 Every phone is fast. Every phone has an amazing screen and almost all of them have LTE. But one of the last features where a manufacturer can truly distinguish itself is the camera. We decided to test four of the best phones. The Nokia Lumia 920, the HTC One, the iPhone 5, and the Nexus 4. Let's see how they stack up. So all four of these phones do a pretty good job in pretty good conditions. Slightly overcast outside, plenty of light, not a huge amount of contrast in the scene. We've got detail in the tires, we've got detail on the paint, on the bus, and on the gravel itself. And the photos are well balanced. There's a wide range of tones and everything's pretty sharp. So out of the four phones we tested, it's safe to say the Lumia 920 wasn't the worst. But it was a little weird. In almost every single scene the saturation was through the roof. There's definitely a lot of processing happening right on the phone before you even get to see the image. Bright colors, for example, in the pictures of my shoes looking down at the grade on the sidewalk, the bright colors of my shoes and pants were blown out. Shooting up into the sky, through the trees, if you compare the blue sky and the Lumia's photos to the other phones, I think you'll see that the HTC One and the iPhone 5 and even to some extent the Nexus 4, they look a lot more natural. To me, the Lumia 920 just looks not real at all. Another thing I've noticed about the Lumia 920 is that when I look at these images zoomed in, even when the ones that were taken outside with a huge amount of light, they're noisy. Almost every single image that we pulled off of the Lumia 920 is noisy. Image quality on the HTC One was decent. The biggest problem with the HTC One is that in any sufficiently bright environment, the photos are washed out. Regardless of where the light source is coming from, there's just not enough contrast in the images. As a person who spends most of his time shooting with an SLR, in my opinion, the iPhone 5 is the best all-around cell phone camera that we tested today. Noise levels across all the photos taken with the iPhone 5 were generally good. In low-light photos, sure there was noise, but the noise looked real, for lack of a better term. It didn't look mushy, it didn't look like software was doing everything it could to mitigate the noise. The iPhone does a great job of striking a balance between accuracy in a photo and giving you a useful file at the end of the day. Dark scenes are dark, but they also look real. Bright scenes of the sky, buildings, trees, things like that, sure they're bright, but they're not blown out. And there's plenty of contrast, and there's still some detail in the shadows. The Nexus 4, while not terrible, was sort of right down the middle, decidedly average. Images from the Nexus 4, they lack contrast sometimes, they almost always look compressed. There's a high amount of noise in lots of images. It just looks like the photo was taken with a cell phone camera. So one of the most common use cases for a cell phone camera today is going to be a place where the light's terrible. You're in a bar, you're in a restaurant, you're out with friends. The HTC One produced really bright pictures that didn't look like a low-light situation, but they were really noisy and really mushy. But it was a usable photo, and in small sizes it might work. The Nexus 4 was useless in low-light, worse than useless, completely useless. Just leave it in your pocket and use your memory. The Lumia 920 did a pretty good job with a low-light photo, but our subject wasn't moving. And I can tell, based on my multiple tries, that the 920 absolutely favors a slower shutter speed in low-light situations. Which means if you're photographing anything that's alive, you're going to have some trouble. Low-light photos from the 920 are noisy, just like any other cell phone camera, but it was also clear, as usual, that there's a tremendous amount of processing happening on the phone before we even get the images onto a computer. The iPhone 5's low-light photos are the most true to life. The light and the colors are as I remember them. They're generally pretty sharp, but they are also very noisy. Cell phones are better than ever, and everyone these days has a great computer in their pocket. And it's only a matter of time before cameras catch up. But until that happens, and probably after that happens, photography is going to continue to be a game of compromises.