It is commonly said that the best camera is the one you have on your person, and in today’s times that camera happens to be the smartphone for most of us. This is one area where many smartphone manufacturers are making serious headway, but flagships still continue to deliver the best imaging experience when it comes to smartphones. We have with us, the Apple iPhone 8 Plus (review) and the Samsung Galaxy Note8 (review), two smartphones that could easily be regarded as the best imaging devices in the market. If you’re ready to drop some serious money on a new smartphone and find yourself wondering which of the two smartphones is the better shooter, our comparison should hopefully help resolve some of the confusion.

Specifications

The Samsung Galaxy Note8 and the Apple iPhone 8 Plus both sport dual cameras, with 12-megapixel sensors all around. Both the cameras offer a wide-angle and telephoto lens setup, but that’s pretty much where they stop sharing any similarities. The Note8 offers a field of view of 26mm and 52mm for its wide angle and telephoto lenses respectively. The wide-angle lens has an aperture of f/1.7 while the telephoto lens has an aperture of f/2.4. On the Apple iPhone 8 Plus 28mm wide angle lens with an aperture of f/1.8 while the telephoto end extends to 56mm at f/2.8. The Note8 offers optical image stabilisation on both the lenses while Apple only offers it for the wide-angle lens, reserving the dual OIS for the far more expensive iPhone X. From a pure specifications point of view, the Samsung does offer a slightly better set of features, with wider apertures and dual OIS. While the Note8 offers a slightly wider field of view, the iPhone has a farther reach on the telephoto end, although it is just a difference of 2mm. While we are inclined to choose the Note8 as a better spec’d smartphone, if you’re in the market for a phone that offers maximum telephoto reach, the iPhone might be your natural choice, but the lack of OIS is definitely going to be a bother.

note8_iphone 8 plus

Stock Camera App Features and Performance

Apple’s stock camera app is very clean and minimal, offering settings on the top bar and shooting modes on the bottom. There is no settings cog here that would allow you to change camera settings, which is truly bothersome. In order to change the video resolution, you’d have to go into Settings > Camera and then make whatever changes it is you want to make. The lack of direct access to this from the Camera App itself leads to more time spend tapping on the screen, which could potentially lead to missed moments. What it does offer is easy access to turn on/off HDR, flash, Live Photos and effects. All the shooting modes are at the bottom of the screen and easily accessible via slide gestures. The Samsung Galaxy Note8 instead offers a very different stock camera app experience. The app has a lot to offer, so there’s more going on here than just two rows of options. In order to see all the shooting modes offered by the Note8, you need to slide from left to right on the screen to see the plethora of shooting modes the Note8 has to offer. Beyond the Panorama mode, the Note8 also offers a dedicated Food Mode, a built-in mode for shooting Hyperlapses, a Virtual Shot mode to create 360-degree photos and even a Pro Mode. While both the smartphones offer the ability to capture and output RAW images, the default camera app on the Note8 allows this in the Pro mode, however, for RAW output on the iPhone 8 Plus, you will need a third-party app. Here, if we had to pick a winner, things would be hard. The iPhone 8 Plus camera app offers a very streamlined and minimal interface and feature set, in line with their “it just works” philosophy, removing all aspects of tinkering. If you prefer more control over your images, Samsung’s Galaxy Note8 offers you a one-stop shop. Personally, we’re more inclined towards the Note8 because it offers far more latitude for experimenting than the stock camera of the iPhone 8 Plus.

Day Light Camera Performance

In good light, both the iPhone 8 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note8 shine exceptionally well. In terms of colours and dynamic range, both the smartphones are neck to neck. However, differences start to crop up when you’re shooting in strong lighting conditions, the differences between the two cameras start to crop up. The iPhone 8 Plus in our test tended to prioritise highlights over shadows while the Samsung Note 8 managed to retain better detail in the shadow areas, but did end up blowing the highlights. You can see this in the photo samples below.

The other area where the image quality between the two smartphones differs is with regards to detail retention. We noticed that consistently across all images, shot on both the lenses, the Note8 retained more detail in the subject that the iPhone 8 Plus. The sample below of the top of my dog’s head shows that the Samsung Note8 is not only able to render better distinction between the strands of fur, but also a more pleasing and distinguished colour tone. The image from the iPhone 8 Plus looks a little muddled with more subdued colours.

Portrait / Live Focus Modes

The two-lens combination’s more important purpose is to give the user to shoot images that have the “bokeh” effect appear when taking portraits. Apple calls this Portrait Mode for obvious reasons, while on the Note8, Samsung has it branded as Live Focus. Both the modes do essentially the same thing, but there are some minor differences. Apple also offers Portrait Lighting now, a set of lighting effects that are designed to emulate studio lighting. This feature is currently in beta and honestly, still needs a considerable amount of work. However, photos shot on regular lighting with Portrait Mode seem to have incredibly natural bokeh for the most part, with minor flaws only being visible if you look really hard for them. On the Samsung Note 8, the Live Focus mode offers the ability to tweak the amount of bokeh you’d like in the image not just before shooting the image, but also after. The effect is good when applied in smaller intensities but quickly starts looking artificial. Overall, the iPhone 8 Plus does produce images with better bokeh effect than the Note 8 in a variety of conditions, although, both the smartphones do require a number of variables to be just right for the images to look “DSLR-like”. Here, we do give Apple the thumbs up for returning better results in comparison to the Samsung Note 8, in a larger variety of shooting conditions.

Low Light Usage

Low light performance of the two phones differs vastly, not so much in terms of quality, but significantly in how the two phones approach taking photos in low light. The iPhone 8 Plus prioritises boosting ISO over dropping the shutter speed so as to prevent motion blur that might get introduced into the photo due to the subject moving. The Samsung, on the other hand, happily drops the shutter speed as needed (also while boosting ISO), often leading to blurry images. This was a problem we faced quite often while shooting in low light, where the only way to get a usable photo was to switch to Pro mode and set the proper shutter-speed and boost ISO accordingly. Unfortunately, this could pose to be problematic for users who are not that familiar with the technical aspects of photography. The other aspect of lowlight photography the iPhone 8 Plus edges ahead of the Samsung Note8 on is the flash photography. When shooting with the flash enabled, we noticed that the iPhone was able to retain some ambient light in the shot, while the photos on the Note 8 had it all drowned out, making the background appear totally dark. However, the flash on the Note8 is more powerful than the one on the iPhone 8 Plus, which is helpful if your subject is at a distance from you while the iPhone 8 Plus is better for subjects closer to you.

Verdict

Between the Apple iPhone 8 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note8, the choice is definitely a more difficult one. While the Note8 offers better camera controls and shooting modes built into the stock app, the iPhone 8 Plus takes better portraits. The Samsung Note8, however, retains greater detail in images in comparison, and for anyone who likes macro photography, the Note8 does allow you to get closer to the subject in comparison to the Apple iPhone 8. Without having to resort to third-party apps, the Samsung Note8 offers far more latitude for experimenting thanks to the Pro Mode and RAW capture and a large number of other shooting modes built in. We also prefer the Note8 for its colour reproduction, but this is just a personal preference. The iPhone 8 Plus still produces great images, but the highlight preference for metering often leads to poor exposure of the shadows. This can be problematic if you’re shooting someone against a strong source of light. What the iPhone 8 Plus does exceptionally well is the Portrait Mode, which performs better than the Live Focus mode of the Note8. While the Samsung Galaxy Note8 allows a lot of fiddling, users looking for a simple interface would benefit most from the iPhone 8 Plus. You can have a look at our gallery of Apple iPhone 8 Plus & Samsung Galaxy Note 8 images in the two galleries below

Apple iPhone 8 Camera Samples

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Camera Samples