Who doesn’t love a good camera battle that aims to crown a phone as the best in the business? I’m (especially) here for it when the battle takes in lots of data, various camera modes, prices, and more to help truly decide what might be the best smartphone camera available. We got that this week and the Google phones from 2022 kind of dominated.
You all know MKBHD. You may also know that he runs a camera battle each year that is typically based on a bracket system that attempts to crown a winner based on people’s votes. It’s fun, but not that scientific. For 2022, he changed it up and went all-in on a data approach with dozens of phones and a custom website created to help score all of them in a head-to-head battle system for top spots in standard photos, night/low-light mode, and portrait mode. This appears to be a serious setup with results you should be able to take real info from, because in the end, hundreds of thousands of people voted and have decided which phones take the best photos.
You’ll want to watch his video below for a longer explanation of how this new system plays out, but for this post, we’ll just get right into which phones are awesome at what, and also which phones are garbage.
The top overall spot, with the highest overall score based on this voting system, is the Pixel 6a. Not a joke, man. In second place was the Pixel 7 Pro, followed by the Asus Zenfone 9.
Further breaking that down, the Pixel 6a took 3rd (standard), 2nd (low-light), and 2nd (portrait) across all categories, while the Pixel 7 Pro was 2nd (standard), 4th (low-light), and 1st (portrait). Because I know you are curious, the iPhone 14 Pro came in at 6th (standard), 10th (low-light), and 5th (portrait).
There is a deeper breakdown about the value of a phone and how it performed, which is cool. The Pixel 6a, as you can imagine, also won the “Votes Per Dollar” category. At $449 and with a camera as good as you all said it is, yeah, that makes sense. There’s also plenty of talk about which photos appear to get higher votes based on brightness or darkness and amount of blur and so on. Again, watch the video.
Oh, you want to know which cameras are absolute buns? Here you go.
That’s right, the Moto Edge 30 Ultra and the Sony Xperia 1 IV are terrible. The Nothing Phone (1) shouldn’t get a pass for being absolutely awful too. At least it doesn’t cost $1,000 or more like those other two bad phones I just mentioned.
So there you have it – the Pixel 6a and the Pixel 7 Pro are essentially the best smartphone cameras you can buy according to millions of votes by people like you and I. Good job, Google.
This post was last modified on December 22, 2022 9:28 am