Smartphone cameras have become so good in recent times and they have effectively destroyed the point and shoot market. Flagship smartphones from their respective manufacturers take very good photos and shoot 4K video and they have allowed us to share high quality content on our social media channels.
Not all cameras are the same though in these smartphones and it is a combination of key elements that we judge how good a smartphone camera is. There is of course the camera specifications (size of the aperture, pixel size, sensor size, megapixel count, optical image stabilization) and also the processing of these photos.
Thanks to a combination of these elements, photos and videos between smartphone cameras tend to vary but nowadays, smartphone cameras are rather similar. Last year, we saw a trend that was carried forward to this year where flagships were given 12MP sensors with high end optics that performed rather similarly.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 was announced last month and on paper, it seemed that Samsung was still maintaining the same recipe as last year’s phone, the S7, which was widely regarded as one of the best. The general specs was a 12MP Sony sensor with 1.4µm size pixels and a really wide f/1.7 aperture.
So it is not a surprise that DxOMark, a company that publishes their findings on both dedicated cameras and smartphone cameras, gave the Samsung Galaxy S8 a score of 88, which is exactly what they gave their previous model, the Galaxy S7.
They found out that the Galaxy S8 has three main strengths, the excellent autofocus, accurate white balance and very effective noise reduction.
The Galaxy S8’s camera may have not been a significant upgrade to the Galaxy S7’s, but it is still an excellent camera no doubt. However, it still falls behind Google Pixel which has a score of 89 and the new HTC U11 which tops the DxOMark charts with a score of 90. The Galaxy S8 is still an excellent all rounder and you can understand by its stellar sales so far.
