Sorry, Apple: The iPhone 7 camera is not better than Samsung's Galaxy S7 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, Apple: The iPhone 7 camera is not better than Samsung's Galaxy S7

businessinsider.com

39 pointsFireBeyond13 comments

It certainly looks better at portraits and when zooming in.

Though that's disappointing it seems to blow the highlights. I have seen this with previous iPhones - the HDR isn't as effective as it should be and I often end up with a white sky on a sunny day.

I didn't know about this until recently, but when you are shooting on the iPhone, you can touch any area of the screen (e.g., a blown out highlight, or white sky) to adjust the exposure so that the area you touch is correctly exposed.

You can also tap (to focus + auto expose) and then drag up/down to manually adjust the exposure from there.

I really didn't know about the drag up and down thing to adjust exposure. Thanks!

Hardly surprising, given that Apple use Sony Exmor sensors with which Samsung have approximate parity. In fact some Sony-branded sensors are actually Samsung designs fabbed by Sony! [0] All's fair in love and capitalism.

The real differentiators would be in the lens and stabilisation and in a phone-sized case there's not a lot of space to do much different to the competition.

[0] some of the S7 models use Samsung's in-house sensor and others use the Sony IMX260 which is a... Samsung design. The iPhone 7 probably uses a Sony-designed IMX230.

The real difference is post-processing - and this is true for many years already (see also c-brands vs a-brands even if phones are using exactly same sensor)

As always with these comparisons unless you know how the image should look in the first place you can't know which one is a more accurate representation of the real world. Maybe they should use a high end DSLR as a control (but even that no one can guarantee it will look accurate - post processing changes photos a lot)

Both cameras are good (except the portrait where I think the iPhone looks more natural). So if we back off a bit from the brand wars I think premium mobile phone cameras mostly perform the same.

> which one is a more accurate representation of the real world

I'd venture a guess and say that most consumers don't care about this. Probably why the S7 saturates a bit more. Makes selfies look better, doesn't it?

The other question is does "camera" mean the hardware only, or hardware + software like businessinsider have assumed?

I don't see much difference between the smartphones anymore. They're good if you don't want to zoom-in too much / use it at night / have depth of field. I'm buying new phone every 2nd year because it's getting prettier (S7 edge), and I see the wear on the older phone, but the difference in usability is not big anymore.

It should be the iPhone 7 camera is not better than the S7 in every way because clearly the article shows how it is better particularly the telephoto option which seems like quite a desirable feature.

On some photo's the colors of those picture's are different. I wonder which one is closer to the "real" color.

However, the iPhone 7 appears to be better at "not exploding".

Or is that some other Samsung phone? I lose track.

the exploding samsung is the recent Note 7 (the phablet of the Samsung line). The comparison is with the older Galaxy S7 (announced in March if I am not mistaken).

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