camera

Which phone has the ability to truly elevate your mobile photography game?

pple has long been known for the quality of its phone cameras, and the ‘Plus’ phones of the past came with innovations such as portrait modes that have since been copied by other manufacturers to varying degrees of success.

This year, the sensor is physically larger, which enables the pixels themselves to be bigger, for enhanced light-gathering. There’s also more processing going on once you’ve taken the shot, resulting in greater colour saturation and finer handling of light and shadow. The resolution is nothing special at 12MP, but the final result is so good that it’s really not an issue.

Portrait mode now enables you to control the level of blurriness in the background, and you can record video in sort-of HDR – it doesn’t adhere to any common standard, so you can’t share it as HDR, but it does mean you get shots in the first place when mixing light and shadow.

Huawei has slapped one of its Leica triple-camera systems on the back of the Mate 20 Pro, and as you’d expect it’s excellent. Having 24MP on the front of the phone is particularly nice. Ultra-wide angle and

AImage quality on the Note9 is excellent, with AI smarts lending a hand

telephoto lenses on the back are also good to have, though you’re limited to 8MP when using the latter. You can focus super close on subjects for up to 0.6x magnification, too. Having 40MP provides scope for cropping right into images, but the Mate 20 Pro’s AI enhancements can be a bit strong, producing colours too oversaturated for our tastes.

Over in the Samsung corner, a brace of 12MP shooters are differentiated by their apertures, with one opening up to f/1.5 to really suck in the light, while the other packs a 2x optical zoom if you want to go closer. Both offer image stabilisation, and in a first for the series the front camera is equipped with autofocus.

Image quality is generally excellent, with some AI smarts lending a hand to clearly identify objects in the frame and adjust shooting parameters accordingly.