Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtw | Hacker News Reader

Note : take the review with a pinch of salt. DXOmark do not review phones or cameras from companies that are not "collaborating" with them. They also have paid partnerships with a few manufacturers (see Oneplus 5 launch).

In this case, DXOMark magically added a metric (bokeh and zoom) just one week after the iPhone 8 review. Of course this is a good plus for Apple. Before iPhones were behind Google Pixel, behind HTC U11, Samsung S8+. They were not in the top 10. Now magically, they get to be on top. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a discussion or collaboration between doxmark and apple to review their metrics to have iPhone 8 and X under the best light possible

View on HN

Comparing their subscores it's obvious that without the new zoom and bokeh categories the Pixel would have stayed on top.

Pixel v iPhone 8+

90 - 89 : Exposure and Contrast

80 - 78 : Color

98 - 74 : Autofocus

70 - 64 : Texture

65 - 68 : Noise

50 - 73 : Artifacts

81 - 84 : Flash

24 - 51 : Zoom

30 - 55 : Bokeh

91 - 89 : Video

I guess picking the "best" comes down to how important those features are to each customer. Though Google isn't standing still, the Pixel 2 is announced in two weeks.

As a Pixel owner I must say it's camera is very good. I used iPhones for a long time due to security features. Pixel's camera and reasonable hardware security lured me away. Pixel has no pure equivalent to Secure Enclave, but it is good enough. The HDR+ on it is great.

Every time I was caught by the richness of the Pixel. The iPhone 8 was ok, but seemed artificial. iPhone 7+ looks downright bad in some pics which goes to show how challenging the scenes must be as its camera is pretty decent.

On the other hand the iPhone 7 Plus was never reviewed while the Plus models always tended to be about 3-4 points better than the regular sized iPhones. But this was around the launch of the Google Pixel where they quoted (so I assume they paid) the DXO score to show how much better it was than the iPhone.

I think the scores are fairly registered but they tend to bend a bit when it comes down to money. Google (and their fans) shouldn't complain if they did the same trick before.

I think the iPhone 8 Plus has a really great camera and the numbers show it. Though the importance of bokeh and zoom is something that you can debate. But I like the pictures that the HTC, Pixel and S8 take a lot as well. For me personally having optical zoom is a killer feature and definitely the feature that nudges me into the direction of the iPhone 8 Plus.

What were the 10 phones above the iPhone before?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com