Different people have different priorities when it comes to picking out the perfect smartphone. Some people focus on design, others on screen size, and many people stay loyal to a particular brand and buy its latest flagship device each time they are due for an upgrade. Whichever smartphone one might end up with though, there are certain features that are always among the most important when people are polled about their top needs and wants. Battery life is a big one, of course, but camera quality is always near the top of the list (sorry, BlackBerry).
There’s no question that Apple’s new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have cameras that are among the best in the business. As Tim Cook pointed out, these phones pack what will be the best cameras many iPhone buyers this year have ever owned. But are they the best among their peers? An Apple news blog recently put together a blind camera test and asked readers to pick a winner. Did the iPhone come out on top when fans couldn’t tell which camera was which?
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Among Apple blogs, iMore is definitely one of the most balanced sites around. Still, it’s safe to say that most of its readers are fairly, shall we say, enthusiastic Apple fans. After all, it’s a website dedicated to nothing but Apple news and reviews.
So, the blog put together an extensive photo comparison test that differs in one key way from similar comparisons you’ll see around the web: it was blind. The site captured similar photos using the iPhone 7, Galaxy S7, LG V20 and Microsoft Lumia 950, and it posted them on its site with no indication of which device captured each photo. Then, it asked users to choose the photo with the best quality for each scene.
With more than 13,000 votes tallied, can you guess which camera these Apple enthusiasts picked as the winner? If you surmised by now that they didn’t pick the iPhone, you’re correct — Samsung’s Galaxy S7 camera ended up coming out on top.
Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Apple’s iPhone 7 are clear leaders in this key space, and fans of both companies will say their brand of choice is the clear winner. The truth, of course, isn’t quite so clear-cut. As we noted in our iPhone 7 review, Apple’s latest iPhone camera has a clear edge over the Galaxy S7… in some lighting. In other situations, the Galaxy S7 is much better than the iPhone. And when brand favoritism is removed from the equation and a wide range of photos are presented to the viewer, it looks like Samsung’s Galaxy S7 may indeed come out on top.
Check out iMore’s full post to see all of the sample photos and dig deeper into the results of the blind test.
