Whenever Samsung rolls out new models of its flagship handsets, you can be forgiven for feeling like the company is positioning them as top-notch cameras that also happen to include smartphone functionality. That was certainly the case during last week’s Unpacked event in New York, when Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 10+ and spent a lot of time and attention touting the image and video quality experience, in addition to the state-of-the-art tools built into the series’ pro-grade cameras.
Samsung has even more reasons to promote the devices’ amazing cameras now that DxOMark’s Galaxy Note 10+ 5G camera review is out. The phone’s front-facing camera earned a score of 99 out of there-is-no-maximum, compared to its rear camera’s first-place score of 113. Both of which are essentially meaningless numbers, as we’ve explained numerous times in the past.
Camera reviews, of course, can’t rely on performance benchmarks with objective scores, despite DxOMark’s insistence that you can, in fact, quantify such a performance. Which is not to say we recommend you ignore these kinds of reviews completely. On the contrary, the DxOMark review of something like the Galaxy Note 10+ is definitely worth perusing, especially if camera performance is something you really care about in a phone.
As Samsung explains in its summation of the new DxOMark review, the camera scores here sum up the DxOMark engineers’ “assessment of a devices’ photo and video quality to provide consumers with neutral and reliable test data about smartphone camera performance.” Also, that announcement continues, DxOMark assigns sub-scores for photo and video quality and then combines them into an overall score.
Given its top scores, the cameras included with the 5G variant of the Note 10+ best comparable handsets like the Huawei P30 Pro, the OnePlus 7 Pro, and the iPhone XS Max. Check out the full Note 10+ 5G review here.
The review’s summary notes that the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G “becomes the top-ranked device for smartphone image quality in our database. An excellent performance across the board means that whether you’re shooting photos or videos, you can be confident of getting outstanding results from Samsung’s latest flagship device. While the scores are broadly similar to its stablemate Galaxy S10 5G, some fine-tuning of the processing algorithms has improved on the excellent image quality previously observed on Samsung premium devices.”
