that guess at depth don’t produce very good results. Google’s Pixel 2 XL with its split pixels, for example, doesn’t do very realistic background blur, despite all the software magic Google has packed into it.

Even dual camera systems, which can generate a depth map to better inform the blurring, are still pretty much hit and miss. Sometimes you get a good result, sometimes you don’t. If you look too closely, you can see odd edges where the phone doesn’t quite get it right, especially for hair. It’s really best to just think of Portrait modes as a beta feature right now.

With those caveats mentioned …

Winner: Apple iPhone X

The Apple iPhone X takes the better Portrait shots for a few reasons. Its accuracy is actually more or less on par with the Samsung Note8, which is to say, it depends on your luck. They both produce pleasing blur when they do get it, whereas the Huawei Mate 10 Pro’s bokeh can look unrealistic, with odd halo effects.

The Note8 has the added advantage of being able to adjust the strength of the background blur, but the iPhone X has an extra feature called Portrait Lighting, which lets you modify the light on your subject’s face for a better look. One particularly striking effect, called Stage Light, isolates your subject and darkens the background. Here's a video demo of it in action.

Since the iPhone X’s Portrait Lighting helps you get a nicer portrait, while the Note8’s variable blur helps you get, well, a nicer background, the iPhone X wins the round for Portrait mode.

Selfies!

Apologies in advance for all the pictures of my mug. Testing the front-facing camera has never been a big priority for us; the logic being that it doesn’t matter how awesome the front camera is if the back-facing camera isn’t.

That said, we can’t avoid how important selfies are to most people (ourselves included), so here goes … 

Winner: Apple iPhone X

The Apple iPhone X takes the best selfies, with good color and detail. The Google Pixel 2 XL and the Samsung Note8 also take good-looking selfies, but the details are softer in comparison to the iPhone X.

The iPhone X can also shoot with Portrait mode using its TrueDepth camera. The overall effect isn’t perfect, but it’s fine if you don’t look too closely. The Google Pixel 2 XL can also produce faux bokeh selfies, but they’re not very good, with ragged, artificial edges.

The HTC U11, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and Sony Xperia XZ Premium turn in selfies that look softer than our winners. The LG V30+ deserves a special mention for its wide-angle option, for when you want to get more people and background in a selfie. It’s a brilliant idea, but there’s noticeable softness in corners of the image.

Zooming in … most of the time

Only two of the smartphones in this shootout are capable of optical zoom — zooming in with actual lenses, not digitally cropping and enlarging the image — the Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Note8. The LG V30+ does the opposite; its dual cameras come with a ‘normal’ view and a super wide-angle view, so we won’t be considering it here.

Winner: Samsung Note8

The Note8’s telephoto camera shoots more detailed images than the iPhone X’s, which mirrors how their wide-angle cameras perform against each other. However, there’s something you should know about shooting with the zoom lens on both cameras.

In low light, both the iPhone X and the Note8 have a habit of shooting with the wide-angle camera instead of actually using the telephoto camera, then digitally cropping and enlarging the photo to give you a final image. A digitally enlarged photo is not as good as a genuine shot from the telephoto camera, but there’s no way to manually override this decision.

The cameras are likely doing this because the telephoto lenses are slower compared to the wide-angles on both phones, which means shutter speeds need to be slower to make up for the lesser light being captured. Slower shutter speeds increase the possibility of camera shake, and it doesn’t help that telephoto shots are more prone to camera shake than wide shots.

Even though both the iPhone X and Note8 come with dual optical image stabilization systems, they’re still doing this digital swap when shooting in dimmer light, likely to preempt the chance of blurry images. The good news is that the Note8 seems to have improved its digital zoom since the first time I used it; whereas the review unit at launch had heavily compressed zoom photos, the latest updated Note8 has better quality digital crops.

Shooting moving images

Shooting video has become as important as shooting images on our smartphones. In 2017, it’s not enough to just grab good-looking video, but to also provide stable image stabilization and clear sound capture.

Winner: Apple iPhone X

The Apple iPhone X takes the best-looking videos. It has good AF and the auto-exposure smartly adjusts itself when lighting conditions change. Colors look good and there’s hardly any rolling shutter.

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The iPhone X also has the richest range of frame rates to choose from; from 4K at 24/30/60p. Plus, it has the fastest slow motion capture at the highest resolution with a frame rate of 1080/240p (the Sony Xperia XZ Premium can shoot at an astonishing 960fps, but at 720p). With iOS 11, the iPhone X records videos in the new HEVC format, which cuts your file sizes by as much as half — very welcome when you’re shooting a lot of 4K videos.

Here’s a look at the difference between 4K at 60p and 4K at 24p (a cinematic frame rate that produces a more ‘film-like’ look). The videos were shot with the iPhone 8 Plus’ wide-angle camera, which is identical to the iPhone X’s wide-angle camera.

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However, while the iPhone X’s video optical image stabilization (OIS) is good for mostly still shots, it does produce an odd jelly-like effect if the videographer moves around too much — although the jelly effect is not as pronounced as on the Samsung Note8. I’ve also noticed that camera shake on the iPhone X is more pronounced at 60p, scale back to 30 or 24p and shakiness is reduced. It could be that 4K at 60p is still too much for the electronic part of the image stabilization to process, or simply that shakiness is more noticeable because the higher frame rate is capturing more motion detail.

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The Google Pixel 2 XL has the best image stabilization — its OIS combined with electronic image stabilization (EIS) is very, very, very good. But the images are full of noise, and sound capture is muffled. There’s even a bug where high-pitched sounds produce a whiny background noise, Google says this will be fixed in an update.

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The LG V30+ deserves a special mention for its rich video recording options. There are 16 cinematic color grading presets, and an innovative Point Zoom feature that lets you zoom into any selected area in the frame, not just the middle.

If you’re a manual shooter, you can shoot in full manual, and even adjust audio capture using a graphical audio monitor. The V30+ even records to LG-Cine Log, which is like raw for video. But these manual features will really appeal only to a niche audience, while this shootout focuses on everyday use. And unfortunately, the V30+’s Auto video quality is not as good as the iPhone X’s, rolling shutter is clearly evident on the main camera, colors look hyper-saturated, and while the iPhone X has OIS on both cameras, the LG V30+ only has OIS on the wide-angle.

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The best smartphone camera for 2017

After 11 pages of exposition, here’s how the smartphone cameras fared in each test:

And the score tally is five points for the Apple iPhone X, three for the Google Pixel 2 XL, and five for the Samsung Note8.

 

There is no one perfect camera

What these results mean is that if I could, I’d carry the Google Pixel 2 XL for its excellent stills, the Apple iPhone X for shooting video, and the Samsung Note8 for shooting when it gets dark.

Unfortunately, most of us can’t carry around multiple cameras to take advantage of their unique strengths. We have to choose a single smartphone, with its strengths and its weaknesses.

There’s no one perfect smartphone camera in this shootout, and therein lies the conundrum. For example, if this shootout was about taking the best pictures only, then the Google Pixel 2 XL would win hands down. Its photographs are truly outstanding, and like nothing I’ve ever seen from a smartphone. Even though it may not have the best details and low noise performance, the expanded dynamic range in its always-HDR photos make them look more lifelike than the other smartphones. The Pixel 2 XL even manages to make on-camera flash look alright, using its HDR sorcery.

But then again, the Pixel 2 XL’s Camera UI is half-baked. The focal point is always in the middle until you manually change it, and the autofocus (AF) doesn’t even ship with face detection. Even though the image stabilization in video mode is out of this world, video quality itself is not great. It appears that even though Google made great strides in one area of its camera, it let the rest of the app go to slack.

So while the Pixel 2 XL has one extraordinary quality, it can’t be the smartphone camera for most people, who do shoot videos and need functional AF.

As an aside; the Pixel 2 XL’s accelerated ascendance on the strength of its software really underscores how software is eating the camera world. While the Pixel 2 XL can’t beat, say, a Nikon D850’s 45MP images, neither can a Nikon D850 do what the Pixel 2 XL is doing computationally.

The other smartphone manufacturers may be masters of hardware, but hardware has physical limitations. Software has fewer constraints, and it’ll be interesting to see how far one of the best software companies in the world will change photography in the Pixels to come. If you’re curious about just what’s going on inside the Pixel 2 camera, Googler Nat has a great inside video on how Google built it.

It’s between the iPhone X and Note8 (is anyone really surprised?)

It then comes down to the two highlights of this shootout, the Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Note8, both of which are tied for points. So, really, this could go either way.

Contrary to the comments on my previous comparison between the Apple iPhone 8 Plus and the Note8, I don’t particularly want to give Apple’s iPhones the crown all the time. The iPhones do almost everything very well, but the photos lack detail, especially when it comes to low light.

This is a weakness I’ve been highlighting for years, and Apple shouldn’t keep getting a free pass, especially since the Note8 shows you can get detailed images while keeping image noise down, even in low light.

On the other hand, Samsung still hasn’t fixed the jelly effect that haunts its videos. It’s gotten better, there’s less rolling shutter than there used to be, but the Note8’s videos aren’t as good as the iPhone X’s. To be fair though, if you don’t move the camera around much, you won’t get the jello effect, and the iPhone X’s video OIS can also produce some odd jerking motions, though not as obviously as the Note8’s.

When it comes to auxiliary features, neither one consistently outperforms the other. The iPhone X has the better UI, but the Note8 has the better AF — only in Pro mode, however. The iPhone X takes the better HDR images, but the Note8 shoots the better panoramas. The iPhone X takes the more acceptable fake-bokeh portraits and the better selfies, but the Note8 has the better optical zoom.

On the software front, the iOS 11 has one advantage. It saves in new file formats, HEIF for images and HEVC for movies, which cut file sizes by as much as half. With photos and videos increasingly taking up the bulk of storage on our smartphones, that’s a big help. It’s likely that more smartphones will adopt the new formats in 2018, but that’s not where they are today.

Winner: There’s more than one!

If you’ve already read through this entire page, you know we’re faced with a real conundrum this year. 

The Google Pixel 2 XL takes stunningly good photographs, but falters in everything else. The Samsung Note8 is excellent in most things, but its videos aren’t as good as the Apple iPhone X. The iPhone X provides the most balanced performance for most people, but there’s no denying that the quality of its still photos don’t match up to the Note8’s.

After much debate within our editorial team, we’ve decided to do something unusual this year, and deliver three awards instead of declaring a single winner. In fact, the iPhone X  and the Galaxy Note 8 are tied for The Best Smartphone Camera of the Year. Here is our awards summary:-

		While the iPhone X'simages aren’t as detailed as the Note8’s nor as rich as the Pixel 2 XL’s, its better video performance, user-friendly UI and new file-saving formats make it the best overall smartphone camera for most people.
		Let's not forget that the Note8has really good cameras. While Samsung’s video performance still lags slightly behind the iPhone’s, there’s no denying just how good the still images are, and it fully deserves our recommendationto commend this achievement.
		The Pixel 2 XL’s still images have awed us so much that we’re giving it an Innovation Award. There’s a lot of sophisticated technology that Google is applying to the Pixel 2 XL’s camera, and it’sbreathed new life into smartphone photography. Just round out the rest of the app, Google, please.