(source) It was a wise geek that once said, "The best camera you can have is the camera you have with you". More often than not, this is the camera hanging off the back of your smartphone rather than any standalone camera you may have at home.
The cameras on the latest flagship smartphones are worthy replacements for point-and-shoot compacts. The image quality won't be better, necessarily, but this is more than made up for by conveniences such as easy sharing and not having to carry around a second device.
Choosing between one smartphone and another can often come down to which one has the better camera. While the number of megapixels can give you a general idea of the camera's quality (five megapixels is average, eight-plus megapixels is in the above-average category), real-world testing is the only way to properly judge each camera.
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Apple iPhone 5, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4: Who comes out on top? |
Apple iPhone 5
The Apple iPhone 5's camera is almost stark in its simplicity. There are no scene modes, white balance options or ISO settings in its tiny bag of tricks; the two shooting options are limited to HDR and panorama.
But this dearth of features doesn't seem to have hurt the iPhone's popularity. According to Flickr, one of the world's largest online photo sharing services, the top three cameras used by its members are the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.
Is it actually the superior camera? The iPhone 5 has its age going against it, with both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4 being several months newer. This has given competitors ample opportunity to improve on the iPhone 5's eight megapixel camera, and it shows – but not as much as you might think.
Up against the Samsung Galaxy S4, the iPhone 5 didn't produce as much detail in brightly-lit conditions, which is understandable given there's a five megapixel difference between the two. The less light you feed the iPhone 5, however, the better it is out of the two phones at producing good exposures, even if it comes at the expense of noise (blotchy speckles in the image).
The iPhone 5 out-performed the HTC One for day-to-day photography, but challenging situations such as macros and dim lighting saw the HTC One come out on top. The HTC One's 'ultrapixel' sensor in particular was at lot better at making the most of available light for both indoor and night-time photography.
Samsung Galaxy S4
When it comes to features, Samsung has opted for a kitchen sink approach, stuffing the Galaxy S4 with all the options and settings you'd expect in a dedicated compact camera, as well as a few extras.
The usual suspects such as a night-time mode and panorama option are joined by unique shooting options such as dual-mode, which lets you add a 'selfie' thumbnail picture to photos or videos using the front-facing camera, and drama, which takes multiple exposures of a moving object and merges them into one composite photo. They're gimmicky features, to be sure, but they're fun to muck around with nonetheless.
As to the bread-and-butter of everyday photography, the Samsung Galaxy S4's 13-megapixel camera shines – especially when the sun happens to be shining, too. In good lighting conditions, the Galaxy S4 proved to have the best camera out of the lot, producing sharp, colour-accurate photos that had plenty of detail.
It's only when you take the Galaxy S4 out of its comfort zone that it starts to struggle. Action photography isn't the Samsung's forte, and more often than not it would blur the moving object rather than freeze it.
Its biggest shortcoming, however, is low-light photography where the flash isn't employed. Where both the iPhone 5 and HTC One were able to extract some detail from dim scenes, the Galaxy S4 simply threw in the towel and rendered most of the photo pitch black. Manually activating the Galaxy S4's night mode helps, but since it keeps the shutter open longer to let in more light, you're likely to end up with a blurry photo.
HTC One
If you can't beat them, create a new playing field. Pardon the mixed metaphor, but that's the cynical interpretation of the new "ultrapixel" sensor in the HTC One. Rather than go the usual route of competing on megapixels, HTC has invented its own 'ultrapixel' unit of measurement that describes the larger pixels used in the camera's sensor.
This has left the HTC One with a middling four-megapixel camera that, according to HTC's marketing boffins, is able to let in 300 per cent more light than competing 13-megapixel cameras. This promise definitely holds up in practice, and it's astonishing how effective the HTC One's camera is at wringing light out of a dark scene. For low-light photography, the HTC One consistently produced brighter and cleaner (less noisy) photos than the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4, even though it had a tendency to introduce odd colour artefacts as well.
The HTC One also excels when it comes to macro and action photography. The exceptional auto-focus captures razor-sharp photos when you get up close, and it can also render a sharp freeze-frame of a moving object almost every time – a feat the iPhone can pull off intermittently and the Galaxy S4 not at all. For everyday shots, the speedy performance means you're more likely to capture fleeting moments with the HTC One than you are with the other smartphones.
Detail, however, isn't the HTC One's strong point. This is where the fewer megapixels on offer work against it, as it doesn't produce anywhere near as much information as the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4. If you regularly print or crop your photos, the HTC One won't do you any favours.
The camera has other issues, too, such as a bad habit of over-exposing, which frequently results in blown out highlights, and adding a bluish cast to colours, which makes them look less vibrant.
Conclusion
The main rivalry here is between the Apple iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4. The HTC One certainly has its strengths, namely for macro, action and low-light photography, but its performance for day-to-day shots wasn't up to the same standard as its competitors.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 was able to produce a slightly higher quality of photos out of the three under optimal lighting conditions, but it lost its lead to the other smartphones whenever it was challenged with something trickier.
The Apple iPhone 5, however, was a strong contender no matter what we threw at it. It may have been runner-up for most shooting scenarios, but the consistently good performance across the board makes it the best smartphone camera all-round.
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