MKBHD Picks The Best Smartphone Camera

So while I've got you here, I wanted to talk about this. I had to talk about this

This is the blind smartphone camera test video that you did. A couple million views on it. A lot of people talking about it

I saw people talking about it on Twitter and so on. And I mean, the basic idea, the premise here is a bunch of photos

You don't tell anyone which smartphone camera they were shot on. And then you ask people, hey, which ones look the best

It's blind. Blind. Truly blind. That's why the word is in the title

yep the blind smartphone camera test and you tested a bunch of cameras how many total

16 something like that uh full-on bracket play that's a ton of smartphone cameras here's the

thing like when you have 16 they're not all gonna be great right so we have everything from the

highest end iPhones the pixels but then we have we go down the list you go LG you go red Samsung

then you suddenly have the OnePlus and the Blackberry and you're just kind of filling in

the bracket so the hardest part about that at the very beginning was making the bracket right what

do i blindly put up against the iphone 10 do i put another great phone or just sacrifice a blackberry

against it when i watched the video i actually didn't think about that yeah but you're kind of

right because in a typical bracket fashion you would see you would have one seed versus 16 seed

so the favorites will be more likely to make it through what did you end up doing uh we kind of

had sort of a seating you attempted you attempted one seed versus 16 i think we essentially thought

we'd end up with an iphone and a pixel at the end or something like that so we didn't want to put

iphone versus pixel in round one so we kind of had a huawei phone against a palm phone uh blackberry

against an iphone a lot of matchups like that in the first round but spoiler alert uh didn't quite

go that way and that's actually why i wanted to bring it up yeah because what ends up happening

in this experiment here is that the results are not what anyone expected them to be

Now, of course, there's reasons for that. I mean, I immediately had my speculation on why that might be the case

In the video, you actually talk about it a little bit. But ultimately, I mean, we're going to kind of spoil the video a little bit here

But some phones make it through this bracket that have no business, in most people's minds, making it through the bracket

You would traditionally think certain characteristics would carry through and make the photo obviously better but we did the tests and the voting on Instagram and Twitter So it ended up kind of boiling down to

putting them two side by side. People generally fell towards voting for the brighter, more saturated

more vivid one, even though the highest and best smartphone cameras we traditionally know as, you

the iPhone and the Pixel, don't do the brightest, vivid, most crazy photos. They do sort of more

neutral, more adjustable, gradable, higher dynamic range photos, which didn't win. The interesting

thing for me about this experiment, this video, was it brings into question the idea of good

in general. Who gets to decide which is better? It's not strictly this is a higher resolution

photo it's which one do you like better was the way it was positioned and so when people went and

picked phones that that typically wouldn't be you know like let's say the poco phone or against the

iphone 10 or the blackberry beats the beats the the the 10s like on paper no one's supposed to

pick that but blindly they do right like who gets to pick what's good and bad is it you and i or is

the general public i mean they had the same photos at their disposal yeah right you had these photos

you published them on social media after you saw them post compression i blind tested myself a

little bit that was what i was wondering so on my computer when i'm looking at the full resolution

because we basically like cropped the two and put the top and the bottom next to each other so i'm

looking at the original files next to each other original files i picked the higher end expected

winner every time. But then I put them on Instagram stories and I forgot about the letters and I

tested myself and I voted for the crowd favorites, the upsets more often than not. And most of this

was because when I'm looking at the original files on my iMac, they're high resolution, I can see the

detail in one and the softness in the other and immediately I picked that one. But yeah, we lost

that particular characteristic of the high-end phones and suddenly it's just like, well, I like

the fact that I can see all the colors in one of them and the other one looks a little muted, so I'll pick the brighter one

So you had the same effect that the audience had. It had the same effect on me yeah You ended up picking the cheaper devices A couple of times yeah Sometimes and I also like I put 16 phones in because i wanted to eliminate the oh i know this is the pixel so i vote for it so if it was a versus b and i told you one a pixel one an iphone at a certain

point you can kind of identify a photo shot on a pixel for sure out of the punch decide you want

to pick one or the other so when we had 16 options like this it was like well every single time

one of these might be the pixel and i i was kind of like i don't want to evaluate too hard

I just kind of glanced at it and picked one and moved on. And when I'm just doing that, which is kind of like what most people do on Twitter anyway

I was picking the Blackberry and the Pocophone. Unexpected, but interesting nonetheless

The crazy part here is that these companies spend tremendous amounts of time and energy

to create these amazing cameras that have completely replaced these gigantic systems

that people have had in the past. and of course point and shoot cameras and so on

And then people end up taking these photos and the only way we end up seeing them

is on Instagram, Twitter, and your phone. And so people aren't, like really what the story is about this particular video

is that people are not sharing their photos and receiving their photos in such a manner

that constitutes spending the extra money on the better camera in the first place

You've got to know what you want out of it. If all you want is to take a photo that's good enough for Instagram or Twitter

literally any of those phones would be fine. And I think that's what I learned because I wouldn't have even wanted

Every phone is an Instagram phone. It's hard to find a really truly bad phone nowadays

But I think if you also value that, like, well, you know, Apple's running a shot on iPhone contest where you can share your original images

to be put on a billboard. Like if you care about seeing them as a wallpaper on your computer

or you want a little more detail or a little extra finesse for things like that

then you're actually looking at the top couple instead of just whatever looks fine on Instagram

Or if you take a lot of selfies, I don't know. There's all kinds of priorities. But if you know what you want out of a phone

that'll dictate what kind of weight you put into this test. Right. There's something to be said for like the extra work that gets put into pushing that bleeding edge of phones

That's why I love... I carry the Pixel as like a camera. Yeah Like I keep trying like all these other phones and I keep falling back to the camera that camera for me side note that camera for me was the most like just point it and shoot it yeah

out of any smartphone camera i've ever tried night sight too yeah absolutely yeah no it's

it's ridiculous i mean again somehow in the blind test blind tested but it lost to what

are the pixels oh it lost to mate 20 pro yeah which then went on to win the whole thing really

crushed the whole thing. Yeah, it did win the whole thing, right? I think, yeah, it did. Okay, so let me

ask you something then, in closing, out of this entire bracket here, obviously the Mate 20 Pro

ended up winning, but some cheaper devices like the Pocophone went all the way to the final round

Yeah. And now that smartphone cameras are such a differentiating factor for people, and one of the

main reasons people will actually spend more on a smartphone, out of this group, which do you think

represents the best value for money. I think it'd be hard to argue with, if I'm just looking at this

test, the Pocophone being one of the less expensive phones going so far. The BlackBerry

it's still, you have to like a BlackBerry. Like there's a whole lot more baggage that comes with

switching to a BlackBerry. But I think a lot of people who are like, oh, well, I'm on this older

phone. I'm thinking about this Pocophone, but I don't know if the camera is going to be good

enough i think they can probably rest easy like this is a good enough camera if you want the

highest end the most detail the most dynamic range the test results won't really help you so much

but i found this really interesting way it played out which phone wins your bracket

of like cost doesn't matter you had you had full res files you had your own taste buds

It made 20 Pro. Oh, really? And the reason is because, like, it took the brightest photos, and that's why it kept winning

But it was also very detailed and had a good amount of dynamic range

So you can pull down exposure if you don't like that high exposure if you want

That's just kind of like how some bias. Samsung bias is a little high exposure. Apple tends to go a little lower

But I think looking at the RAW files, if I blind tested myself with the RAW files and not the compressed version

I think I would have ended up picking Mate 20 Pro. Oh, very cool. Yeah