Mobile photography has come a long way since the iPhone ushered in the modern day smartphone era back in 2007. Whereas early era smartphones featured rather meager cameras with disappointing low light performance, the mobile photography landscape is entirely different today. These days, smartphone cameras are getting discernibly better each and every year. So whether or not you’re partial to the iPhone or more of an Android fan, the pleasant reality is that even a low-end smartphone today can take stunning photos.
As camera technology in smartphones continues to improve, photo shootouts between high-end smartphones and dedicated point and shoots aren’t as ludicrous as they once were. And while we’re still not at a point where smartphones can deliver photos capable of rivaling DSLRs in an array of shooting scenarios, the battle, at the very least, is interesting.
That said, PhoneArena this week decided to put Samsung’s recently released Galaxy S8 to the test by seeing how its photo capabilities stack up against the Panasonic GH4 and Nikon’s D5100, a “$2000 mirrorless camera and an entry-level DSLR”, respectively.
At any rate, I wasn’t tasked to go and take photos for an art exhibition at the office, I was tasked to take pictures of different things under different light conditions, and with three different cameras, so we are not going to judge the results by their artistic merits. Instead, we are going to be talking about color, detail, dynamic range, and how “finished” the results look with no post-processing involved. We know right off the bat that both cameras dwarf the S8 in terms of resolution (16 MP vs 12 MP), and we know that editing can change things a lot, but the question is which device produces the best-looking photos straight out of camera.
Interestingly enough, the S8 managed to hold its own in quite a few of the test photos, with the shot below being one such example.
Make sure to check out the full results from this intriguing photo battle over here.
