When it comes to premium smartphones, the two most prominent options have different approaches to taking photos. The shiny titanium-clad and -colored $1,300 Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra comes with four rear cameras, including two dedicated to zooming and one with a 200-megapixel sensor. Apple’s titanium-clad and -colored $1,200 iPhone 15 Pro Max packs three rear cameras, one for zooming and a main one with a 48-megapixel sensor.Â
Let me state the obvious: Both capture some of the absolute best photos you can take from any phone today, especially in challenging environments like high-contrast scenes (think a sunset) or places where the lighting is dim (think a restaurant).
Read more:Â Best Phone to Buy for 2024
Before I took a single snap, I expected the S24’s array of zoom cameras to handle distanced subjects better. And yet I also knew that Apple is no slouch and might bury Samsung’s best efforts with the iPhone’s masterful photo processing and video image quality. How do they stack up against each other?
I took them around San Francisco to find out.
After I shot hundreds of photos and videos with both phones and compared them side by side, a more complex reality revealed itself, with the iPhone and Ultra excelling in some situations and struggling in others.
Cutting-edge camera hardware, apps
The iPhone 15 Pro Max has a trio of lenses: wide, ultrawide and telephoto. The main camera has a 48-megapixel sensor, while the other two have a resolution of 12 megapixels. There’s a bit of a gulf in terms of zooming between the main 1x camera and the 5x telephoto. And that’s where the differences between the two phones start to reveal themselves.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a similar trio of lenses but adds a second telephoto, with a 3x zoom level. Think of it as if Apple took the 15 Pro Max and added the iPhone 15 Pro’s dedicated 3x telephoto to the back, thus creating an actually nonexistent iPhone 15 Ultra with both 3x and 5x cameras.
Camera hardware specs compared
Camera | Zoom… |
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