 Hey everybody, I'm Sean O'Kane, I'm a reporter and overall camera nerd here at The Verge. Hey, I'm James Barron, I'm a photographer and camera nerd and I just did the pictures of the First Lady. You always have to one-up me. We're here comparing the brand new Galaxy S7 Edge's camera against what is probably the leading camera up until this thing, the iPhone 6S Plus. So we've been out shooting on the streets of New York with these. We're going to take a look at some of the results that we got. So we went out onto the streets of New York, wanted to put these cameras really through their paces. First one was, how fast are they? Yeah, so the camera on the Galaxy S7 Edge launches extremely fast. Samsung's been doing the double tap the home button to launch the camera for a little while now, but on the S7's it's faster than ever. And so we gave ourselves a little bit of a contest here of these taxis going through the intersection down in the West Village. And I was basically waiting for a taxi to hit the crosswalk, and as soon as it hit the crosswalk I take my phone out and try to take the picture as quickly as possible. I was trying to get the taxi in the middle of the intersection. And you can see here with the iPhone, this is the best I was able to get. I tried a couple different times. The iPhone you have to pull out of your pocket, you have to hit the home button or the power button and then slide the camera icon up, and then you've got to wait for the camera to launch, and then you can take the photo. So how long is this whole process going to take? That's like two seconds, two or three almost. I mean it was enough that I almost missed this taxi. It takes me that long to find it. And then let's skip to the Samsung image here, and I caught it almost back at the line. Wow, so that's probably like four feet. Yeah, and I mean we're working with a wider angle lens, which we'll talk about in a bit with the Samsung. I wasn't able to get that taxi in the shot with the iPhone. The Samsung's also faster to focus too. We were messing around with that in the last couple of days. The autofocus on the Samsung notices when new things are in the frame. It does a better job of guessing what it is you're trying to take a picture of. Whereas the iPhone still has to hunt for that focus. It feels a lot like an older contrast detection autofocus on a camera. Let's start talking about some of the images. Yeah, so this is just some general details, some raindrops on a car. And both of them are pretty similar. I mean this is the iPhone image here. We've got really good detail. But there's a lot going on. It's also we deliberately put the trees in the background so sometimes the autofocus will hunt through it. We'll actually try and focus through the screen. But no real problems for either camera on this. No. One big thing about Samsung's new camera is that both the front and the back camera are F1.7. The brightest lens you can find on a smartphone right now. iPhone's working with F2.2, so that's a big difference. Not just in the amount of light that it lets in, but also in the depth of field. So we took this picture of this tiny little Jack Daniels bottle. World's smallest bottle of Jack Daniels. That we found on the street. And I think these two images are actually pretty similar. It almost looks like there isn't much difference here. You can see some color difference and everything. But as far as depth of field, it didn't look terribly different. But the big difference comes with these images of the cobblestone. The background here is actually relatively in focus. You can make out that grill over there on the van. I should just point out here, the background is pretty much the same. I should just point out here, this is red paint. This is not the scene of an accident. But if you look up here, you can make out the grill in this red van up here. It's much harder to make that out on the Samsung because it's got that really shallow depth of field. And you clearly see the line of focus on this as well. Clearly going across the top. I really like the Samsung here. So now let's go, we're going to shift into some low light photos. Because this is basically where most people take their photos. If you're not outdoors in daylight, you're in a bar or in your coffee shop or it's nighttime. This is a really challenging... this is probably the worst the iPhone did out of all the things that we tried. And we should point out here that we couldn't really see this when we took the picture. It was just dark on dark on dark. So this is actually much lighter than it looked at the time. Yeah, it handled itself relatively well considering it was pitch black almost in the back of this coffee shop. It's a world of difference with the Samsung here. That difference from f2.2 to f1.7. The iPhone one, there's not really much to work with. It looks kind of awful. The one from the S7 Edge, you actually have some detail. You can see the sort of the individual swirls in the top of the cappuccino. The S7 Edge's optical image stabilization, I think that helped this image as well really strong. But it has to, there's a point here. Because the lens on the Samsung is wider. And there's that corresponding rule that the wider the lens, the slower the shutter speed can be before you see the shape. Another big deal, also in low light, is food images. I think both of them perform pretty well considering, again, we're in really awful lighting situations. That's a really awful food picture by the way. Yeah. No offense. And this one's not too much better. Again, a lot more yellow in the Samsung image. This is amazing because you can clearly see that there was a very similar focus. But this is back focused a bit because if you go to the front down here, you can see the softness here. Yeah. And then so the focal plane is actually midway through. If we get close to the iPhone, it handles itself pretty well. But that same crisp detail is here. It's definitely a lot muddier than the Samsung. But the funny thing is it gives, if you zoomed out, the overall impression is that the picture is sharper. But if you zoom in, it's kind of close, but it doesn't have the crispness that the Samsung does. So another coffee photo, another popular picture that people would take, again in challenging light. I think this time the iPhone actually wins out. Yes. The Samsung, much more contrasty like we saw on the hood of that car. Right. Much better color in the iPhone photo. The interesting thing though is there's two rules of thumb here. Because if you're just going to shoot, publish, then the iPhone is definitely better. However, if you were going to shoot, publish from the Samsung phone and you wanted just to play with it a little bit with some, you know, some adjustments, you actually have again more shadow detail to play with. Right. And we see this in this next picture too. Exactly. There's a lot more detail in the shadow than the Samsung. Whereas the iPhone handles the color better, but it definitely darkened out the blacks. So it's kind of locking into saying this is what the picture is going to look like whether you want it to or not. Right. Let's move to front facing cameras because obviously selfies are a big deal. You look fabulous. Thank you. The iPhone, again, f2.2 lens on the front, 5 megapixels. Samsung is 5 megapixel as well. The f1.7, it actually put everything in focus. I had it far enough away from the sort of the most focusing distance. The resolution is the same, but the Samsung looks much better. Right. If you go to the Samsung one, again it's wider, but look at the color in here. Yeah. It just seems sharper and there's just a bit more contrast. Now a little bit closer. A little harder to tell the difference. Definitely a cooler image from the Samsung, but also it kind of missed the focus a little bit. So it shows it can kind of go one way or the other. Again, it's kind of gone back a little bit. Yeah. And then a low light example of the front facing camera. This is a truly horrible picture of me. I just need to point that out. That is, I couldn't possibly take a worse picture. iPhone, brighter. Samsung, much flatter image, much sharper image. You really see how much wider it is. Yeah. So for that front facing camera, you're just going to get a lot more in. Yeah. And then lastly here we have some, just, you know, always got to get a flower shot in here. We got a lot of bright colors. This was actually shot indoors in some more challenging light. So this is the iPhone, more saturated colors, focus isn't quite as good. I actually had a lot of trouble getting it, whereas the Samsung was actually able to nail it. Again, you know, it's funny that if you compare the straight up picture, the iPhone definitely looks better. But thinking about, well, how we could, I could grade this, what I could do to it. Right. I actually have much more choice with Samsung. Now another big thing with these two cameras is obviously video and Samsung, like the iPhone, can both now shoot 4K. So we put both phones right up against the big window in the High Line here in New York, looking down. There's not a ton of difference here. The iPhone is definitely a flatter image over here. And the Samsung, a little crisper, a little more contrasty. And definitely a touch warmer, yeah. Now both cameras can also shoot really slow motion, 240 frames a second. So upwards of five times slower. Five times or ten? 24. So 10. Cut! And we did a quick test here, just sort of chasing down some pigeons because there are lots of them here in New York. And if you really want to go deep on it, the Samsung stock camera app has manual mode and you can go in and change the shutter speed, change the ISO. You can change a lot of stuff, whereas on the iPhone, you can't really change much. And what you can change has been buried in the settings menu. If you want to even just change the frame rate to shoot slow motion or shoot 4K, you can't do that in the camera app anymore, which is really, really frustrating. So I think we were all expecting the S7 Edge's camera to be better. It's basically at this point a generation ahead of the iPhone 6 and where Apple is at with the iPhone in general. We're going to really need to wait to see the iPhone 7 to, I think, to find something that's comparable to the S7 Edge's and the S7's camera. And I think the results sort of prove it today. I mean, it's sort of an informal test. We're here on a laptop. We're not on a big monitor or anything. But from what you can tell on the phone and on the laptop, S7 Edge is. I mean, I've got to say, you know, I do not like Samsung software, never have. But as far as the app goes, you just can't fault it. And the pictures speak for themselves.