 For the past five years, the iPhone has had the smartphone camera to beat. If you wanted a phone that took reliable and consistent photos, your best bet was to go with whatever latest iPhone was available. But in the past year, things have changed. The competition has really stepped up its game, and other smartphone makers now have cameras worthy of consideration. Both Samsung and LG have released phones this year with really impressive cameras that give the iPhone some solid competition. Now we just saw the iPhone 6S get released, and Apple's touting that we've got more resolution this time around, better performance in low light, all with that same reliable container of taking pictures on an iPhone that we're all familiar with. So we decided to take it and stack it up against the best from Samsung and LG. So we've got Samsung's best, the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus. We've got LG's best, the LG G4, and we put them up against Apple's best, the iPhone 6S Plus. I brought these out and I put them in a bunch of different situations. Low light, macro, portrait, landscape, basically everything that you'd want these cameras to succeed in. So first we've got a macro image here. This is a beautiful flower. And this image is really bright and vibrant, but there's some real issues here. Namely, you don't really see them until you look closely, but it's actually out of focus. We found this to be a pretty common situation with the iPhone, right? Focusing up close with the iPhone is not necessarily the easiest thing to do. You have to give yourself more space than I think most people would expect. And even tapping the focus here didn't really help. And then on top of that, you take another look at some of the colors here. These flowers, as we're actually going to see, are white around the edges, but the iPhone really kind of bled that color throughout, and you lose a lot of depth of the color. So let's take a look at LG's version of this. It looks like a totally different photo. It's a totally different photo, much more in focus, but it's also a lot duller. We don't get as much of the pink here in the center of the flower as we did with the iPhone. And then we take a look at Samsung's, and Samsung's basically splits the difference between those two. It's sharp. We can see all the way down into this flower over here, but it's also still very separated from the background, so you get this really awesome depth. And there's a lot of color. I mean, we're seeing dark pinks in here that we weren't seeing in the iPhone, and we're seeing white, really, really light pink out here at the edges that we weren't seeing in the iPhone. I mean, color depth, actual depth, clarity, this one definitely beat out all the others. Yeah, I agree. There's some weirdness going on around the edges here. It looks like it may be a little oversharpened, but it doesn't take away from the photo at all. I think that by far, Samsung won this one hands down. So the next photo we're going to look at is one just right from the corner of Central Park. We've got some flowers and trees and stuff in the front, nice landscape with some buildings in the background, a lot of different competing light, highlights and shadows. What do you think we got here? Well, the first thing I'm noticing here is that where we saw the sharpening wasn't really a problem on Samsung's image of the flower, here it's kind of a mess. You lose a lot of detail in the center here and a lot of detail around the edges because Samsung's kind of oversharpening. And that's kind of counterintuitive to what most people want or think. You want a really sharp image, but when you apply it artificially, it can look really bad. If we flip over to what the iPhone did, you can see everything is just more pleasant to the eye. It's not as harsh to look at. There's more detail preserved in this area. It's not blown out. And the image doesn't look as overly crisp to my eyes. This is way less aggressive of an image just from the highlights to the shadows to that sharpening detail. And that's what Samsung's phones seem to do this when there's a lot going on in a photo. That's when their sharpening is kind of exposed. If it's a nice simpler shot like that flower, it's nice to sharpen it up a little bit. It doesn't have a lot of stuff to play with, but in a really busy photo like this, we can see that Samsung's phones kind of overdo it a little bit. But yeah, this is probably...this is really pleasant all the way to the shadows in this building to...you can see these leaves in the dark up here, but without blowing out these flowers, this is just like exactly what you'd want to take away from that setting. Yeah, iPhone did a really impressive job here. Over here on LG, I can't say the same. You've got blown out highlights here. The image just kind of looks just harsh to my eyes. It's kind of got a lot of the similar sharpening issues as the Samsung, and the busy details here just make it unpleasant to look at, unfortunately. So here we've got a pretty standard straightforward portrait. It's head and shoulders, very common shot. We're outdoors in daylight here. This particular image is from the iPhone, and for the most part, it's pretty good. There's plenty of detail here. You got detail in her eyes and her eyelashes down to her hair. The color is a little weird, though. It's kind of got this green cast, which we saw a lot with the iPhone photos, and it becomes really dramatic when we check out the other photos from LG and Samsung. The color is way more natural here. You can really see it in her skin, and definitely in the hair over here. It's kind of borrowing some of the blue from the background here, but the green cast, when you really pull back and look at some of the other pictures, is what stands out here. We saw that in a couple of the other iPhone photos that we were taking. If it got the colors wrong, it got them wrong green, and that's not really a great color to let bleed into pictures that shouldn't have green in them. Especially if it's a portrait. It's just going to make the face look a little sicklier. Otherwise it's not bad. We've got some great detail here, not too much compression or anything. One thing we did notice is that it sounds like there's not a big difference in the apertures between the iPhone and the other phones. iPhone has a f2.2 aperture, and the Samsung has f1.9, and the LG has an f1.8 lens. That sounds really close, but it actually makes a pretty big difference. Here she looks compressed against the wall. Almost everything's in focus. But you look at LG and the Samsung image, and there's some separation there between her and the wall. There's some depth in this image, and that little change in aperture actually makes a really big difference in a picture like this, at least, when you're close to the subject. I think the Samsung did the best job here as far as balancing the color, the sharpness, and the saturation. What's interesting, though, is the LG is really almost a desaturated or flat image, which isn't great for a directly out of camera image, but if you want to edit your photos or something like that after the fact, this gives you a good base to work with. Yeah, I look at a photo like this, and I think about all the different directions I could take it when I'm editing a picture. Whereas I look at something like the one that we got out of the S6 Edge Plus, and I say, this one's probably already good enough to post somewhere. I don't really need to do too much to it. That's really a matter of choice. I think most people are going to want to do less out of the camera and would like something like this. We just took a look at a portrait image taken in daylight. Let's take a look at something on the far end of the spectrum taken at nighttime, lit by a phone screen. We can see here, this is the iPhone image. We can see that green cast again, a lot of green color in his face, especially where it falls off from light to shadow. We also see that the iPhone didn't really handle the exposure too well. It's really blowing out some highlights here around his nose and his forehead up here. Not really the best thing, but you got a usable image. This is a really challenging moment to get a picture. It was really dark out, even though you can still see a little bit of blue in the sky. It's not bad. It kind of reminds me of when you had a disposable camera and you took a picture with a flash. It's a little harsh, and it's got that green tint. Whereas you can see if we flip over to what Samsung did, it's kind of like the exact opposite. All the green has been replaced by this orangey yellow, which is way too extreme in this case. I really dislike this image a lot. The other problems that I have with this image is it's way oversaturated. The green is super green. The red is super red. Even though it looks like there's more detail in some of the areas where the iPhone blew it out, you can tell it's just smeared, and there's no actual detail there. It's really interesting how the two cameras handle this similar situation differently. Really the winner, I think, here is the LG. It's got all the detail in his face as best as you can preserve it. His shirt is not too oversaturated, and it's not overexposed or green. This is like the perfect blend of enough sharpening to get some detail out of the image, enough noise reduction so that it doesn't look completely awful. I think a lot of this is also due to the optical image stabilization on the LG G4. All of these phones have optical image stabilization, which is great and helps, especially in low-light situations where you need a longer exposure. LG's is definitely in a different class from the other two phones. You can hold this phone and rock it around a little bit up and down, and the image won't move on the screen. It's almost disorienting. For a picture like this where you need to be holding the phone there for the shutter to open a little bit longer to capture the image, the optical image stabilization on the LG really helped make this the best picture of the three. Yeah, I agree. So we just took a look at a nighttime portrait. Now we've got kind of like a nighttime landscape scene here. This is a highway, and so all three cameras use their optical stabilization to the best. They all are going to drag the shutter quite a bit here so the cars are going to get some blur, but the rest of the details should be sharp. Now this here is the iPhone image, and it's kind of cool. There's not a lot of warm tones in here. It didn't pick up the headlights as being warm and change its white balance to that, whereas if you look at the LG here, it's the exact opposite. It's really warm in comparison, right? It's kind of yellow. It's really kind of unnatural. I don't think this is a better image. The other thing that you can notice here between the LG and the iPhone is in the sky, the LG is doing a ton of noise reduction and blurring up there, whereas the iPhone kind of just holds the grain, which makes it grainy. More neutral, duller photo, but the detail has at least not been touched and messed around with too much, whereas this has definitely had some processing done already. But this is a sharper image, and I think it's, again, thanks to optical image stabilization. You just follow the lines all the way down to the center of the image, and you can just see a sharpness that isn't there in the iPhone. Especially when you look at the sign that's way back here, this green sign, you can pick up way more detail than you can on the iPhone. On the iPhone, it almost even looks farther away, I think probably because it's a wider field of view. But you can actually read it here on the LG. And then I think even better, we get to the Samsung image, we have basically the happy medium. The walls aren't completely yellow with all that ambient light. You still get some of that natural daylight that's barely still left up in the sky. Balancing it all out, you've got this really kind of good movement from blue to warm. And then you also have a lot of really great detail. You can see the trash all along the highway all the way down. And you go back to the iPhone image, and that's a lot harder to see here. But you still have some of the problems that the LG one has. Like you said, you can see a bunch of splotchiness up here in the sky, which is where it's doing some noise reduction for you. But otherwise, this is probably the best. It's the same deal. We can see a ton of detail back here as well. We can see the sign where we couldn't see it in the iPhone image. But this is another case of not one of these three is too much better than the other one. They're all really kind of a matter of taste, where iPhone is going a little more natural, a little less processing, but the LG and the Samsung especially are going to give you something better out of camera and ready to post without doing any more work to it. Yep, totally. So I went into this expecting that I was going to love one phone more than the others. And this really wasn't the most scientific test. It was very situational. I was finding things that I wanted to take pictures of and just pulling these phones out of my pocket and one by one taking those pictures, which I think is how most people shoot. And we've got results that reflect what most people shoot. Right. And we've been reviewing them on this high resolution large screen, which really isn't how most people review their photos. They're looking at them on their smartphone. They're sharing them to Instagram that they're viewing on the smartphone or Facebook or wherever it might be. And the reality is that any one of those photos that you took earlier are going to look great on any one of these screens. It's really hard to find those differences. If we looked at these same photos on a phone screen, it would be a lot harder to parse those differences on. Exactly. And while there's no real winner here, there's no real loser either. All of these phones take great photos in a lot of different situations, and they're all pretty reliable no matter what you want to do with it afterwards. And that hasn't always been the case. That's quite a bit different than it was a couple of years ago. Yeah. If we did this test a few like even a year or two ago, we would see much different results and it would probably be the iPhone that was the winner. And it's these two other companies, Samsung and LG, that stepped up their game and were able to catch up to where the iPhone was at and really give people cameras that are just as good, if not better in some situations, than the iPhone has always been. And so now really any one of these cameras on these phones is going to get you the image that you want to get. Right. So now it's just up to us to take good photos. All right. Thanks very much.