The iPhone 11 Pro triple-camera system re-established Apple’s crown as a critic’s choice this year for smartphone cameras, but Marques Brownlee’s blind Twitter survey always turns up some interesting results.
Last year, the iPhone lost to a BlackBerry … and for 2019, the iPhone 11 Pro didn’t make it past the first round losing to a photo taken by the OnePlus 7T Pro.
MKBHD’s test format involves taking photos on sixteen different phones and then uploading those pics to Twitter in blind polls for his followers to pick their favorites. The lower voted photos are knocked out and the winners go onto successive rounds.
The iPhone only participated in the first round, as it was immediately eliminated. Here is the photo it took compared to its competition, the OnePlus 7T Pro.
The iPhone cast a blue tint over the scene, whereas the OnePlus 7T Pro was more yellow. The iPhone’s white balance is certainly questionable here. The iPhone also left more of Brownlee’s face in shadow than the OnePlus camera system. In general, brighter photos win these polls.
The iPhone 11 Pro’s photo here is not the best photo that phone can take but it’s not awful. As always, the question of what is a ‘good’ photo is subjective. In this case, the lower lightning level on the iPhone photo clearly hurt it. It also seems a little flat between the foreground subject and the background.
As Brownlee only posts the images to Twitter, which heavily compresses uploads, examination of photos at a pixel level for detail is essentially impossible. Whilst having access to the full-res versions would probably affect decision making substantially, the existing test is pretty relevant to today’s world where most images are merely uploaded to social media sites anyway.
The overall winner of the camera test was the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus. You can watch the full video here:
