The iPhone 10
Which will forever be known as the X so don't be that one comment role correcting everybody about it is the most
Expensive and the most beautiful iPhone ever made since I took my sweet time making this review
I can probably safely assume that you already know all the basics about it that other reviewers have covered elsewhere
But if somehow this is your introduction to the X I'm gonna cram a standard
10-minute YouTube review
Into the next 60 seconds the glass front and back are very breakable and expensive to repair it has the fastest benchmarks of any smartphone
available It's even faster than my 13-inch MacBook Pro at certain tasks face ID works the majority of the time sometimes
It doesn't visual mapping data is stored on a secure part of the hardware
So it's never exposed to apps or the Internet gesture based navigation feels super smooth that does have a learning curve wait you're going to
learn to love it once you master it the
Multitasking gesture is slow and hard to discover control centers hard to reach the speakers or louder battery life is totally fine
It's ip67 water-resistant finally supports wireless Qi charging. It's Apple's first OLED display five point eight inches designed in collaboration with Samsung
It's got better colors and contrast ratios sports HDR and Dolby vision the screen is 120 Hertz touch responsive
But the refresh rate is still 60 Hertz the screen has a slight blue cast at certain angles
But it's really not a big deal true tone display is genius
And I never want to go back both cameras are stabilized now the telephoto is faster at F 2.4
There's still no headphone jack and emojis are super cute and fun it's expensive
There's a notch and it's pronounced 210 not X now that that's out of the way
Let's slow down and get into some details first some quick housekeeping if you're new to my channel
I work as a photographer and a video creator a lot of my work is for web and mobile
A lot of it's my wife's blog and so I actually do a lot of professional
Photography using mobile phones my daily driver has been in iphone since the beginning of smartphones
But there's always been so much great Android hardware out there that I can't stick to just one device
So for the testing period I'm mostly comparing the X to the Google pixel 2 and
also
The iPhone 6s since I think a lot more people will be upgrading from that and from the iPhone 7
Since I promised a review from a photographer's perspective. Let's start with the camera
I did a pretty extensive review of the iPhone 8 and most of the key points about it also applied to the 10
It's got the same great lens and sensor on the wide-angle
And there's also some improvements to the image signal processor
They've improved the sharpness and contrast of images and decided to slightly boost the saturation which
Gives a look that's a little more so to Samsung phones dynamic range
which is the ability to hold detail in both the brightest and darkest parts of the image is one of the biggest ways that a
Modern mobile camera can set itself apart and Apple has steadily improved that over the years
But HDR is one place where the pixel to really has an edge on the iPhone
It keeps more detail and color in the highlights and still manages to look very natural
Just like the iPhone 8 HDR is on by default
But sometimes it doesn't turn on when I want it to so I would still rather have the manual control
I'm gonna go into a lot more detail about image quality on my podcast
So go to Stallman podcast comm where I'll have a lot more to say about it like previous iPhones
It has a tendency to overexpose just a little bit
So I'm constantly adjusting the exposure down or often that I'd like to but on the other hand I find Android phones tend to underexpose
So everyone has some room for improvements in their auto settings
Since we live in Calgary of course some of these camera tests you need to be out in the mountains
So here's the ski test we can shoot 60 frames per second in 4k or 240 frames per second
The slow motion on this is crazy none of my other cameras can do this even my Sony which is
$3000 can't do 240 frames per second and the autofocus does have a lot of trouble at these speeds
But when it works it looks amazing just like on previous iPhones portrait mode works pretty well when it works
Which it's not that often, but it looks really great
I think a lot of people love this feature and don't notice the difference it still doesn't compare to a real SLR
But it's a fun effect in a really glad that it's there. They also added portrait selfie mode
Which is a great idea I find it cuts things out even a little bit worse if we look at the depth data
We can see that the front camera has a much more detailed understanding of its environment
But somehow that data doesn't really translate into a more realistic image ears hair glasses
they all get cut off and
The pixel 2 does a much better job at isolating the same subject the new studio lighting features
I don't think worked out very well
They have all this extra information to work with so I expected it to look great, but it's an interesting experiment
But the future is just not ready yet
IOS, 11 adds new photo filters built into the Photos app that slightly improve on the old ones
But they've basically gone from being truly terrible to me
But if you want a quick way to give your photos a beautiful look
There is a dead simple app designed for professionals, but anybody can get the hang of it. It's called film born
It's made by Mastan labs whose Lightroom presets
I've been using for years, and it's designed to accurately emulate the experience of shooting films
So you don't spend a lot of time fussing around with a lot of little sliders
You just pick your film stock tweak your exposure and white balance and you're done. It's not a fake vintage look
It's not cheesy
Just a super simple approach to your mobile photos a clean and timeless look
So you'll find the link to film more and below the front lines that all these phones are competing on is
Performance in dark lighting situations to test the low-light on this camera
We're gonna shoot some event photography at the opening of the new flagship
Canada Goose store here in Calgary when I did my iPhone 8 review
I didn't really do any head-to-head low-light comparisons, but tonight
I've got the iPhone 6s the difference in quality is a lot more obvious when you see it next to this older iPhone and the
Performance of speed and this camera in low-light just blew away the success in the time
I was able to take five photos with the flash on with the older camera
I was able to take nine photos with the new one the improvements on the selfie camera were even more impressive than on the front-facing
camera those tests were in moderately low light
But we also wanted to test it in on
Except ibly low light so we flew to Toronto to shoot photos lit by nothing more than Christmas lights
It does a pretty good job very usable photos
But what's really interesting is when you compare it to the Google pixel to the pixel is a totally different approach to this low-light it
Decides to lift the shadows a lot more which gives you kind of a better thumbnail image
But it also adds a lot of noise to the dark areas whereas on the iPhone you would lift that exposure in post and you
Get a little bit less noise the details in the pixel are also a lot better
It's sharper, or is in the iPhone it gets a little smudgy when you zoom into a hundred percent
Yeah, if phone's impressive here
Especially if you process it a little bit it can look really beautiful
But I think out of the box most people would prefer the pixel image so the camera is getting better and better on iPhones
But let's be honest
we're not all excited about this iPhone because of the bump in quality the phone is designed entirely around the screen and
What a screen it is you already know that it's OLED
But you may not know why that's so special the best way to see it is if we turn off all the lights
And look at it next to older iPhones, which use LCD displays the blacks on the 10 are truly black
There is no light coming from it meanwhile the iPhone 7 screen almost looks like a flashlight next to it
That's what I mean when I say the contrast ratio is amazing the dark and bright parts the image are
More true to life than ever before as we can all see Apple wasn't quite able to give us a perfect edge-to-edge
screen we have this black little notch at the top when this was announced at the keynote I
Honestly, I hated it
It's all I could look at but within a day or two it becomes a blind spot and for the most part
I never notice it and now not only is it become an extremely powerful piece of branding for Apple
So you can always spot their phones in the line of the screens
But I've even found myself starting to like the way that it looks it's that feeling of identifying
Attachment to an imperfection because you've loved the main things so much the only time that it's really distracting is when you're looking at
ultra wide full screen content
Which is a shame because the screen is extremely wide a few pioneering youtubers including?
Austin Evans and Jonathan Morrison even shot their reviews the iPhone X in ultra wide formats to take advantage of it
but that turned out to have the
unfortunate consequence of always hiding part of the image behind the knotch it kind of breaks the zoom features on youtube so the new
optimal widescreen format is two to one which your
Right now this beautiful new screen and face ID are very closely tied together neither would exist without the other by now
You've probably heard that it does generally work pretty great, and I think it'll make for a great future of security on iPhones
But there are a couple of issues for example when you're laying down. It's just really surprising. How often face ID fails
Obviously if your face is smushed in a cushion
It's not gonna work
But something about the angle does make it way less reliable for no obvious reason
also
If you're eating or yawning a really positive consequence of changing that home
Interaction to a software swipe instead of a hardware press is that it makes all of the interactions with the phone feel much more organic
Now all the swiping between apps feels part of the same interaction language, so is it worth it
I think as with most expensive products. This is such a broad question to ask that the only honest answer
Is that it totally depends it depends how excited you are to have the latest tech it depends
How frustrated you get by learning new tech for me someone who pushes my phone to its limits to get my work done
Of course it's worth it
But if that doesn't sound like you and you're just looking to get the best tech that you can for a reasonable budget I have
Some great news the iPhone 8 is
Awesome, and it has most of these same flagship features in a much lower price
Or you can wait till next year when I'm sure the design of the iPhone
10 will spread across to the rest of Apple devices we have an embarrassment of riches in both iPhone and Android devices this year
So there's bound to be a phone. That's the perfect fit for you, so going into 2018 the iPhone 10 is hands-down my favorite phone