Samsung S22 Ultra vs iPhone 13 Pro Ma

 Samsung S22 Ultra vs iPhone 13 Pro Ma 

Camera Test

 

Welcome to the camera test of the year we've got samsung's just released s22 ultra which is promising more detailed photos smoother video enhanced stabilization and a way more intelligent camera than the company has ever released before but that's up against the iphone 13 pro max which since the day it launched has been the most refined reliable camera system that you can get on a smartphone so we've got 12 short categories and through them we're going to find out if samsung's done enough to finally take the crown and dethrone the iphone.

The first category before we dive into how capable each device is is the equally important question of which one is more fun to use and to give apple some credit they've made major strides with their iphone 13 pro they let you choose a photographic style so you can add your own spin they made a new close-up macro mode for the first time and they added cinematic video which at the time the phone launched was the most well-thought-out implementation of this type of dslr

style recording but samsung's phone is really really fun and it's a combination of things it's partly.

The fact that they've improved their cinematic mode not quite at the iphone's level but close now it's partly the fact that the zoom on this phone is not just good but extreme it's partly the fact

that this new screen is so bright that it makes broad daylight feel like child's play and it's partly the software features you've got things like director's view which lets you see all of your camera feeds at one time remaster which can take any old photo of anything and then use artificial intelligence to just improve it watch what it does to this low res cube that I downloaded here i was i was blown away by this and then also auto framing which is a new mode that can dynamically zoom the camera in or out to accommodate more or less people i i want to like it the added movement it adds is nice but I would more or less disregard this feature it uses the weaker ultrawide camera to start really far away and then uses digital zoom to get closer to people which is it's just a recipe for grainy footage but one feature that i think is integrated beautifully on both phones is our second category macro you literally just bring your phone close to something

and bam you have an almost microscopic view of it i'd say that the s22s macros look a little crispier and the extra processing that samsung does to shots it gives them quite a nice color pop but the iphone can get even closer which is also a big win in this category so on balance we can give macro photography a draw do you know what's definitely not a draw though zoom because like on paper this Samsung might look really similar to last year's samsung with its almost identical setup of two telephoto cameras one capable of three time zoom the other capable of ten.

Times however thanks to the ability to now capture from multiple cameras at the same time and merge those shots for improved quality and the ability to use ai to drastically clean up images after they've been taken the s22 ultra doesn't just beat it completely spanx the iphone single three-time zoom camera so here's an example going all the way from the ultrawide to the wide to three times ten times where you can see the iphone's image starting to die a little here and

then 30 times i am in awe that at 30 times magnification samsung still looks this put together like past Samsung phones even though still impressive in this regard would pretty much look like water paintings at the point where you hit 30 times and yet somehow this I almost want to say is a usable result and if you want a good chuckle have a look at the difference as i start zooming into the moon the iphone was practically having a seizure trying to figure out what to focus on and which lens to use so yeah this category goes to the samsung with the slight caveat

that even though their camera app is smoother to use than it has been in the past it's still not close to the silky performance of apples okay on to category number four and as you can probably tell at this point samsung is killing the iphone and to be honest it gets better with portrait mode

you see there was a time where iphone portraits were unbeatable apple was the

first to properly introduce this feature

and for a good four years or so android phone makers have just been scurrying around unsuccessfully trying to recreate their formula i think samsung is now their closest competitor but mostly thanks to one key new thing impeccable edge detection you could have the most complex confusing background and yet the s22 ultra and its new improved artificial intelligence still seems to cut the foreground out so confidently and perfectly that said because samsung's three-time zoom camera which is the default camera used for portraits it's just not as good

quality as apple's three times zoom camera the iphone's portraits just remain more detailed and also some sense portrait mode barely activates if you step more than three meters away so

overall that phone only just escapes with a draw now there's a bit of a saying in the movie industry that sound is 50 of the experience and if that is true then the ability of each of these phones to pick up speech is paramount to how good the camera systems are thankfully i've done a lot of testing in a lot of different environments and these are pretty much the best two

phones for it i would say the iphone is slightly more natural in a little bit more than fifty percent of the occasions but it's close enough that i think we can call this one a draw and also both

phones have the not quite new anymore but still phenomenal audio zoom feature which means that as you zoom into things your microphones can isolate the sound coming from whatever you're zooming into but now we're on the subject of video one of the other big improvements that samsung talked about for this s22 ultra is stabilization so you know most flagships use optical image stabilization right which means that if  i move the phone up the camera itself

will actually move a little down to try and counteract that movement well what samsung is saying is that the s22 ultra's main camera has 58 more room to be able to move and that's pretty

exciting given that samsung was already the king of stability unlike me it's not a game-changing

difference in practice so if you're just leisurely walking around with these phones they're both good and that's pretty much all you need to know even if you try a gentle jog which is probably

the most you're going to be doing while filming on your phone the iphone is still fine it's only when you're absolutely lagging it and you're also using samsung super steady feature that's when you can tell that this phone has the ability to convert even the most manic hand movements into something that's somewhat presentable so technically yes samsung can stabilize better sort of because you could just as equally argue that in cases like these even with better stabilization

are you really winning if it's coming at the cost of resolution artifacting and just a generally artificial look would you ever use this extreme stabilization and this brings me onto a bigger point the quality of the video itself year after year we see android companies take the stage to announce huge improvements to video but it just it never quite materializes in the end product

the good news is that the s22 ultra is the most complete video experience that has ever graced a samsung device and it's it's not just the steadiness it also now generally keeps up with the

iphone in terms of dynamic range its ability to prevent the bright areas being too bright and the dark areas being too dark and the focusing is spot on 99 of the time you will get a pin

sharp subject with nice smooth transitions as the cameras shift between what they're focusing on

but it's still not better than the iphone the primary difference being that the iphone's footage just looks clearer and my best guess is that this is the consequence of apple having complete

control over not just the phone hardware and the custom chip that's powering it but also the entire software that they've engineered from the ground up to squeeze the most data out of these cameras as possible and disadvantage also translates to low light mind you

samsung has noticeably neatened up their night performance but you can see it right it's just missing that that layer of crispness and confidence the only time that it does

Win a video is when you want to zoom in 10 times while recording which was not completely useless you know i could see that being useful at a sports game or a show it is a pretty niche scenario and this brings me on to the other thing which has been brewing on my mind over the

Last few days and that's if i had to crystallize what the difference is between these two cameras in one word that word would be balance the iphone has an incredibly balanced camera system like even though you have three cameras on the back one on the front it never really feels like it the way that apple's managed to match these cameras in terms of not just color profile but also quality means that you're never thinking oh which one's my best lens i need to make sure i'm using that for this shot it just feels like one continuous camera even as you move from ultra wide to main to zoom and this is what samsung misses out on each camera here feels like a separate

experience and it's it's not just the slightly janky transitions between them it's more that each has a different color profile and each produces images with slightly varying quality you know i

mentioned earlier that samsung's portraits are let down a little by lackluster three time zoom camera younever get that feeling with the iphone now it's not always a bad thing the iphone's intense consistency does make it a little boring by comparison and the fact that samsung has more variability its performance means that when you are in a best-case scenario when you are

consciously taking advantage of its strengths like that ten time zoom you can achieve something special it just it lacks that effortlessness and if i was picking one of these to give someone to

shoot say a holiday travel vlog with 95 percent of them would get a better end result with the iphone it's pretty clear where the majority of samsung's time went though night mode photos

every flagship has night mode where you hold your phone still for a few seconds and you let it take multiple frames and fuse them together for a brighter shot but something's got a few extra things going for it this year for starters this phone takes 25 more of those frames to fuse together it manages to take those frames within a shorter time period its camera has bigger pixels to capture more information and then finally more intelligent processing of the final output and you can tell or at least you can tell if you know what you're looking for samsung's night shots are very bright and not just technically strong but they also have a bit of character and vibrance that i think the average phone photographer is probably going to appreciate and also if you line these phones up on a tripod and point to the sky it also pumps out crispier astrophotography shots not the best i've ever seen but good however there is a weird important quirk that i should probably mention for the s22 ultra samsung has made all of the cameras apart from the ultrawide camera

wider which feels like a very odd decision because like when you're taking a photo of a person they will look better if you're stood a little bit further away and you're using some zoom but what Samsung have done is the opposite of that you will actually have to step closer to them and you might be thinking well if the camera's wider then that's great because i can fit more people in but

that's what the ultrawide camera is for and that's the only camera that they didn't make wider

the other reason i'm telling you this though is that samsung's wider lens makes it much harder to compare detail between these phones because if I enlarge these shots such that one object

is the same size on both then i've actually zoomed in more on the Samsung because it was smaller to start with all in all though these phones trade blows sometimes i do think to myself oh

samsung why you gotta go around brightening things that don't need brightening and creating unnecessary grain but then other times i'm like whoa where did you come from and miraculously

given that samsung's flash module is like half the size of apples it's actually brighter it really does ward away the darkness and bring back so much texture into photos and hey if you want

to brighten my day then the sub to the channel would be flashy and this trend it also carries

through to the daytime i systematically prefer samsung's look their cooler tones their crunchier contrast the way they slightly soften your skin imperfections their vibrance and brightening power of darker areas also seem stronger it's not to the point of looking wrong or fake just enough to give the photos some pop the long-running caveat though with samsung phones is that they take longer to capture and it's tough to say whether that's because they need more time to

process the immense amount of data from their 108 megapixel sensor or if they're just not as well optimized but the point stands if you've got a fast object you can expect some degree of motion blur that's not so much of a problem when you're taking still posed photos or if you're more of a vegetative subject like myself but it can come back to haunt you in those semi-dim indoor lighting environments because it introduces more time for everything in frame to just shift even a tiny bit i usually use the sharpness of my beard as a pretty good way to measure this shutter lag and you can probably see the difference for yourself one thing that i will give to Samsung  though is slo-mo not that they've really innovated with it it's more just that they tried really

hard with slo-mo like four years ago and then those features have just been carried forward onto each subsequent model both phones can record at eight times slo-mo for which i'd say they look

pretty similar quality wise but then samsung can just go slower with bursts of 32 times slow motion footage great to have the option but i am honestly i am surprised that samsung actually allows a feature that looks this bad to exist on

their 2022 hero phone okay two quick sections before we decide who wins the first being something that's really important to me selfies i am such a natural

in fact i've made it a habit to take a selfie in front of every single video backdrop we make and the reason that I always use an iphone for it is that even

though the lights around me change drastically it uses its understanding of what's what in the photo to still keep my face looking consistent samsung's

still not quite there on that front but i'm actually starting to prefer it as a selfie camera for other reasons it's higher resolution so as long as you have adequate lighting you can see all of

those little beard hairs just how i like it and you can get really deep contrasty shadows that almost look like how I would actually edit my photos to be like and then the other side of that coin is selfie video but to be honest for the same reasons that apple wins when it comes to normal video they also take it away here to be fair it's very close battle given that i think samsung's front camera on a hardware level is better but they're

just let down by their software processing so let's have a look at the results samsung's won 7.5 categories apple's bagged 4.5 so i almost don't need to tell you the s22 ultra is a solid

improvement over the s21 ultra it's turned both portrait mode and night mode

from a loss into a draw and it's taken the already huge lead and zoom and just

completely run away with it however what it doesn't do is significantly improve upon its predecessor's key weaknesses namely video quality and shutter lag and

that puts me in a dilemma i really enjoy using this camera i love the punchiness

of its photos downloading random pictures of the internet to try remastering and casually zooming into signs 100 meters away and realizing that i can actually read them but for my uses

given that one of the things it does lose in is video which is such a huge category for a content creator this phone would actually make my life trickier the iphone is good enough that

we actually use it interchangeably with our main camera every now and again i

wouldn't do that on the s22 so all i can really say for this comparison is that there is room for both of these on the market to find out more about the

 

s22 ultra i did a pretty detailed first look over here or if you want to understand the crazy world of nfts that video is over here my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss

you.