hey everybody its norm from Testim and today we're talking about smart phones
now this is not gonna be a full comprehensive phone review there are
plenty of other people who do great job at that but I did want to use this as an
opportunity to talk about one of the features in smart phones that people who
are shopping for new phones may be looking at whether they're looking at an
iPhone or an Android phone and that is of course the cameras one of the new
killer apps for phones these days we're gonna start off with the iPhone 11 pro
new this year of course there's a third camera and that's not the only thing
that's new there's a new processor iOS 13 all that stuff but the big thing that
you're paying $1000 for is in addition to a standard wide-angle camera and a
telephoto lens there's also an ultra wide-angle lens as well and those of you
on the Android world may be shouting your screens well Android phones have
had ultra wide-angle lenses for a while now and that's totally true I've used LG
phones with ultra wide-angle lenses and very happy with that Samsung phones as
well and compared with the iPhone I actually have this new phone this is the
oneplus 70 much like the oneplus 7 pro and the 70 Pro has an array of three
lenses once again a standard wide-angle lens a telephoto lens and then also an
ultra wide-angle lens I thought that would be a good place to compare them
because otherwise these phones could not be more different right not only is one
running iOS and one is Android they're on funnily different architectures
there's apples a 13 chip in here their own home-brewed chip while oneplus like
many Android phone manufacturers get their chips from a third-party in this
case its Qualcomm and a Snapdragon 855 different amounts of ram although they
use at Ram differently and the screens could not be more different as well on
the oneplus side it's a massive over 6 inch diagonal screen has a different
notch designs that teardrop notch design but one of the best things about this
phone that I like is that has a 90 Hertz panel super smooth it's one of those
things that Apple I think still needs to catch up on on the
phone cycle they do have it on the iPad pro side but again not a full
comprehensive phone review let's go to the cameras and in terms of cameras in
the photographer world there is a couple ways to talk about these focal lengths
of cameras you can talk about them purely in the the focal distance a focal
length itself but you can also talk about and what most commonly you talk
about is in the focal length in relation to the sensor size or the equivalent to
a full-frame camera sensor so when you say a 26 millimeter focal length on this
normal wide angle lens on both these cameras it's in relation to its sensor
and so would be a 26 millimeter equivalent if you had a full-frame
camera on the ultra wide side it's also easier to talk about the focal length
not only in terms of the 35 millimeter equivalent and it's gonna be I believe a
13 millimeter on the iPhone and a little bit of a 17 millimeter on the oneplus 70
side but it's also useful to talk about in terms of field of view so it's a
hundred and seventeen degree field of view over on the oneplus 70 and then on
the iOS on the iPhone side it's a hundred and twenty degree field of view
just cuz not a lot of people even in the full-frame camera world even shoot at
wider than 16 millimeter so 13 millimeter on the iPhone is pretty darn
wide and of course the lenses themselves have different apertures there are
different speeds so they capture different amounts of light and also
they're the sensors themselves are different megapixels that pixel buckets
are different on the oneplus 70 for example that Center wide-angle lens is
actually a 48 megapixel sensor although there are some pixel Mining's
so what you actually get is a very high detail 12 megapixel image not a true
massive 48 megapixel JPEG and those are just the technical differences in the
physical lens and these sensors on these two camera systems on these two
smartphones there's of course a whole other half of the equation which is of
course the image processing side how fast as that is done based on what
processor they're using and also they're kind of owned their own secret
sauce to turn the light rays and what the sensor sees into visible images to
display this is something that happens on your dedicated DSLR is a mirrorless
cameras all the time as well it's something that people don't really talk
about but those also have processors an image processing that happens it's not
just the light that gets turned into a raw image and then of course on the
smartphone side there's a whole wave of computational photography things like
portrait mode or low light mode this kind of post-processing effects to
simulate the effects that you get from a bigger sensor or a faster lens and
that's all on the software side so what I did was I took both these phones to a
recent event in New York comic-con as well as around San Francisco and the
home and did some comparison shots and what I'll do is I'm gonna then show them
to you guys now so you can get a sense at least in confine of a 1080p window
what some of the differences are and then we'll talk about my thoughts
so overall I was actually very pleased with the image quality on both these
phones in terms of detail I did think that the oneplus 70s of central
wide-angle camera that 26 millimeter equivalent camera main camera produced
better images with more detail I could see finer text in the images whether it
was inside a restaurant or out in the world I could just zoom in if you're
gonna pixel peep I thought the images look better from
that 48 megapixel sensor in terms of the ultra wide-angle shots those extra three
degrees actually I think matters a lot on the iPhone side difference between
that 13 millimeter and 17 millimeter equivalent lenses on the ultra wide and
if you're gonna go into an interior and try to capture an entire space the stark
difference in the iPhone having that 13 millimeter equivalent lens is really
striking and that's not to say that the ultra wide-angle lens on the oneplus 70
wasn't good it was good it just wasn't that much different than what you'd find
on the 26 millimeter lens telephoto wise I think they were both good as well I
did like the oneplus 70s telephoto image quality but some time I ran into is the
software sometimes with auto switch actually on both these phones the
software kind of switches between the lenses depending on the light quality so
while you might be zooming into 2x for example you might not always be getting
the photo from the telephoto lens and let until you then look into the
metadata and say oh wow that is from just from the 26 millimeter that's
cropped in or that actually is from the 51 or 52 millimeter lens so that seems
to be a software side and one thing is also interesting is that on the ultra
wide-angle lens on the iPhone while it is ultra wide and image quality's is
good it is actually fix focus I don't think this is something that Apple has
talked about and that means that you can't adjust focus like if you have an
object here and you want to focus there is a pretty sizable minimal minimum
focus distance that you need to be or us objects in the four
tend to be a little bit blurrier and that's a little bit disappointing
because some of the most striking ultra wide-angle photos are when you go really
close to a subject like an animal or up - and to see that in the foreground a
little bit distorted and then the world behind it and you can only do that with
with adjusting to focus and that works on the 70 but not on the 11pro really
curious as to why Apple did that in addition the third-party apps that can
tap into Apple's back-end on a lower level cannot
save those images as RAW images either on that ultra wide-angle lens
hopefully that's something that gets unlocked in the future also what's the
really novel about the camera system on the 70 is that it has a macro shooting
mode this is an actual mechanical adjustment if you look up close he turn
on the macro mode you'll see the lenses shift a little bit and that reduces the
minimum focus distance from about like over 8 centimeters to up to 2
centimeters you get really really up close and see fine details in see Li
kind of like we're where's poor structure on organic things like skin or
fruit and that's something you can never do on the iPhone because it just doesn't
have that kind of macro mode you know once you get really close things just
get out of focus not even just in the ultra wide but in the telephoto and the
wide-angle lens it's a huge advantage I think that the oneplus 70 has over other
cameras out there but then there's also the software and usability experience
and this is where Apple really has it strengths because they control
everything from the camera app the OS to the lenses that they're choosing the
sensors and also the processors and everything is optimized for photography
when you're in the camera so the burst mode on iPhone is extremely useful and I
found myself be able to capture moments that I wasn't able to on the oneplus 70
just because of that shutter and Elaine just because of the processing time
wasn't nearly as fast as on the iPhone same as in portrait mode I love taking
pictures in Porcia mode with both these cameras I
think they do both do a really good job of masking the background and creating
some fake bouquet slight differences in the way they do it and the way they
create those deaf maps but both in the wide-angle and telephoto portrait modes
the iPhone was much faster and there are times where I just couldn't get you know
the the face of my baby and a smile on the 70 by could get it on the iPhone
because it responded just a little bit quicker so I think it comes down to what
type of photographer are you are you someone who wants to catch in the moment
scenes not miss that Kodak moment here you're doing a lot of street photography
in that case something like the iPhones 11pro might be better for you because
apples put so much engineering and resource into making these cameras
really snappy and really responsive but if you're all about image quality and
you're a more a studio photographer or landscape photographer and you can
control your subjects you're more static subjects and you just want the pure
image quality the oneplus 70 is tough to beat and the Android cameras in general
are tough to beat and the price is also tough to be because while this is a
$1,000 phone at base spec this is a $600 phone with eight gigs of RAM 128 gigs of
storage and a fast Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and three pretty amazing
cameras with that macro modes so those are just some of the things for you to
consider if you're shopping for a new smartphone and your enticed by the ultra
wide lens a UC Apple marketing all over the place yes it's very novel and yes
you can get some really cool shots especially with the burst mode combined
with the ultra wide lens on the iPhone but you should also consider on the
Android side plenty of phones which have camera systems that are just as
impressive if not more so we'll have more stuff more tech to cover in the
future I don't know what camera phones you like using whether you shooting wide
ultra wide or telephoto what are your experiences with the iPhone 11 Pro or
phones like the oneplus 70 please post them in the comments below and we'll see
you next time you