not people doing extensive manual post-editing or professional photo work), the result isn’t all that different. I’ve taken very good pictures on $400 phones, and for most people who take photos for keepsakes, to post online or send to people (i.e. We’ve reached a place in smartphone photography where there are almost no wrong choices. The Ultra has unique benefits of its own besides the camera too, like its very satisfying stylus. But I’m not sure that’s the best question to be asking, especially since the phone is significantly more expensive, and the difference is small enough that it’s likely to be outweighed by other considerations you might like iOS better as an operating system for example, or be very keen on the Pixel’s design or much lower cost. The S23 Ultra gives a fantastic photography experience overall, and I’m reasonably confident in saying its camera performance is superior to its rivals. Given enough light, you can get really impressive results at both 3x and 10x, which gives you a bit more flexibility over the fanciest iPhone (3x only) or Pixel (5x only). To one side of the camera stack is another 10MP telephoto camera, this one at 3x zoom. Having that 10x lens as a starting point means you’ll get better 15x or 20x crops than other phones, but they generally aren’t pretty. But you won’t see a clear image until after the shot is processed, if at all, and even in ideal lighting you get a lot of wobbly artefacts as the phone tries to remove noise and take a guess at where to create detail and texture. The image stabilisation cleverly latches on to what it thinks is the subject, or any object you tap on, so you can get results without a tripod. To be honest, it’s hard to think of use cases for a 100x smartphone zoom apart from taking pictures of the moon and spying on your neighbours, and it isn’t that good at either. The ultra-wide camera and range of zoom lenses makes the Ultra great for very close or very far subjects. There’s also a Pro mode, which lets you manually control the focus and aperture speed like a proper camera, and a separate RAW app for taking images in the DNG format for if you really want to just get the plain information from that big sensor and take it to a PC for editing yourself. Where the latest iPhones really struggle to hold a focus up close, the Ultra easily produced a clear image only two or three centimetres away. An in-between option of 50MP is a better choice, if you really need huge images for editing. You will get a lot more detail, so you can zoom right in and crop to your heart’s content, but the pictures are duller, noisier and take up heaps of space. Photo enthusiasts don’t have to stick with that default route though you can demand the phone outputs a full 200MP image. But it’s tough to know exactly how much of that is to do with the huge 200MP sensor, and how much is to do with hardware and software elsewhere. All the photos I took this way came out clean and very sharp, if sometimes a bit too vivid for my taste, and were generally better in the detail than my iPhone 14 Pro Max or Pixel 7 Pro.
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