What were you doing last Friday night? I was hiking around Ventura Blvd collecting night shots for smartphone reviews, so it’s time for a showdown! I posted three sets of photos from three different phones, and requested YOUR comments on Instagram. Which phone would YOU take with you for a night out on the town?

I was going to post the results on IG , but I felt this round required a touch more explanation than I could easily deliver in an IG post. To start, here are the full res images, uncompressed. The only edits were cropping them all into squares.

I got a TON of great comments on that post. Lot’s of people sharing their thoughts on their favorite processing styles. More than a few people guessed the phones correctly, which makes me really happy. Even with TERRIBLE Instagram compression, I’m interacting with people who understand and appreciate the nuance of what different cameras bring to the table. I’ll always point to those conversations as data points. Maybe we shouldn’t ONLY consider the lowest common denominator “average user” while we review these pocket supercomputers. But I digress…

Before I disclose which phone took which shots (if you haven’t already skipped to that part), I wanted to point out one small aspect of this comparison again. From my original IG post:

“Auto mode. HDR disabled. #noedits other than cropping to a square.“

The trend many manufacturers are following is to process images in a way so the final output looks like multiple images have been captured, stacked, and combined to form one final JPG. The Pixel popularized this approach, Apple followed, and now others are utilizing it too. This combination effect is very similar to how we bracket and expose when taking a high quality HDR photo. The results for a normal, NON-HDR photo in auto mode on many cameras now looks similar to an HDR shot.

If the goal is the simplest, most straightforward path to delivering a “social media sharable” juicy and vibrant shot, this end game will be much appreciated by many people shopping a new phone. However, it does somewhat ignore the user’s input, and might stand in the way of someone’s goals if they have any specific vision for the photo they wish to capture.

THE RESULTS

As many have guessed:

Phone A is the OnePlus 6T.

Phone B is the LG V40.

Phone C is the iPhone XS.

To my eye, I greatly prefer the more traditional image processing from the V40 on the Creepy Tunnel and the Rear Camera selfie shots. The phone is handling lens flaring better. Those images are slightly sharper, and I love crunchy contrasty shots. Both the iPhone and the OnePlus produce hazy, flat, dull output in those low-light, hard contrast situations.Maximizing ALL THE LIGHT means you also magnify things like lens flares or defects.

Looking a bit closer at the selfie shots, the iPhone produces some of the worst image integrity of the three. Similar to some of the complaints people had with the front facing camera, that shot is blurry and splotchy. It looks ok when viewed as a whole in a smaller frame, but it falls apart fast when zoomed in or cropped. It’s an EXTREMELY difficult shooting setup. There’s VERY little light in this location, but less expensive phones, with more old-fashioned processing, can deliver crisper results.

It’s something I’ve complained about since I started producing camera reviews. Cameras which try to make night shots look SUBSTANTIALLY more vibrant than what those conditions actually resembled. More often than not, you arrive at poorer quality output than exposing darker. When EVERYTHING is bright and vibrant and juicy, NOTHING is bright and vibrant and juicy.

However, that story flips hard looking at the street scene. That shot was taken using each phone’s version of a 2X zoom. I’m not a fan of Zoom sensors because in a HUGE number of shooting scenarios, you’re not actually using that sensor. Shooting in cloudy conditions, indoor lighting, or at night? You’re really working off the main sensor, cropped in, and the final image is up-scaled to match the resolution advertised.

The smaller sensors used for zooms are so much poorer in quality, anything outside of optimal-bright-direct-sun is just better to crop from the main camera.

Even trying to force the issue, this picture above shows six bright LED bulbs, one mini travel LED panel, and my studio LED light panel all on the baseball. Toggling 2X on the iPhone, it still used the main camera.

But I digress again…

Back to the street scene.

LG’s post processing is more “old-fashioned”, and in setting my focus on the dark CRAVE sign, it took me at my word. That’s what I wanted in focus, the exposure was set to a dark part of the frame. Exposing for that part of the shot means that the billboard lights will blow out the ‘Ralph Breaks the Internet Poster’. I’ll save my thoughts on LG post processing and noise reduction for a future blog post…

Looking at the iPhone and OnePlus shots, they are far more effortlessly captured, which means they’ll be easier to share directly from the camera. The advantages we see here are not from superior dynamic range however. What do we call it when software evens out the differences between highlights and shadow detail?

HDR.

There’s a significant consumer benefit using this kind of processing. The ease of use in this scenario is tangible. Who would complain about better looking images, captured with less effort? The main issue I have is I told the camera not to use processing like this.

Eventually, I do truly believe software processing will completely eclipse the traditional “one RAW = one JPG” style of image capture. Looking at the Creepy Tunnel and the Selfie though, I don’t think we’re there yet. It’s still too deliberate, too heavy handed. This effect is a little too unpredictable.

I think smartphone cameras have a huge democratizing effect. Enabling anyone to take better photos, capture higher quality moments and memories. This should be applauded. The next stage of consumer photography, after empowering individuals with better tools, is to empower those people to appreciate their own specific style.

I don’t like HDR. I like dark, contrasty images. Others will find their own style. Education means learning to appreciate an image or a story beyond just looking for “the good color”. Ranking a camera is more complex than just scoring it as “gooder” or “badder” than what’s familiar. The next step is nuance.

Right now it feels like most manufacturers are rushing towards one style of photography. When photos from a OnePlus and an iPhone can look so similar, we’re not really getting more choice in the market…