 One of the most important questions you can ask yourself when you're thinking about buying a smartphone is whether or not it has a good camera. And luckily for all of us over the last couple years, the answer to that question is increasingly yes. So we took the five best ones released this past year. The iPhone X, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Google Pixel 2, the LG V30, and the HTC U11. Now we put them to the test in a whole bunch of different situations, all to figure out which smartphone has the best camera. So we're here in the studio and we're about to take a look at some of the images. I'm joined by James Barron, the Verge's creative director. Thank you, James. Hello. And why don't you give the people an idea of what it is that makes you an expert in this field. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I've been taking pictures for a very long time, but I've been specifically taking pictures with these phones for the past week. I've had pockets full of phones. And if you caught our circuit breaker show last week, you'll have seen that we went out and shot some pictures and started comparing them. And then we handed the phones over to you and you've been picked up the mantle and have been doing it ever since. Yes. And we decided to pick these phones not only because they're some of the industry leaders in sales and things like that, but they just are the best cameras that are out there as far as the top tier of smartphones that you can buy right now. There are definitely some other competitors that we could have included in this test, but then we would have been here for the rest of eternity. So we're going to be viewing all these photos on a retina MacBook Pro, but we know that not everybody has access to a screen that's that good. So we're also going to take a look at them in some other settings. We're going to upload some of them to Instagram to see what they look like sort of at the end state of everybody's images these days. And then we're also going to take a look at them on some of the phone's screens, which is where I think most people probably do the viewing to begin with. The interesting thing is 90 percent of the pictures you take, you look at on your screen on your phone. Yeah. You're not going to do what we're going to do. So this is the only way we can really get into these pictures. So what's this one? Where are we starting? All right. So we're going to start with this, which is a relatively, you know, it's not the most exciting shot in the world. It's a little, you know, it's a dreary day. Yeah. But it's sort of a good test. There's a lot of detail in the foreground, in the mid ground, in the background. And it's a good. I think the biggest example coming from this is that. What phone is this? So we're starting with the iPhone 10. And I think one of the things this particular scene shows more than anything else is the fact that there's how the different cameras interpret color and contrast. So jumping to the HTC, the iPhone images almost a little washed out, but but sort of not as dark, the dark zone is dark as the HTC, which has like really black blacks. Take a look at the LG, which is sort of on the iPhone end of the spectrum where it's, you know, a little washed out, a little bluer than the rest of the other the other images. The Note 8 is a lot warmer, which I feel like is something we've come across a lot with shooting with these phones. This is really interesting because Samsung is, as I say, everything looks like it's been dipped in tea. It's slightly brown, but if you click back to the iPhone, it's pretty close. It's a little bit more green than brown. But it's definitely in the same kind of color gamut as the Samsung, whereas the HTC, LG, much more blue. And the Pixel, which is this one, which is also blue, but like probably maybe the most accurate of like what it actually looked like in that moment. It's very accurate. If my memory serves. But if you look. It's definitely you look. It's funny and this is the problem with doing these comparisons is we bounce around and then you come back to the iPhone. Now the iPhone looks awful and green. And I didn't really notice that before. OK, so I'm going to keep interrupting you just because it's annoying. But look, if you go to the Pixel, what's interesting about this is the overall thing is kind of that gray blue like the HTC, like the LG. But look at the color of the cab here. The water taxi. But also there's still quite a lot of brown here and a lot of brown here. So it's not it's not pushed so far to the warm end of the spectrum as the Samsung or the iPhone. And I think another way of saying what you just said is that it's taking it's taking all that color information and sort of representing it in a representing all of it better as opposed to, you know, skewing the picture because it's dominated by one particular part of the color spectrum. Right. I absolutely I think that this is a really good. It's actually a really good choice of pictures because it's very neutral. Thank you. Of course. You know, you know what you're doing. It's very neutral. It's very flat as well. So you've got very even tone from the foreground and the background. And I think that this kind of image really shows up the neutrality of the Pixel camera, which is, I think, having played around with them myself for a week, I know that you've been playing around. I think that's my immediate takeaway about the Pixel. It is the kind of in most environments, it's the most neutral. What I wanted to do and one of the reasons I shot this photo this way was also to show off the sort of detail capture of all these different smartphones. The big thing that separates all these smartphones and the cameras on them these days is the software processing that these companies decide to do and not in like a, you know, filter white kind of way. I mean, software processing is in how they're getting the information off the sensor into the JPEG that it shows you. And that process is handled so differently by all these different companies. And it sort of there's artistic judgments being made and sort of judgments being made as to like how to like make the photo look because you're going to be looking at a smartphone, things like that. I think that this is a core point to make at this time. It's like two sides of a coin. Neither side is more valuable than the other. And the two sides of the coin here are the hardware and the software. And I think by bringing it to a screen, we can see exactly not only the hardware decisions that are being made, like two lenses on the iPhone here, and the software treatment of that to create a final image. So I think it's really important. That's why we want to do real world. We don't want to go down the bench testing route. This is about this is what these pictures look like. Yeah, I mean, the hardware is closer than ever on these days. And they're all sort of pushing up against the same physical limitations of putting a camera in like a space that small on a smartphone. So here's the iPhone's 100% view of this image. HTC is a little wider. So you're not getting quite as these were both shot with this is shot with the wide angle of the iPhone and you know, that only camera on the HTC. So pretty good. You don't get quite as much detail there. The LG and this is something I found and I think we noticed this when we were doing the first go around with these. The LG is fine details, especially ones that are in the deep background of a photo always seem to have this like aberration. They're always a little bit blurrier. It doesn't have quite the resolution. And even the sharp bits aren't as sharp. Right. Yeah, I mean, you look at some of the detail in the rope. There's just tons more here on the iPhone. And on the HTC as well. HTC is really good. Now Samsung, who kind of same it sort of blew some of the focus here. This whole crazy thing with Samsung is it takes sharp pictures and then softens them. Yeah, it just seems like counterintuitive. And then let's take a look at the pixel, which is again, I think like right in the middle. I think the iPhone might make you think it's got more detail there. There's like a little bit more sharp going on maybe. I also think it's to your point that it's got lighter shadow detail, which gives an impression of more detail. Yeah. But I also think I think we have to be honest. Look at the difference there. The iPhone is sharper. Yeah. And I think that this as well, is it using both lenses to get sharpness in the background or is this just one? I would assume it's just using the wide one. But that's sort of the thing. Like one thing we don't know about how Apple uses the dual lens system right now is like we know it will use those two lenses to help the other out sometimes, but it's not explicit as to how it does that. Sort of like we're not totally sure how Google does the software things that it does with HDR+. The other thing I'm going to make here is I've noticed with pixel, much as I love it, it's very crunchy. It adds a lot of contrast. It's almost in a Photoshop, we call it a high pass filter where it just you bring out that textural sharpness and it's sometimes goes a little bit crazy with it. So I think the iPhone and the pixel probably have the best photos here. It's really hard to pick a winner if we were going to try and do that. The iPhone probably overexposed it just a touch, which I found it tends to do. But they're all relatively good. I think the pixel is probably the best down the middle representation of what that scene looked like. I also think that the pixel camera is the most photographic. I've said this before is I think that the files of the pixel look the most like a camera shot rather than a phone shot. Much different scenario this time. This is obviously on the subway. This is sort of low and challenging light, not the darkest situation you'll find because there is a lot of bright sort of LED lighting in here. But lots of variation in the light in the scene, which makes it challenging for a smartphone to handle. So we have, let's take a quick look. Again we sort of get different color representations of some of the scene, like some bluer stuff again from like LG and the Samsung. It's really funny that the Samsung is so blue. Yeah, it took a different, sometimes when it's reading lights, like the information coming from like especially LED lights, it will cast that color across the scene. I've tended to notice. But this one I want to dive right into the details. Yes, because what's interesting about this shot is if you look at the highlights on these pillars, you've got that, it's an overall dark picture with then very brightly lit white areas, which is very hard for a camera to retain that level of detail because it's got to make a choice and the choice is a compromise and it basically lands in the middle. Yeah, it can't fit all the information in the brightest brights and in the darkest darks of the picture. So it's got to pick something. It's got to make a choice. It's got to swear allegiance to one part of this. You've got to make a choice sometimes. So we're going to start with the iPhone or you're going to, what one are you looking at now? This is the Pixel. And I think what's interesting about what the Pixel did is this is like where you almost start to get into the territory of what I was talking about, where it's almost doing a little too much with its HDR because I think the point you made is really good about how there's detail in these brights that some of the other, like the HTC missed some of those tiles. Yeah. The iPhone missed a lot of those tiles. That's surprising. The Samsung missed a lot of those tiles. So the Pixel captured more information in the brights while not losing the information in the darker parts. But look at the detail on the subway map behind. Yeah, that's actually a good comparison. You can almost read it. Yeah. And the Samsung is fuzzy. The LG looks like it's been painted. The HTC, again, the HTC is a little bit wider. And so that means like when you're looking at fine detail, it feels like it's farther away. It's smudged. And the iPhone did a decent job. But yeah, the Pixel, yeah, it really does feel like you can read the individual subway. It's very clean. There doesn't seem to be, it's almost like in paint where paint bleeds, the colors bleed. These are very kind of restrained and crisp and clear. Right. All the paint is within the lines, which is kind of funny. I think if we think of contrast ratio as a visual thing that here's a contrast ratio on most of the phones, the Pixel just has a broader gamut. It's going to capture more in the dark end of more in the light end and just give you an overall better exposed image. And I'll say, like one of the things that we, I think both you and I were not expecting coming into testing all these smartphones out is that we weren't expecting the HTC to find, like the HTC is as good as the iPhone and the Pixel at in like a bunch of different settings sometimes. Right. And that was something that surprised both of us. And here is like one of the clearest examples of that. Like this image looks a lot like that. Maybe not at the detail level when we zoom way in, but when you look at it sort of zoomed out it has the same sort of color balance as the Pixel's image, it has the same sort of dynamic range where it did lose some of the highlights, but the shadows look, the detail is still here like we saw in the Pixel image. So like the HTC's camera, I don't think it was as consistent. It missed more than the Pixel did, but when it hit, which is still a lot, it did almost as admirable a job, which I think is really nice to see from a company that made smartphones with great cameras that led the pack years ago. I mean like they were the thing that like the iPhone was catching up to before it got to the sort of iPhone 4 era. I think you are absolutely right. It was definitely the surprise of the test. I had no idea it was going to be as consistent. So this is another sort of challenging scene for a smartphone camera because we've got again some bright brights, some dark darks and a lot of intricate like lines, a lot of fine detail, which is something that's harder for underpowered phones to resolve. And a lot of very close tones. Yes. And what do you mean by that? A lot of close tones. If you look at it overall, it's the squint test. If you squint and you can see what disappears, it basically turns into bluey gray at the top, gray green here with black of the branches and the roof line. So it's it's very uniform. And then, as you said, those bright, warm lights hanging in the tree, which confuse everything. So I mean, I think the you know, the pixel again did the best job of keeping the highlights from being blown out. Maybe a little too dark overall. Was it when you look at this scene, you were there, you took these pictures. Which is the one that's most like the scene? Well, it's definitely not the iPhone. The iPhone missed it like crazy. It overexposed a bunch of stuff. It is green again, which is like, I think the iPhone's got a really great camera. And I think it's probably one of the two best, you know, like maybe behind the pixel, the pixel two. But it still has this tendency to make green to put this green cast on things, which is just a really weird thing that I don't know why that's never been hammered out of the system. HTC probably did one of the most if not the most admirable job of loss some of the details and the highlights. But the color throughout, it doesn't have as much of a green cast. There is separation in the colors down at the bottom of the photo like you were talking about. Like you can squint and see some difference in the green and the brown here. Whereas the LG is just a little muddy. I mean, it's the same deal as we've seen in some other photos where like, I mean, I think it did a pretty good job resolving some of the detail back here. But it's not as good as maybe something like, I don't know, maybe I'll just eat my words. You know, I guess it's about on par with what the HTC did there. And Samsung is, again, like pretty even. I think the iPhone missed more than any one of the other ones did a better job. But if you zoom into the Samsung, we're going to see this smeary effect again. And it's like in the roof line and everything. It just looks everything's got a wash over it. It's kind of weird. Yeah, but the color is bleeding. I mean, look around here. You can actually see the blue is bleeding around. Let's take a look at what that did in the iPhone. Yeah, the iPhone did a way better job with that. You can actually see detail in this like grassy thing, whereas apparently that all got lost pretty much in the Samsung. If you zoom in, you can also see on the iPhone how much artifacts is adding from the sharpening. What we wanted to do though with some of these pictures and with this one in particular is look at it in an even more neutral platform than maybe this screen, which is Instagram. Because how much do these differences matter if they're all being funneled through Instagram's compression algorithm, which is probably removing a lot of these differences in the first place. So we have uploaded a few of them here. I think the one where it's showing me the most of what Instagram is doing is we zoom way in here on the LG versus what we saw here. Let's get to the same spot. The LG, which we knocked a little bit for resolving some of this detail, still was able to get some of these finest little branches here. Whereas in the Instagram... Oh no, that's as big as it's going. You can see it here. I'm looking at this spot right here. That's a nest of information with all these branches and twigs. Here it's just like it's been blurred together. There's all these artifacts from the compression. You're also noticing it in the shadow data along the trees. If you jump back to the original picture, look how crisp the separation of the different colors of bark are. Then once you get into this, it's almost like it's stripping some of those colors out. It's making a decision of this is this kind of brown, this is this kind of green. What matters about that is we take a look at, let's say, here the HTC, which we said handled the scene really well, right? That actually looks worse than the LG does on Instagram. It lost so much more detail in the back branches of this tree that the HTC photo uploaded on Instagram on the HTC phone viewed on the web now, to sort of give it a neutral platform, looks worse than the LG photo uploaded through Instagram on the LG phone. That's a weird thing that it's stripping more information out of the file from the HTC phone than the LG one, which apparently had less to compress, I don't know. I think looking at them, I would sum it up like this. The platform, it's like an amplifier for whatever the trait of the image is. If the image is slightly soft, it's going to make it softer. If the image is slightly contrasty, it's going to make it even more contrasty. If it's slightly warm, it's going to make it even warmer. It just seems to take these decisions and push it that much further. As you said, we saw that slight softness in the HTC image, and that's now much more pronounced when we look at it through Instagram. What was the pixel one like on Instagram? Let's find that. You see, it's made it flatter and darker. Yeah, it looks even darker and moodier than it does on this screen here. At least here, there's some information in the shadows. It doesn't feel quite as dark and dour. Here, it's subtle, but there's definitely a little bit more here that was lost in the dark end. I definitely think that's my takeaway from this, is if you have a slightly dark picture, you're going to put it up and it's just going to push it that much further in whatever direction. When you think about it, if you have a slightly blurry photo or if you have a slightly dark photo or a slightly bright photo, whatever you were talking about, it's exacerbating those things because they are there because of a lack of information. The photo is blurry because it did not resolve the information to make it sharp. It is dark because it did not capture enough information in the shadows to bring out the detail. It's just going to exponentially run down that path as you run it through Instagram. If you were to upload some of these, the HTC, which is a little soft, if you were to upload this to Instagram a couple more times, I'm sure it would just be one big foggy image by the time you did that. An interesting exercise would be to actually then process the image before you upload it. If you know it's going to block up, you fill in some shadow detail. If you know that it's going to go too bright, you bring the highlights back or push the color up. I think that that's the other side to all of these images. This is what the image looks like. What do you want the image to look like? I think we've said that at the end of the day, these phones take really, really good pictures and a lot of these choices are going to come down to what kind of pictures do you like? If you like brown fuzzy pictures, then the Samsung is for you. Let's just put that out there. Clearly a lot of people do. They sell a lot of phones. Just like if you are going to live with the fact, if you get an iPhone, you're going to have to live with the fact that it overexposes sometimes. The question then is, does this change the opinion of which camera did the best in this situation? I think maybe it does. I think the best photo out of the cameras looking at it on the screen was probably the HTC. On Instagram, it's the one that sort of got wrecked the most in the process. I wouldn't agree with that. I would say the LG seemed to have held up. Well, I don't know. What's that one? The LG. Like we said, it lost some detail in this one nasty area, but it actually wasn't as fuzzy as some of the other ones wound up being. That color was pretty medium to begin with, so it just wound up looking kind of medium in the end. The problem with once you start viewing the images on Instagram and saying, well, now you've seen the image on the screen and now you've uploaded it, which do you think handles that the best? The problem is, the answer is, it depends on the picture. I think that if you're going to upload a bright sunny day with a deep blue sky and a bright red car and a big green bench, then the brightness of the iPhone is probably going to make that look amazing. I think if you've got muted colors, grain, shadow detail, backlit, which we've experimented with before, and the Pixel 2 XL or Pixel 2 is going to kill it. I mean, it's just by far the winner. I think the HTC is still the average one. I think these kind of tests are very much we're trying to find definitive answers. Actually the answers are, this is probably the best, maybe. But then you could compensate for it. So where do you stop? You could say, well, if I have an iPhone, I know I'm going to kind of push the color balance a little bit redder. That's the point where you lose people, right? Most people aren't going to do that to try and compensate to make the photos look better. They just want it to work. And so at that point, you just have to know that Instagram is going to sort of, again, skew or enhance the problems that you're already dealing with. I think the answer is that overall, you know where you are with the iPhone. You know where you are with the Pixel 2. I think inconsistency on the other three is means you're probably going to know a little bit less. I think that's the thing. I think that you can compensate and take into account what the iPhone 10 and what the Pixel 2 are going to do. And they will consistently always do that. OK, so here's another sort of weird test that we want to use to show how differently these photos can look. How much differently. Can I just say this? Yes. You know, I said we should get into the weeds. Yeah. So we're going to get into the weeds with pictures of weeds. I'm leaving. Is that meant to? So this is what we're looking at right now is a picture that was taken by the Pixel 2 XL on the Pixel 2 XL screen and on the iPhone 10 screen. Same picture. Same picture. And already, I don't know, it might be hard to see in the video, but like already it is insanely different. It's insanely different. Yeah. So if you have like True Tone or anything turned on, these are just sort of we've got the Pixel 2 XL in the screen mode that actually matters, whatever one they call it, the one that doesn't have dumb colors. The right one. Yeah, the right one. And then the iPhone just sort of in its standard mode. And the iPhone is interpreting the Pixel's photo as like almost kind of dull. It's doing it deliberately. Very, yeah, right. It's very flat. Like there's not as much contrast. It's still a good photo. It looks like it's representing some pretty good detail. But here's something crazy, right? We've been saying up to this point how the iPhone makes everything look green. And the one color it's stripped out of the Pixel's image is the green has gone. Yeah, in comparison, the Pixel is just like lush and beautiful and it's got all this vibrant color. It's just gone. It just looks like this is normal and this is after a few days when the water's gone and it's gone a little bit brown. So what I want to do is get in a little bit closer so we can see some of the detail. I'm having trouble because- Apple hates Google? Yeah, the Google Drive app won't let me zoom in any further on the iPhone. But one thing I will say is that they're not resolving the detail any differently. This is really just about color, the difference here. And I don't know, I do pulled back kind of look like the way that the Pixel's looks on the Pixel. But the sort of photographer in me is looking at this one and saying like, that's a more realistic image because I was there shooting this picture. The greens were not that green and the blue was not that blue. That is an aggressive reproduction by Google in sort of- I don't want to live in the real world. I want to live in the better world. Fair enough. Let's take a look at the iPhone's photo on the Pixel. Okay. So the other way around now, we've got the iPhone X's photo from this scene on both of these screens and it's doing the same thing. I mean, it's like almost the exact same differences. The iPhone is almost like- It's making it more neutral. Yeah. I mean, this is like a real color profile kind of problem where like, you have one photo that's the same everywhere, but it looks different everywhere. And so it's the same thing again. We've got the Pixel sort of really going crazy on the colors, making the greens way more green, the blues way more blue. The iPhone is much more muted. But interestingly, it's blowing out the detail on the flowers a little bit. Yeah. So it's pumping up the contrast. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we noticed that in the last one, but I think the difference here is that the Pixel's photo of this scene wasn't as contrasty. It had more dynamic range and the iPhone didn't quite nail that as much. And so the Pixel is sort of exacerbating it because its screen is punching up the colors and the contrast. And so it's taking a problem and making it worse. To your point earlier, if the information isn't there, it's not there. Right. So removed from all that sort of phone screen trickery, now we're looking at those same two images here on the Retina MacBook. And I think a pretty wild difference in the sense of the Pixel's image actually looks flatter. Way flatter. And not as saturated as it did on the phone, which is super weird. It feels like we got flipped. I actually almost thought I was looking at one and not the other. And the iPhone has sort of greener greens and more purpley purples. But it's much more blown out. It's blowing out the color. Yeah. This is a really strange difference. So clearly the screens are actually that last stage of punching the color. Because the Pixel, this image here, the colors are basically more muted. You know what it's like? It's almost like we're looking at the Pixel in neutral mode. And then when I'm looking on the screen, it's enhanced mode, right? It's the punchy mode. So in a way, maybe that even makes sense. Yeah. And as far as like how the pictures stack up against each other, I think the Pixel really got this one better. I think the iPhone might be a little more pleasing initially just because there's a bit more color there. It's also a little bit warmer and a little bit greener in that sense. Not just that there's green in the image, but in the way that it tends to apply those sort of casts to the image. This sort of like haze of warm colors and green colors. But the Pixel, obviously much more muted, much cooler. But just way better detail. Again, it didn't lose the detail in the highlight detail and the highlights, as well as just the sharpness, like the detail of the actual subject. Like the actual flowers in here. Much more rich. It feels like we're looking at a tone. It's blowing out. It can't hold these tones on the highlights. Yeah. I mean, on the flowers, it's like actually... And this wasn't... It's not like I took them in different settings, like where the sun was out. It just really read... This read a muted scene well, and the iPhone sort of didn't and kind of missed it. So we haven't talked about one of the sort of flagship features for some of these phones yet, because not all of them have it. And that's portrait mode. And so the ones we're talking about here, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the iPhone X and the Pixel 2 XL. So this is just one portrait mode photo. We're not going to go into a whole bunch of them. This is, I think, probably the most representative of the things that we saw a lot with portrait mode on the different phones. Which is that the iPhone tends to create probably softer, maybe less sharp looking portrait mode photos. And it's more progressive. Yeah. And the depth that it's sort of creating by blurring some of the background, yeah, it seems more progressive. It feels more like it's trying to and doing a good job of recreating the sort of blur that happens towards the back of the image. Whereas the Pixel, I think in most photos, has better edge detection than the iPhone X. It is finding the sort of seams around a person's head or their hair or whatever the subject might be, even if it's not a person. It's finding those seams better and sort of cutting around them better. But the part of the problem with that is like it's doing that and then immediately just blurring everything else. It makes everything feel like a cardboard cutout, which is aggressive in some images and not in others. And so I think the Pixel's portrait mode might wow a little bit more from time to time. But I actually wish it did more of that sort of progressive blurring that made it look like it was coming out of an actual sort of like SLR camera kind of thing. I think that having seen these now, I mean the Samsung is so, it's got the washy, it's got the warm. It does what it does. I mean, so the Note 8, again, it's aggressively smoothing the features on his face. It's sort of missed the exposure. It handles the blurring kind of well. One thing I love about the Samsung that I wish the other two phones would adopt is you can, while you're shooting or after you've shot a portrait mode photo, slide to adjust how much blur there is. On the Pixel you can sort of toggle it on and off, which is nice. But I wish there was that feature on the iPhone. I feel like Apple's never going to not believe fully in its ability to get it right. So we're never going to get it. And it's so dependent on the picture that you take. I mean, one of the good reasons to use this is there's so much detail in the background. Obviously, if you have a cleaner background, then all of the cameras do a better job. And I think one thing to note about the way the iPhone does portrait mode is it seems to really, I think it's sort of like almost cheating in a way that when it knows it's got a face, it really tries to keep the focus on the face. And it's even blurring his shirt where like that maybe, I don't know, with a really thin aperture, like a really good portrait lens, like that would happen if it was really, we were working with really small depth of field. But I think that makes more sense to me on the Samsung photo or even the Pixel photo where like his shirt should be in focus. Maybe not as cardboard cutout he is, the Pixel did it. But I think the Pixel did better detail and better color representation here. The iPhone always skis a little warm, like we've seen in most photos, but especially in portraits. And that warm kind of greeny cast I think gives a weird feeling when I'm looking at someone's face. I just don't like that they apply that there. So I think it handles the portrait mode a little bit better. But it still has some of the problems that I have with the way that the iPhone's software processing is being applied to the images. It's really funny that having used these phones so much, having being the owner of a Pixel, I never use portrait mode. Yeah, well, it's a good gateway into like some of the other things we should talk about with these because it's not just about having like sort of the best camera that captures the best detail in every scenario. That's great, obviously. I think if we're talking about just that, I think the Pixel 2 XL wins. I think the Pixel from last year would probably beat out most of these phones in certain situations. So the 2 XL, I think, and the software team that they have pumping over at Google to make the most out of the hardware that they have, you know, only having one lens, not two, and all that, they're just crushing it. And they are, again, a sort of step ahead of the pack when it comes to just like image quality in every situation and being consistent with it. One thing I don't like about the Pixel 2 XL and its portrait mode is that it's buried in the sort of hamburger menu and you're like, you can't just easily access it. It's easy to forget that it's there as far as like the UI goes. That's probably why I don't use it. I just forget. Yeah, I think that's probably part of it. But you can go too far on the Note 8. Their version of portrait mode is called Live Focus and it is right under the shutter button all the time, which makes it feel like you're always in portrait mode, even though you're not. You have to tap it even though it looks like a swipe. And that is mind boggling to me. I hate that. And I also hate that on the Samsung it shows you what lens you can switch to. So it says X2 for the telephoto lens. But on the iPhone, that means that you would be in that lens. And it's just it feels so backwards to me. And I think that's another big difference here. Like software across all these is wildly different. And we're just talking the sort of stock camera apps for these phones. One thing that I think the Samsung does the best of all the rest of them is it still to me is the quickest camera. And by that I mean it's the quickest camera. When I take it out of my phone, I can double tap the power button and the camera is just up and ready to shoot. The HTC, the Pixel will also do that. If you double tap the power buttons. I don't think they're quite as fast. And Samsung's autofocus is still really fast. I think probably still a class above the others, especially during video. And so I think that's probably still the fastest. It's real small though, the difference between that and like the HTC. And it's something that I wish the iPhone would really address. I wish there was just a way to launch the camera easier. I'd still hate swiping over to the camera because I never get it right 100% of the time. And the new sort of 3D touch button on the X, at least it puts it in a place where I know I can find it. But like I just I wish I had a hardware button. Honestly, I think the most the fastest I've ever launched a camera app on a smartphone is the sort of S7 and older category of them. I remember those days. The home button. It was just so much better. OK, so we've come to the end of the video. We've been arguing a lot and now you're expecting us to tell you which is the best camera. We're not going to do that. Actually, yes, we are. It's the Pixel. So no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because I think the Pixel is doing things that is more impressive than some of the other things. I think they have a better lead on the rest of the smartphones as far as their cameras. And I think they can take it to more interesting places. This is a surprise. I think the iPhone is right there with it, if not a little behind it. I love the versatility of a second lens. And we tested this on the circuit breaker show. The telephoto lens is still like worth using over just cropping in on like the Pixel 2's image. There is a quality difference. So I like that. And I do like some things that the iPhone does like live photos. You can reselect an image now. So if you just missed the moment, you can pick the one that you that you should have had. And it also does some interesting software stuff like long exposure simulations with live photos now. So I think Apple's got some advantages over the Pixel. I think just like hands down most consistent, going to always give you the best photo in most situations. I don't think you can say it isn't the Google Pixel 2X. I own it. I get it. I was just trying to be the most sort of diplomatic diplomatic. I mean, there are times and I think that this is the point. There are times when an iPhone is going to be better. There's times when the ACCU 11 is going to be better. There's times maybe not when the Note 8 is going to be better or the LG. But I think we have three that are sort of in a class of others. And then these are the sort of best that are out there, which is why we picked them in the first place. Exactly. We have way more comparisons on the website. So make sure you go find the smartphone camera comparison there where I'll have just way more detail than we could fit in this video. So look for that. Head to youtube.com slash the verge. Click subscribe if you're not already, which like at the end of this video, like, what are you doing if you're not? And thanks for watching. Thank you. Just the amount of what's the word I'm thinking of? I have no idea. Please tell me. Oh my God. Why am I blacking out?
 One of the most important questions you can ask yourself when you're thinking about buying
 a smartphone is whether or not it has a good camera.
 And luckily for all of us over the last couple years, the answer to that question is increasingly
 yes.
 So we took the five best ones released this past year.
 The iPhone X, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Google Pixel 2, the LG V30, and the HTC U11.
 Now we put them to the test in a whole bunch of different situations, all to figure out
 which smartphone has the best camera.
 So we're here in the studio and we're about to take a look at some of the images.
 I'm joined by James Barron, the Verge's creative director.
 Thank you, James.
 Hello.
 And why don't you give the people an idea of what it is that makes you an expert in
 this field.
 Okay.
 Well, that's interesting.
 I've been taking pictures for a very long time, but I've been specifically taking pictures
 with these phones for the past week.
 I've had pockets full of phones.
 And if you caught our circuit breaker show last week, you'll have seen that we went out
 and shot some pictures and started comparing them.
 And then we handed the phones over to you and you've been picked up the mantle and have
 been doing it ever since.
 Yes.
 And we decided to pick these phones not only because they're some of the industry leaders
 in sales and things like that, but they just are the best cameras that are out there as
 far as the top tier of smartphones that you can buy right now.
 There are definitely some other competitors that we could have included in this test,
 but then we would have been here for the rest of eternity.
 So we're going to be viewing all these photos on a retina MacBook Pro, but we know that
 not everybody has access to a screen that's that good.
 So we're also going to take a look at them in some other settings.
 We're going to upload some of them to Instagram to see what they look like sort of at the
 end state of everybody's images these days.
 And then we're also going to take a look at them on some of the phone's screens, which
 is where I think most people probably do the viewing to begin with.
 The interesting thing is 90 percent of the pictures you take, you look at on your screen
 on your phone.
 Yeah.
 You're not going to do what we're going to do.
 So this is the only way we can really get into these pictures.
 So what's this one?
 Where are we starting?
 All right.
 So we're going to start with this, which is a relatively, you know, it's not the most
 exciting shot in the world.
 It's a little, you know, it's a dreary day.
 Yeah.
 But it's sort of a good test.
 There's a lot of detail in the foreground, in the mid ground, in the background.
 And it's a good.
 I think the biggest example coming from this is that.
 What phone is this?
 So we're starting with the iPhone 10.
 And I think one of the things this particular scene shows more than anything else is the
 fact that there's how the different cameras interpret color and contrast.
 So jumping to the HTC, the iPhone images almost a little washed out, but but sort of not as
 dark, the dark zone is dark as the HTC, which has like really black blacks.
 Take a look at the LG, which is sort of on the iPhone end of the spectrum where it's,
 you know, a little washed out, a little bluer than the rest of the other the other images.
 The Note 8 is a lot warmer, which I feel like is something we've come across a lot with
 shooting with these phones.
 This is really interesting because Samsung is, as I say, everything looks like it's been
 dipped in tea.
 It's slightly brown, but if you click back to the iPhone, it's pretty close.
 It's a little bit more green than brown.
 But it's definitely in the same kind of color gamut as the Samsung, whereas the HTC, LG,
 much more blue.
 And the Pixel, which is this one, which is also blue, but like probably maybe the most
 accurate of like what it actually looked like in that moment.
 It's very accurate.
 If my memory serves.
 But if you look.
 It's definitely you look.
 It's funny and this is the problem with doing these comparisons is we bounce around and
 then you come back to the iPhone.
 Now the iPhone looks awful and green.
 And I didn't really notice that before.
 OK, so I'm going to keep interrupting you just because it's annoying.
 But look, if you go to the Pixel, what's interesting about this is the overall thing is kind of
 that gray blue like the HTC, like the LG.
 But look at the color of the cab here.
 The water taxi.
 But also there's still quite a lot of brown here and a lot of brown here.
 So it's not it's not pushed so far to the warm end of the spectrum as the Samsung or
 the iPhone.
 And I think another way of saying what you just said is that it's taking it's taking
 all that color information and sort of representing it in a representing all of it better as opposed
 to, you know, skewing the picture because it's dominated by one particular part of the
 color spectrum.
 Right.
 I absolutely I think that this is a really good.
 It's actually a really good choice of pictures because it's very neutral.
 Thank you.
 Of course.
 You know, you know what you're doing.
 It's very neutral.
 It's very flat as well.
 So you've got very even tone from the foreground and the background.
 And I think that this kind of image really shows up the neutrality of the Pixel camera,
 which is, I think, having played around with them myself for a week, I know that you've
 been playing around.
 I think that's my immediate takeaway about the Pixel.
 It is the kind of in most environments, it's the most neutral.
 What I wanted to do and one of the reasons I shot this photo this way was also to show
 off the sort of detail capture of all these different smartphones.
 The big thing that separates all these smartphones and the cameras on them these days is the
 software processing that these companies decide to do and not in like a, you know, filter
 white kind of way.
 I mean, software processing is in how they're getting the information off the sensor into
 the JPEG that it shows you.
 And that process is handled so differently by all these different companies.
 And it sort of there's artistic judgments being made and sort of judgments being made
 as to like how to like make the photo look because you're going to be looking at a smartphone,
 things like that.
 I think that this is a core point to make at this time.
 It's like two sides of a coin.
 Neither side is more valuable than the other.
 And the two sides of the coin here are the hardware and the software.
 And I think by bringing it to a screen, we can see exactly not only the hardware decisions
 that are being made, like two lenses on the iPhone here, and the software treatment of
 that to create a final image.
 So I think it's really important.
 That's why we want to do real world.
 We don't want to go down the bench testing route.
 This is about this is what these pictures look like.
 Yeah, I mean, the hardware is closer than ever on these days.
 And they're all sort of pushing up against the same physical limitations of putting a
 camera in like a space that small on a smartphone.
 So here's the iPhone's 100% view of this image.
 HTC is a little wider.
 So you're not getting quite as these were both shot with this is shot with the wide
 angle of the iPhone and you know, that only camera on the HTC.
 So pretty good.
 You don't get quite as much detail there.
 The LG and this is something I found and I think we noticed this when we were doing the
 first go around with these.
 The LG is fine details, especially ones that are in the deep background of a photo always
 seem to have this like aberration.
 They're always a little bit blurrier.
 It doesn't have quite the resolution.
 And even the sharp bits aren't as sharp.
 Right.
 Yeah, I mean, you look at some of the detail in the rope.
 There's just tons more here on the iPhone.
 And on the HTC as well.
 HTC is really good.
 Now Samsung, who kind of same it sort of blew some of the focus here.
 This whole crazy thing with Samsung is it takes sharp pictures and then softens them.
 Yeah, it just seems like counterintuitive.
 And then let's take a look at the pixel, which is again, I think like right in the middle.
 I think the iPhone might make you think it's got more detail there.
 There's like a little bit more sharp going on maybe.
 I also think it's to your point that it's got lighter shadow detail, which gives an
 impression of more detail.
 Yeah.
 But I also think I think we have to be honest.
 Look at the difference there.
 The iPhone is sharper.
 Yeah.
 And I think that this as well, is it using both lenses to get sharpness in the background
 or is this just one?
 I would assume it's just using the wide one.
 But that's sort of the thing.
 Like one thing we don't know about how Apple uses the dual lens system right now is like
 we know it will use those two lenses to help the other out sometimes, but it's not explicit
 as to how it does that.
 Sort of like we're not totally sure how Google does the software things that it does with
 HDR+.
 The other thing I'm going to make here is I've noticed with pixel, much as I love it,
 it's very crunchy.
 It adds a lot of contrast.
 It's almost in a Photoshop, we call it a high pass filter where it just you bring out that
 textural sharpness and it's sometimes goes a little bit crazy with it.
 So I think the iPhone and the pixel probably have the best photos here.
 It's really hard to pick a winner if we were going to try and do that.
 The iPhone probably overexposed it just a touch, which I found it tends to do.
 But they're all relatively good.
 I think the pixel is probably the best down the middle representation of what that scene
 looked like.
 I also think that the pixel camera is the most photographic.
 I've said this before is I think that the files of the pixel look the most like a camera
 shot rather than a phone shot.
 Much different scenario this time.
 This is obviously on the subway.
 This is sort of low and challenging light, not the darkest situation you'll find because
 there is a lot of bright sort of LED lighting in here.
 But lots of variation in the light in the scene, which makes it challenging for a smartphone
 to handle.
 So we have, let's take a quick look.
 Again we sort of get different color representations of some of the scene, like some bluer stuff
 again from like LG and the Samsung.
 It's really funny that the Samsung is so blue.
 Yeah, it took a different, sometimes when it's reading lights, like the information
 coming from like especially LED lights, it will cast that color across the scene.
 I've tended to notice.
 But this one I want to dive right into the details.
 Yes, because what's interesting about this shot is if you look at the highlights on these
 pillars, you've got that, it's an overall dark picture with then very brightly lit white
 areas, which is very hard for a camera to retain that level of detail because it's got
 to make a choice and the choice is a compromise and it basically lands in the middle.
 Yeah, it can't fit all the information in the brightest brights and in the darkest darks
 of the picture.
 So it's got to pick something.
 It's got to make a choice.
 It's got to swear allegiance to one part of this.
 You've got to make a choice sometimes.
 So we're going to start with the iPhone or you're going to, what one are you looking
 at now?
 This is the Pixel.
 And I think what's interesting about what the Pixel did is this is like where you almost
 start to get into the territory of what I was talking about, where it's almost doing
 a little too much with its HDR because I think the point you made is really good about how
 there's detail in these brights that some of the other, like the HTC missed some of
 those tiles.
 Yeah.
 The iPhone missed a lot of those tiles.
 That's surprising.
 The Samsung missed a lot of those tiles.
 So the Pixel captured more information in the brights while not losing the information
 in the darker parts.
 But look at the detail on the subway map behind.
 Yeah, that's actually a good comparison.
 You can almost read it.
 Yeah.
 And the Samsung is fuzzy.
 The LG looks like it's been painted.
 The HTC, again, the HTC is a little bit wider.
 And so that means like when you're looking at fine detail, it feels like it's farther
 away.
 It's smudged.
 And the iPhone did a decent job.
 But yeah, the Pixel, yeah, it really does feel like you can read the individual subway.
 It's very clean.
 There doesn't seem to be, it's almost like in paint where paint bleeds, the colors bleed.
 These are very kind of restrained and crisp and clear.
 Right.
 All the paint is within the lines, which is kind of funny.
 I think if we think of contrast ratio as a visual thing that here's a contrast ratio
 on most of the phones, the Pixel just has a broader gamut.
 It's going to capture more in the dark end of more in the light end and just give you
 an overall better exposed image.
 And I'll say, like one of the things that we, I think both you and I were not expecting
 coming into testing all these smartphones out is that we weren't expecting the HTC to
 find, like the HTC is as good as the iPhone and the Pixel at in like a bunch of different
 settings sometimes.
 Right.
 And that was something that surprised both of us.
 And here is like one of the clearest examples of that.
 Like this image looks a lot like that.
 Maybe not at the detail level when we zoom way in, but when you look at it sort of zoomed
 out it has the same sort of color balance as the Pixel's image, it has the same sort of
 dynamic range where it did lose some of the highlights, but the shadows look, the detail
 is still here like we saw in the Pixel image.
 So like the HTC's camera, I don't think it was as consistent.
 It missed more than the Pixel did, but when it hit, which is still a lot, it did almost
 as admirable a job, which I think is really nice to see from a company that made smartphones
 with great cameras that led the pack years ago.
 I mean like they were the thing that like the iPhone was catching up to before it got
 to the sort of iPhone 4 era.
 I think you are absolutely right.
 It was definitely the surprise of the test.
 I had no idea it was going to be as consistent.
 So this is another sort of challenging scene for a smartphone camera because we've got
 again some bright brights, some dark darks and a lot of intricate like lines, a lot of
 fine detail, which is something that's harder for underpowered phones to resolve.
 And a lot of very close tones.
 Yes.
 And what do you mean by that?
 A lot of close tones.
 If you look at it overall, it's the squint test.
 If you squint and you can see what disappears, it basically turns into bluey gray at the
 top, gray green here with black of the branches and the roof line.
 So it's it's very uniform.
 And then, as you said, those bright, warm lights hanging in the tree, which confuse
 everything.
 So I mean, I think the you know, the pixel again did the best job of keeping the highlights
 from being blown out.
 Maybe a little too dark overall.
 Was it when you look at this scene, you were there, you took these pictures.
 Which is the one that's most like the scene?
 Well, it's definitely not the iPhone.
 The iPhone missed it like crazy.
 It overexposed a bunch of stuff.
 It is green again, which is like, I think the iPhone's got a really great camera.
 And I think it's probably one of the two best, you know, like maybe behind the pixel, the
 pixel two.
 But it still has this tendency to make green to put this green cast on things, which is
 just a really weird thing that I don't know why that's never been hammered out of the
 system.
 HTC probably did one of the most if not the most admirable job of loss some of the details
 and the highlights.
 But the color throughout, it doesn't have as much of a green cast.
 There is separation in the colors down at the bottom of the photo like you were talking
 about.
 Like you can squint and see some difference in the green and the brown here.
 Whereas the LG is just a little muddy.
 I mean, it's the same deal as we've seen in some other photos where like, I mean, I think
 it did a pretty good job resolving some of the detail back here.
 But it's not as good as maybe something like, I don't know, maybe I'll just eat my words.
 You know, I guess it's about on par with what the HTC did there.
 And Samsung is, again, like pretty even.
 I think the iPhone missed more than any one of the other ones did a better job.
 But if you zoom into the Samsung, we're going to see this smeary effect again.
 And it's like in the roof line and everything.
 It just looks everything's got a wash over it.
 It's kind of weird.
 Yeah, but the color is bleeding.
 I mean, look around here.
 You can actually see the blue is bleeding around.
 Let's take a look at what that did in the iPhone.
 Yeah, the iPhone did a way better job with that.
 You can actually see detail in this like grassy thing, whereas apparently that all got lost
 pretty much in the Samsung.
 If you zoom in, you can also see on the iPhone how much artifacts is adding from the sharpening.
 What we wanted to do though with some of these pictures and with this one in particular is
 look at it in an even more neutral platform than maybe this screen, which is Instagram.
 Because how much do these differences matter if they're all being funneled through Instagram's
 compression algorithm, which is probably removing a lot of these differences in the first place.
 So we have uploaded a few of them here.
 I think the one where it's showing me the most of what Instagram is doing is we zoom
 way in here on the LG versus what we saw here.
 Let's get to the same spot.
 The LG, which we knocked a little bit for resolving some of this detail, still was able
 to get some of these finest little branches here.
 Whereas in the Instagram...
 Oh no, that's as big as it's going.
 You can see it here.
 I'm looking at this spot right here.
 That's a nest of information with all these branches and twigs.
 Here it's just like it's been blurred together.
 There's all these artifacts from the compression.
 You're also noticing it in the shadow data along the trees.
 If you jump back to the original picture, look how crisp the separation of the different
 colors of bark are.
 Then once you get into this, it's almost like it's stripping some of those colors out.
 It's making a decision of this is this kind of brown, this is this kind of green.
 What matters about that is we take a look at, let's say, here the HTC, which we said
 handled the scene really well, right?
 That actually looks worse than the LG does on Instagram.
 It lost so much more detail in the back branches of this tree that the HTC photo uploaded on
 Instagram on the HTC phone viewed on the web now, to sort of give it a neutral platform,
 looks worse than the LG photo uploaded through Instagram on the LG phone.
 That's a weird thing that it's stripping more information out of the file from the HTC phone
 than the LG one, which apparently had less to compress, I don't know.
 I think looking at them, I would sum it up like this.
 The platform, it's like an amplifier for whatever the trait of the image is.
 If the image is slightly soft, it's going to make it softer.
 If the image is slightly contrasty, it's going to make it even more contrasty.
 If it's slightly warm, it's going to make it even warmer.
 It just seems to take these decisions and push it that much further.
 As you said, we saw that slight softness in the HTC image, and that's now much more pronounced
 when we look at it through Instagram.
 What was the pixel one like on Instagram?
 Let's find that.
 You see, it's made it flatter and darker.
 Yeah, it looks even darker and moodier than it does on this screen here.
 At least here, there's some information in the shadows.
 It doesn't feel quite as dark and dour.
 Here, it's subtle, but there's definitely a little bit more here that was lost in the
 dark end.
 I definitely think that's my takeaway from this, is if you have a slightly dark picture,
 you're going to put it up and it's just going to push it that much further in whatever direction.
 When you think about it, if you have a slightly blurry photo or if you have a slightly dark
 photo or a slightly bright photo, whatever you were talking about, it's exacerbating
 those things because they are there because of a lack of information.
 The photo is blurry because it did not resolve the information to make it sharp.
 It is dark because it did not capture enough information in the shadows to bring out the
 detail.
 It's just going to exponentially run down that path as you run it through Instagram.
 If you were to upload some of these, the HTC, which is a little soft, if you were to upload
 this to Instagram a couple more times, I'm sure it would just be one big foggy image
 by the time you did that.
 An interesting exercise would be to actually then process the image before you upload it.
 If you know it's going to block up, you fill in some shadow detail.
 If you know that it's going to go too bright, you bring the highlights back or push the
 color up.
 I think that that's the other side to all of these images.
 This is what the image looks like.
 What do you want the image to look like?
 I think we've said that at the end of the day, these phones take really, really good
 pictures and a lot of these choices are going to come down to what kind of pictures do you
 like?
 If you like brown fuzzy pictures, then the Samsung is for you.
 Let's just put that out there.
 Clearly a lot of people do.
 They sell a lot of phones.
 Just like if you are going to live with the fact, if you get an iPhone, you're going to
 have to live with the fact that it overexposes sometimes.
 The question then is, does this change the opinion of which camera did the best in this
 situation?
 I think maybe it does.
 I think the best photo out of the cameras looking at it on the screen was probably the
 HTC.
 On Instagram, it's the one that sort of got wrecked the most in the process.
 I wouldn't agree with that.
 I would say the LG seemed to have held up.
 Well, I don't know.
 What's that one?
 The LG.
 Like we said, it lost some detail in this one nasty area, but it actually wasn't as
 fuzzy as some of the other ones wound up being.
 That color was pretty medium to begin with, so it just wound up looking kind of medium
 in the end.
 The problem with once you start viewing the images on Instagram and saying, well, now
 you've seen the image on the screen and now you've uploaded it, which do you think handles
 that the best?
 The problem is, the answer is, it depends on the picture.
 I think that if you're going to upload a bright sunny day with a deep blue sky and a bright
 red car and a big green bench, then the brightness of the iPhone is probably going to make that
 look amazing.
 I think if you've got muted colors, grain, shadow detail, backlit, which we've experimented
 with before, and the Pixel 2 XL or Pixel 2 is going to kill it.
 I mean, it's just by far the winner.
 I think the HTC is still the average one.
 I think these kind of tests are very much we're trying to find definitive answers.
 Actually the answers are, this is probably the best, maybe.
 But then you could compensate for it.
 So where do you stop?
 You could say, well, if I have an iPhone, I know I'm going to kind of push the color
 balance a little bit redder.
 That's the point where you lose people, right?
 Most people aren't going to do that to try and compensate to make the photos look better.
 They just want it to work.
 And so at that point, you just have to know that Instagram is going to sort of, again,
 skew or enhance the problems that you're already dealing with.
 I think the answer is that overall, you know where you are with the iPhone.
 You know where you are with the Pixel 2.
 I think inconsistency on the other three is means you're probably going to know a little
 bit less.
 I think that's the thing.
 I think that you can compensate and take into account what the iPhone 10 and what the Pixel
 2 are going to do.
 And they will consistently always do that.
 OK, so here's another sort of weird test that we want to use to show how differently these
 photos can look.
 How much differently.
 Can I just say this?
 Yes.
 You know, I said we should get into the weeds.
 Yeah.
 So we're going to get into the weeds with pictures of weeds.
 I'm leaving.
 Is that meant to?
 So this is what we're looking at right now is a picture that was taken by the Pixel 2
 XL on the Pixel 2 XL screen and on the iPhone 10 screen.
 Same picture.
 Same picture.
 And already, I don't know, it might be hard to see in the video, but like already it is
 insanely different.
 It's insanely different.
 Yeah.
 So if you have like True Tone or anything turned on, these are just sort of we've got
 the Pixel 2 XL in the screen mode that actually matters, whatever one they call it, the one
 that doesn't have dumb colors.
 The right one.
 Yeah, the right one.
 And then the iPhone just sort of in its standard mode.
 And the iPhone is interpreting the Pixel's photo as like almost kind of dull.
 It's doing it deliberately.
 Very, yeah, right.
 It's very flat.
 Like there's not as much contrast.
 It's still a good photo.
 It looks like it's representing some pretty good detail.
 But here's something crazy, right?
 We've been saying up to this point how the iPhone makes everything look green.
 And the one color it's stripped out of the Pixel's image is the green has gone.
 Yeah, in comparison, the Pixel is just like lush and beautiful and it's got all this vibrant
 color.
 It's just gone.
 It just looks like this is normal and this is after a few days when the water's gone
 and it's gone a little bit brown.
 So what I want to do is get in a little bit closer so we can see some of the detail.
 I'm having trouble because-
 Apple hates Google?
 Yeah, the Google Drive app won't let me zoom in any further on the iPhone.
 But one thing I will say is that they're not resolving the detail any differently.
 This is really just about color, the difference here.
 And I don't know, I do pulled back kind of look like the way that the Pixel's looks on
 the Pixel.
 But the sort of photographer in me is looking at this one and saying like, that's a more
 realistic image because I was there shooting this picture.
 The greens were not that green and the blue was not that blue.
 That is an aggressive reproduction by Google in sort of-
 I don't want to live in the real world.
 I want to live in the better world.
 Fair enough.
 Let's take a look at the iPhone's photo on the Pixel.
 Okay.
 So the other way around now, we've got the iPhone X's photo from this scene on both of
 these screens and it's doing the same thing.
 I mean, it's like almost the exact same differences.
 The iPhone is almost like-
 It's making it more neutral.
 Yeah.
 I mean, this is like a real color profile kind of problem where like, you have one photo
 that's the same everywhere, but it looks different everywhere.
 And so it's the same thing again.
 We've got the Pixel sort of really going crazy on the colors, making the greens way more
 green, the blues way more blue.
 The iPhone is much more muted.
 But interestingly, it's blowing out the detail on the flowers a little bit.
 Yeah.
 So it's pumping up the contrast.
 Yeah.
 Well, I mean, I think we noticed that in the last one, but I think the difference here
 is that the Pixel's photo of this scene wasn't as contrasty.
 It had more dynamic range and the iPhone didn't quite nail that as much.
 And so the Pixel is sort of exacerbating it because its screen is punching up the colors
 and the contrast.
 And so it's taking a problem and making it worse.
 To your point earlier, if the information isn't there, it's not there.
 Right.
 So removed from all that sort of phone screen trickery, now we're looking at those same
 two images here on the Retina MacBook.
 And I think a pretty wild difference in the sense of the Pixel's image actually looks
 flatter.
 Way flatter.
 And not as saturated as it did on the phone, which is super weird.
 It feels like we got flipped.
 I actually almost thought I was looking at one and not the other.
 And the iPhone has sort of greener greens and more purpley purples.
 But it's much more blown out.
 It's blowing out the color.
 Yeah.
 This is a really strange difference.
 So clearly the screens are actually that last stage of punching the color.
 Because the Pixel, this image here, the colors are basically more muted.
 You know what it's like?
 It's almost like we're looking at the Pixel in neutral mode.
 And then when I'm looking on the screen, it's enhanced mode, right?
 It's the punchy mode.
 So in a way, maybe that even makes sense.
 Yeah.
 And as far as like how the pictures stack up against each other, I think the Pixel really
 got this one better.
 I think the iPhone might be a little more pleasing initially just because there's a
 bit more color there.
 It's also a little bit warmer and a little bit greener in that sense.
 Not just that there's green in the image, but in the way that it tends to apply those
 sort of casts to the image.
 This sort of like haze of warm colors and green colors.
 But the Pixel, obviously much more muted, much cooler.
 But just way better detail.
 Again, it didn't lose the detail in the highlight detail and the highlights, as well as just
 the sharpness, like the detail of the actual subject.
 Like the actual flowers in here.
 Much more rich.
 It feels like we're looking at a tone.
 It's blowing out.
 It can't hold these tones on the highlights.
 Yeah.
 I mean, on the flowers, it's like actually...
 And this wasn't...
 It's not like I took them in different settings, like where the sun was out.
 It just really read...
 This read a muted scene well, and the iPhone sort of didn't and kind of missed it.
 So we haven't talked about one of the sort of flagship features for some of these phones
 yet, because not all of them have it.
 And that's portrait mode.
 And so the ones we're talking about here, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the iPhone X and
 the Pixel 2 XL.
 So this is just one portrait mode photo.
 We're not going to go into a whole bunch of them.
 This is, I think, probably the most representative of the things that we saw a lot with portrait
 mode on the different phones.
 Which is that the iPhone tends to create probably softer, maybe less sharp looking portrait
 mode photos.
 And it's more progressive.
 Yeah.
 And the depth that it's sort of creating by blurring some of the background, yeah, it
 seems more progressive.
 It feels more like it's trying to and doing a good job of recreating the sort of blur
 that happens towards the back of the image.
 Whereas the Pixel, I think in most photos, has better edge detection than the iPhone
 X.
 It is finding the sort of seams around a person's head or their hair or whatever the subject
 might be, even if it's not a person.
 It's finding those seams better and sort of cutting around them better.
 But the part of the problem with that is like it's doing that and then immediately just
 blurring everything else.
 It makes everything feel like a cardboard cutout, which is aggressive in some images
 and not in others.
 And so I think the Pixel's portrait mode might wow a little bit more from time to time.
 But I actually wish it did more of that sort of progressive blurring that made it look
 like it was coming out of an actual sort of like SLR camera kind of thing.
 I think that having seen these now, I mean the Samsung is so, it's got the washy, it's
 got the warm.
 It does what it does.
 I mean, so the Note 8, again, it's aggressively smoothing the features on his face.
 It's sort of missed the exposure.
 It handles the blurring kind of well.
 One thing I love about the Samsung that I wish the other two phones would adopt is you
 can, while you're shooting or after you've shot a portrait mode photo, slide to adjust
 how much blur there is.
 On the Pixel you can sort of toggle it on and off, which is nice.
 But I wish there was that feature on the iPhone.
 I feel like Apple's never going to not believe fully in its ability to get it right.
 So we're never going to get it.
 And it's so dependent on the picture that you take.
 I mean, one of the good reasons to use this is there's so much detail in the background.
 Obviously, if you have a cleaner background, then all of the cameras do a better job.
 And I think one thing to note about the way the iPhone does portrait mode is it seems
 to really, I think it's sort of like almost cheating in a way that when it knows it's
 got a face, it really tries to keep the focus on the face.
 And it's even blurring his shirt where like that maybe, I don't know, with a really thin
 aperture, like a really good portrait lens, like that would happen if it was really, we
 were working with really small depth of field.
 But I think that makes more sense to me on the Samsung photo or even the Pixel photo
 where like his shirt should be in focus.
 Maybe not as cardboard cutout he is, the Pixel did it.
 But I think the Pixel did better detail and better color representation here.
 The iPhone always skis a little warm, like we've seen in most photos, but especially
 in portraits.
 And that warm kind of greeny cast I think gives a weird feeling when I'm looking at
 someone's face.
 I just don't like that they apply that there.
 So I think it handles the portrait mode a little bit better.
 But it still has some of the problems that I have with the way that the iPhone's software
 processing is being applied to the images.
 It's really funny that having used these phones so much, having being the owner of a Pixel,
 I never use portrait mode.
 Yeah, well, it's a good gateway into like some of the other things we should talk about
 with these because it's not just about having like sort of the best camera that captures
 the best detail in every scenario.
 That's great, obviously.
 I think if we're talking about just that, I think the Pixel 2 XL wins.
 I think the Pixel from last year would probably beat out most of these phones in certain situations.
 So the 2 XL, I think, and the software team that they have pumping over at Google to make
 the most out of the hardware that they have, you know, only having one lens, not two, and
 all that, they're just crushing it.
 And they are, again, a sort of step ahead of the pack when it comes to just like image
 quality in every situation and being consistent with it.
 One thing I don't like about the Pixel 2 XL and its portrait mode is that it's buried
 in the sort of hamburger menu and you're like, you can't just easily access it.
 It's easy to forget that it's there as far as like the UI goes.
 That's probably why I don't use it.
 I just forget.
 Yeah, I think that's probably part of it.
 But you can go too far on the Note 8.
 Their version of portrait mode is called Live Focus and it is right under the shutter button
 all the time, which makes it feel like you're always in portrait mode, even though you're
 not.
 You have to tap it even though it looks like a swipe.
 And that is mind boggling to me.
 I hate that.
 And I also hate that on the Samsung it shows you what lens you can switch to.
 So it says X2 for the telephoto lens.
 But on the iPhone, that means that you would be in that lens.
 And it's just it feels so backwards to me.
 And I think that's another big difference here.
 Like software across all these is wildly different.
 And we're just talking the sort of stock camera apps for these phones.
 One thing that I think the Samsung does the best of all the rest of them is it still to
 me is the quickest camera.
 And by that I mean it's the quickest camera.
 When I take it out of my phone, I can double tap the power button and the camera is just
 up and ready to shoot.
 The HTC, the Pixel will also do that.
 If you double tap the power buttons.
 I don't think they're quite as fast.
 And Samsung's autofocus is still really fast.
 I think probably still a class above the others, especially during video.
 And so I think that's probably still the fastest.
 It's real small though, the difference between that and like the HTC.
 And it's something that I wish the iPhone would really address.
 I wish there was just a way to launch the camera easier.
 I'd still hate swiping over to the camera because I never get it right 100% of the time.
 And the new sort of 3D touch button on the X, at least it puts it in a place where I
 know I can find it.
 But like I just I wish I had a hardware button.
 Honestly, I think the most the fastest I've ever launched a camera app on a smartphone
 is the sort of S7 and older category of them.
 I remember those days.
 The home button.
 It was just so much better.
 OK, so we've come to the end of the video.
 We've been arguing a lot and now you're expecting us to tell you which is the best camera.
 We're not going to do that.
 Actually, yes, we are.
 It's the Pixel.
 So no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because I think the Pixel is doing things that is
 more impressive than some of the other things.
 I think they have a better lead on the rest of the smartphones as far as their cameras.
 And I think they can take it to more interesting places.
 This is a surprise.
 I think the iPhone is right there with it, if not a little behind it.
 I love the versatility of a second lens.
 And we tested this on the circuit breaker show.
 The telephoto lens is still like worth using over just cropping in on like the Pixel 2's
 image.
 There is a quality difference.
 So I like that.
 And I do like some things that the iPhone does like live photos.
 You can reselect an image now.
 So if you just missed the moment, you can pick the one that you that you should have
 had.
 And it also does some interesting software stuff like long exposure simulations with
 live photos now.
 So I think Apple's got some advantages over the Pixel.
 I think just like hands down most consistent, going to always give you the best photo in
 most situations.
 I don't think you can say it isn't the Google Pixel 2X.
 I own it.
 I get it.
 I was just trying to be the most sort of diplomatic diplomatic.
 I mean, there are times and I think that this is the point.
 There are times when an iPhone is going to be better.
 There's times when the ACCU 11 is going to be better.
 There's times maybe not when the Note 8 is going to be better or the LG.
 But I think we have three that are sort of in a class of others.
 And then these are the sort of best that are out there, which is why we picked them in
 the first place.
 Exactly.
 We have way more comparisons on the website.
 So make sure you go find the smartphone camera comparison there where I'll have just way
 more detail than we could fit in this video.
 So look for that.
 Head to youtube.com slash the verge.
 Click subscribe if you're not already, which like at the end of this video, like, what
 are you doing if you're not?
 And thanks for watching.
 Thank you.
 Just the amount of what's the word I'm thinking of?
 I have no idea.
 Please tell me.
 Oh my God.
 Why am I blacking out?