iPhone 12 Pro Max vs Samsung Note 20 Ultra / Huawei Mate 40 Pro Camera Test Comparison.

Alright, these are pretty much the three best

camera

phones in 2020, so welcome to the showdown, we have the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which has the largest image sensor of any Apple product, as well as a couple of extras about the already quite capable

iphone

12 pro

camera

, we have the galaxy

note

20

ultra

which is the pinnacle of Samsung refinement, a truly huge sensor, a crazy five times optical zoom and this new laser autofocus module to fix your only focus on the Achilles heel and then we have Huawei, which You could argue actually pushed smartphone photography more than any other company.

They were the first to develop a really powerful night mode. They were the first with a triple camera setup. They are also the company that almost every year seemed to make it out. with an even larger image sensor than the previous year, in fact this Huawei phone has the largest sensor of any modern smartphone, which is one of the most important factors in a camera. Okay, let's see which is the best camera phone of 2020. So we just take pictures. during the day we've never had three phones that are so consistently bright, but at the same time it's amazing that you can point these three cameras at the same scene, they can capture all the fantastic results on their own trips, but they are also incredibly different from each other, the iPhone takes warmer, redder colors, Samsung, cooler blue tones and Huawei, well, Huawei doesn't really have a consistent color profile.

I've probably taken 500 photos with this Huawei Mate 40 Pro. Now I still couldn't tell you what. His style is that he simply takes each photo as it comes and treats them separately. Doesn't this matter? It rarely looks bad, but what's really important is the detail and this is something Samsung wins hands down, which isn't very surprising. The iPhone only has a 12 megapixel sensor, Samsung's is 108 and what this 50 was is a little ahead when you're in automatic mode, where each phone produces about 12 megapixels, but if you use full resolution mode of each camera, so yes, it's a big jump, although I was a little surprised to see the 12-megapixel iPhone keeping pace with the 50-megapixel Huawei.

This is where we end up with a moral dilemma. Apple's camera philosophy seems to be: let's keep it real, let's keep the scene looking at how it looks to your eyes, but the more I use Samsung and Huawei cameras, the more I realize that they aren't afraid to tweak things a little. , so for example here's a really challenging scene shot on the iPhone and just because of how much brighter the outside than the inside ends up overexposing it like a pro SLR would but if you take that same photo on the

huawei

you can see that It detects that this part is outdoors and says okay, what are we going for?

What you need to do is greatly reduce the exposure of that part so that you can see a lot of blue in the sky instead of it looking dull. As a result, although this iPhone has a pretty amazing dynamic range, in extreme cases you will find some overexposed brightness. areas that you probably won't see on the Huawei so they can make the Huawei shots look more aesthetically pleasing but also in some cases fake looking and that's where you could really decide that you're leaning towards Samsung because Samsung is lies approxi

mate

ly halfway between the two. It's a good compromise, but there are definitely times where this kind of super aggressive dynamic range works in Huawei's favor.

Let's say you have a not very well lit subject sitting in front of a very well lit background, the iPhone tries to keep the image as it is to preserve the way it actually looks, but on Huawei this part looks dark, let's make it brighter and this The difference is often even more pronounced on the phone's

ultra

-wide cameras, which aren't as good at capturing tons of light, making them even more reliant. As for the software, I will say it's a pretty extreme example for the most part with the ultra wide and I think this generally applies to all photos.

Samsung strikes a really good balance: it has the most detail not only in the subject but also in the margins of your shots where the distortion is exaggerated Huawei technically has the best quality ultra-wide sensor and every once in a while it comes out with a shot that It makes you wonder wait a second where you're coming from, but it's just not a very wide ultra wide camera. Oh, I also mentioned that the iPhone 12 Pro Max's sensor is the largest image sensor Apple has ever used in a phone by a mile and one of the best side effects of this is the greater foreground-background separation that on the smaller iPhone 12. pro, but keep in mind that here in this

comparison

you're facing the big dogs between these three phones, the 12 pro max still has the smallest sensor, so while you get a nice blurred background, it's not as much like Samsung and Huawei.

So far, Samsung is in the lead, but this is where it gets a little complex. Stay with me here, so I talked about the image processing that Samsung and Huawei do on their photos, which reduces the exposure and makes sure the sky always looks blue. Well, this happens after taking the photo. This is called post-processing and the important caveat is that you can't do that on video. In video, you have to rely on what your phone can capture in real time and this is where the iPhone wins a couple of points: the chipset inside the iPhone is actually designed to be able to record two video streams at the same time, exposure high and low, and then combine them so that the dynamic range you can capture in video looks almost as good as it does in photos, while for phones that rely a little more on post-processing, their dynamic range is worse in video and Samsung tries to compensate for this by increasing the contrast so it still looks good, but most of the time there is less. information here that on the iPhone only take a look at the darker areas like my jeans for example, the Huawei is a wildcard sometimes the video looks amazing, the colors come out with fantastic exposure, other times it just doesn't, and while These are all pretty stable if you're just walking, try running and wow, it's very clear that Apple and Samsung are tied to their own niche scene, yes, but I wasn't expecting that much of a difference on top of something I can't really show.

What you will see through this video is the fact that the iPhone is also recording in 10-bit Dolby Vision HDR or in other words, it is filming in such a way that a lot of additional hidden color information is captured and that will become really obvious if you wish. To try editing the videos later, you may have noticed that the Samsung video is a little sharper. You can see it if you look at the trees in the background here, but this is not something fundamental to the camera, it's just Samsung's camera software. extra layer of sharpness plus now one of the main takeaways from shooting video on all of these phones is that they focus fast, both Samsung and Huawei have laser sensors to block things and Apple has its own lidar scanner, but take a look.

Right now, Apple can smoothly adjust its focus as objects move closer and farther away, and Samsung can do this too. It looks quite cinematic. Huawei's approach is just a little rough, it arrives quickly, but while you take a video, you don't. I don't really want sharp motion like this and finally Samsung has the option to record 8k video but you probably won't use it much, it's a bit weird and just takes up a ton of storage. Now there's something else besides the video. that the

iphone

12 pro max is absolutely destroyed and that for starters it's portrait mode, it has a 2.5x zoom camera that is mainly there just to take portraits, basically zooming in when taking pictures of people prevents you from having You have to put your phone directly on your face which can distort your facial features, so to try to compensate Samsung uses a digital zoom twice for portraits which is fine but you lose some quality and Huawei just doesn't zoom at all which As you can see it doesn't look that great either what most fans tend to do in portrait mode is figure out what's in the foreground and make it sharp and then figure out what the background is and make it blurry but the iPhone does a I do a better job of subtly blending the two layers, so if you take a look at my jumper in this In the photo here you can see that Apple has understood that one of my shoulders is further back than the other, so it looks a little softer.

Also this could be due to the new lidar scanner, the edge detection is amazing as this is such a complex photo and yet I couldn't point out a single thing that looks like Samsung and Huawei. Both also have a tendency to over-beautify faces, but this is a personal preference. It's annoying that you can't turn it off completely, but hey, I mean everyone wants to do it. It looks nice, you might like it now, while Apple has that 2.5x zoom camera, which is fantastic for portraits, the other two phones are actually equipped with 5x zoom cameras and although they don't really You can use them for portraits because they require a lot of magnification.

It would be like taking photos like that. The benefit of them is that if you want to see far away, you can do so as soon as you zoom in five times. Samsung and Huawei are in a league of their own, they are much better than you. I just have to decide if this is useful to you or not. Each of these phones can also take selfies, obviously, and I'll give this category to the Huawei. I know I really wish this were simpler too. It is very detailed. If you're ever going to want to take a selfie, there's some facial beautification going on here like with the Samsung, but it doesn't feel excessive and the real differentiator is the fact that it can be zoomed in thanks to a second ultra-wide camera on the front, which is perfect for vlogging if you decide to do that and to that end, it's good to see that Huawei is finally paying attention to the audio quality.

The microphone on that phone actually sounds pretty good. It's not the best. I'd give it to the iPhone, but. listen to it yourself, okay, this is me speaking for the iphone 12 pro max, this is me speaking for the galaxy

note

20 ultra and this is me speaking for the

huawei

mate

40 pro. I also just got back to the whole beautification thing. It's a little curious what your opinion is on this because obviously we love the idea of ​​every photo looking 100% real and the iPhone does the best job, but every once in a while I can't help but feel especially this profound new feeling. fusion software that actually tries to highlight textures, it can look a little unflattering, here's a throwback, remember when slow motion was the hot topic for smartphone cameras when Samsung, Huawei and even Apple were fighting to have the slower motion?

Slow motion on the front and rear cameras seems like companies simply forgot about it in 2020. That said, the nature of having better camera sensors on these phones than ever means slow motion has never been better Huawei may get the video slower, we're talking, so slow that it can often seem like nothing is actually happening. It has some very interesting potential use cases, but for most day-to-day situations it is so slow that it is often described as gentle. The boring Samsung can still get quite slow while retaining decent quality and then the iPhone has the least ability to slow down but most of the time it has a slightly nicer result so you may have started to notice a theme in this camera

comparison

.

Apple likes to control the user experience to give you a little less flexibility, whether it's zoom or slow motion, but to make sure that everything you can shoot on this phone looks good and I like that approach, but it's worth the It's worth keeping in mind that it comes with a caveat: The iPhone's camera is a little less fun. I just think that because Samsung and Huawei cameras don't take themselves that seriously, they're not afraid to have some extra features that are just interesting and experimental rather than necessarily being the most polished. I love it. Huawei's light painting mode, for example, can draw things in the dark or in color AI that turns the entire background into black and white or dual view that allows you to capture multiple enlargements at the same time or even just macro - the phone uses its built-in AI to switch automatically. to a close-up camera when you get really close to something and it's good quality, this is not one of those fancy features that you will never use, then you have Samsung, you can take live focused portrait mode videos and while I would say it's fine , is fun at best, or probably best example is its single shot mode, which has actually proven to be useful, so you probably have a lot of situations where you know you want to capture a moment, but unusual. off your head you can't think what is the best way to capture it, so here you can touch theshutter once and shoot everything, take photos, take videos, take ultra-wide shots and even give you options with filters and music.

It's also great every once in a while just to try it out and see what comes out. Oh, and if you're enjoying the video, by the way, a subscription to the channel would be spectacular, so I guess what I'm really saying is that the iPhone 12 Pro Max's camera is like the zenith of refinement, but at the same time it's so focused on the standard photo and video features that it seems like a missed opportunity, but you could also argue that what it can do at night is very fun night photography is what I was most looking forward to for two reasons, one is where the improvements of the The new sensor on this iPhone should be more noticeable and two, it's an area that has historically been dominated.

On Android phones a couple of years ago, the story was that Huawei can take amazing photos in the dark. Samsung also has a night mode, but it's garbage. Apple doesn't even have a night mode, but I'd say the narrative is changing as Huawei improves. So, actually, this la

test

phone has ditched the optical image stabilization that would have helped you keep your phone still for night mode shots. Samsung and Apple have made great strides in gaining some perspective. This is a photo taken with the iPhone 10s max from two years ago. a photo of the 11 pro max this is the 12 pro max Apple catches up fast enough to say that overall the iPhone beats Huawei and it actually ends up as a competition between Apple and Samsung, sometimes the iPhone wins as here.

A look at the flower painting on the right just highlights the exposure and sometimes Samsung wins like in this photo here but I can't believe I'm saying this most of the time the iPhone hits all the pillars of a good night. Photo mode restores the true daylight color of objects, smoothes surfaces that would otherwise be riddled with artifacts or simply noise, and is highly detailed. I have to say that the Huawei did not impress me in some aspects, it feels like they have done it. Backed up a bit, the lack of optical image stabilization means it's a bit prone to micro-shaking while shooting and although its shots are generally bright, I think they would actually benefit from being a little darker because all this brightness does is state the amount. of noise in them, you know something else Huawei used to be way ahead of the competition in astronomical photography of the stars, but now I would almost side with the iPhone, it actually seems to produce a bit cleaner output and, In fact, that is not the only advantage.

At night, the iPhone has portraits to boot, it's the only phone that can shoot both night mode and portrait mode at the same time, which means just a ton more light and video, thanks in part to having the larger aperture. wide f 1.6, it is less grainy. More detailed images but also with better color correction, so all those videos you take in restaurants and living rooms and those types of medium to low light situations will look better on the iPhone, so putting all this together takes us to a natural conclusion, yes. There won't be one phone that comes out on top in every situation, but I would say that the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra overall is the best camera you can buy, it has extreme detail, it has aggressive but not too aggressive dynamic range and there is only one Lots of interesting options to play with, but the iPhone 12 Pro Max is the best video camera on a phone thanks to very good quality dynamic range, unparalleled consistency between lenses, and low-light video that holds up surprisingly well, but this phone is actually also almost as good as

samsung

and also for photos it really wins some points in low light if you really liked the flexibility of the different camera modes and the fun things to play with or if the main thing you will use It's the selfie camera, so consider the Huawei, but overall it's the weakest camera system of the three.

Okay, if you enjoyed this video, I've spent an absolute age on it, so a subscription to the channel would be just amazing. My name is Aaron, this is Mr. Who. the boss and I'll see you next time