For those that are not familiar with DxOMark, it’s a team of photography gurus that tests both camera phones and dedicated DSLR’s to provide a metric for ranking them according to the ratings they garnered. They have a website that reports the findings exhaustively and the overall rating scored out of 100.
The last reigning champ was HTC U11, it had a score of 90 which was a tie with Google’s Pixel. Despite what many might be inclined to think, Apple has never topped the list before. Sure, iPhones have great cameras, but they were always a few steps shy of being the best in the world. Samsung has had better luck in the rankings than Apple ever did. It’s newest Galaxy Note 8 has not been rated yet so it will be interesting to see how it competes with the iPhone.
Okay enough teasing, let’s go to the scores. Apple iPhone 8 Plus got a record breaking 94 points, followed by the smaller iPhone 8 with 92 points. The difference in ratings might be due to the fact that the 8 Plus has a dual camera that is lacking on its smaller sibling. HTC U11 is now at number 3 with 90, a position it shares with the Google Pixel. Neither of the two has a dual camera which is the main aspect that propelled the 8 Plus to number 1 due to the “industry-leading Portrait Mode”. Early reviews say that the new iPhones have better photo contrast akin to Galaxy phones and it seems DxOMark got the same findings, ‘Exposure and Contrast’ were the highest rated aspects of photo quality. Stabilization, on the other hand, was the flag bearer of video ranking. In general, the iPhone 8 Plus scored 96 in the photo section and 89 in the video section. The smaller one, iPhone 8, got 93 in photos and 90 in video.
The main rivals for the new iPhones have not been rated yet. I have high hopes for the LG V30 which has the brightest phone camera aperture size in the world at f/1.6 in comparison to Apple’s f/1.8 (the smaller the ’f’ number, the bigger the aperture). Samsung Galaxy Note 8 hasn’t gotten its dual camera tested either. It will be interesting to see how the rankings will shift once all the ratings come in.