- It's been a hell of a year for phones in 2017.
So, I've actually been doing a series of experiments
that are scientific-ish.
I've already done the fastest phone of 2017,
and I've also done the best battery life of 2017.
Which I'll link to both of those below
if you wanna check them out.
Today, though, let's see which phone of 2017
has the best portrait mode.
Now, portrait mode is the concept
of taking a photo on your phone
and then through software trickery
get it to blur out the background
and keep the foreground in focus
to kind of mimic that of a fast aperture lens on an SLR.
And while it's definitely not perfect,
the processors in a lot of these phones
are able to do a pretty good job, honestly.
At least if the settings are exactly correct.
But, I've chosen four phones that I think do the best job
and we've put them head-to-head
to see which is the best overall.
(energetic music)
So, for this we have the iPhone X,
the Pixel 2 XL,
the Note 8 with live focus mode instead of portrait mode,
and the Huawei Mate 10 Pro using its wide aperture mode
instead of portrait since it actually has more features
and it works on things that aren't just people.
For whatever reason, the portrait mode only works on people.
I don't know what that's about.
And for this experiment I took the same photo,
as best as I could, with each device in varying conditions.
Now, in this first photo,
I quickly took a shot of my latte in a well-lit coffee shop.
And right away you can see that the iPhone X,
the one I thought would do the best here
considering the conditions, actually botched it pretty bad.
The blur spilled over into the cup in a lot of places
and just all around looks pretty unnatural.
The Huawei and the Note 8 seem to do the same,
but not as drastically.
And the Pixel 2 XL, I think,
is pretty undeniably the winner, in this photo at least.
Next I took a photo of myself
using the front-facing portrait mode on each of the phones.
Now, the Note 8 doesn't actually
have portrait mode unfortunately,
but I wanted to just show a comparison
of what selfies would look like on it anyway.
Here we can see that the iPhone X just kinda killed it.
It does a great job, mostly due to
all the extra sensors on the front,
of determining what part of the image is my face
and what part is the background,
and then adding a natural looking blur.
The Pixel did a decent job except for that girl
who happens to have a similar complexion to mine
that it thought was part of my own face
since she was positioned so close to it.
And the Mate 10 Pro did a decent job,
just blurred out some of my hair
and part of my ear against the white background.
Now, I get the girl's face
and the fact that I'm pretty white,
but I'm not the color of the ceiling, thanks.
Next I took a photo of my friend in another coffee shop.
I like coffee shops, if you guys don't know.
And in this one I'd have to go with the iPhone X,
and the Note 8, Pixel,
and then the Mate 10 Pro, in that order.
And I base that on the fact that the Mate 10
did some weird things around the outline of her face,
for some reason, if you look closely.
The Pixel blurred out the left better than the right
and blurred out the computer a little bit
even though it's in the same field that she is.
And the Note 8 did a good job gradually blurring things out
more as they were further away, i.e. the water bottle
is slightly less blurry than the background, which is
how a real fast aperture camera would've handled it.
And the iPhone X, although it had to zoom in quite a bit
just like the Note 8 because of that telephoto lens,
it managed to do a natural blur effect like the Note 8,
and a good job of keeping the right subject
in the foreground versus the background.
So, now another selfie in a super bright area this time,
which is not easy for any of these phones to do.
The Note 8 doesn't have portrait mode on the front again,
so that's just here for a comparison.
The Mate 10 might actually win
for the best delineation of foreground and background,
with just a piece of my hair
at the top left being out of whack,
but it overexposed the crap out of the image.
The iPhone X probably did
the second best with the blur effect,
but I'm properly exposed and sharper for sure.
And the Pixel just kind of botched it
with that weird clear area to the left of my face.
Why does it keep doing that in the same spot on my face?
I don't know.
Okay, now for some Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.
In this one, they all did pretty well, actually,
considering that the tiny parts in this subject,
like the ropes, et cetera.
But, the winner here is probably the Pixel 2 XL
for just a good blur job and sharp image
with mostly accurate colors.
I would actually have given it to the iPhone X
because I think the colors are a little more accurate here,
but the weird things happening to the pole
and the rope on the left sort of pull your eyes there
and you just lose the cool factor
that portrait mode is supposed to give you.
The Note 8 and the Huawei did a good job here too,
but the coloring in the Huawei is pretty off,
as well as the weird coaster
in the background of the Note 8
being in focus for some odd reason,
brings them both down, in my opinion.
And there we go, portrait mode of sorts
on the top four phones.
I think for the front-facing camera,
you kinda gotta give it to the iPhone X.
Because of all those extra sensors on the front, I imagine,
it does a good job of figuring out where my face is
and the background is, and figuring all that stuff out.
And then of course, it just takes good photos,
so the coloring and the exposure and all that's pretty good.
The Pixel, though, I would say is not too far behind,
and it's kind of impressive considering
that it doesn't have any of those sensors.
But, it's just not quite as good.
Now, for the rear camera, I'm a little torn.
Now, the Huawei I can pretty much just eliminate
because it sometimes would get the blur right,
but then it would get the color wrong.
Or it would get the color right, and then the blur wrong.
That happened a lot.
The Note 8 did actually a pretty decent job.
But, it did struggle a little bit sometimes.
The nice thing about the Note 8 and the Huawei, though,
is that they both have adjustable settings after the fact.
So, you can actually adjust the blur
as needed on both of those phones.
So, if it wasn't quite the best blur job,
you can pull off the blur a little bit
to make it a little more natural.
But I care more about, I think,
being able to just take the shot
and get it done really quick,
and not having to fiddle around with things.
And not just that, also I think that the other two phones
did a better job for the most part
than the Note 8 and the Huawei anyway, but still.
So now, the iPhone did a really good job
of having decent color, decent exposure,
got the blur right most of the time,
and so did the Pixel 2 XL.
Both of them had some issues here and there
and botched a couple of photos pretty badly,
but so did all of the phones to some degree.
So, it's a tough choice.
So, I did what anyone would do
when they have a tough choice like this,
I went to the Internet.
So, I put four photos from the iPhone X
and four photos from the Pixel 2 XL side by side,
made a little collage, and posted it on Twitter and YouTube
and asked you guys to decide
which one you thought looked better.
(gunshots) And the truth is,
after I tallied all the results,
it was overwhelmingly
Pixel.
And since the whole point of this
is to see what phone could take these awesome shots
that are very impressive to your average person,
I think that pretty much solves that.
Pixel it is.
There you go guys, hope you enjoyed that.
Let me know in the comments below
what you think of the test of the phones,
all that fun stuff.
If you agree, disagree.
Be constructive with your criticism.
But put that in the comments below,
like to hear from you guys.
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Regardless, thanks for watching.
(energetic music)