The Best Camera Phones

(Image credit: SleekMart)

The new Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is the best camera phone you can buy today because it does everything well. Its primary 108-megapixel camera, which showed promise in the Galaxy S20 Ultra earlier this year but was hampered by glitches, has been improved with the use of a new dedicated laser auto focus sensor. The 12-MP telephoto uses a folded lens design to achieve 5x optical power, which obliterates the 2x optical zoom of the iPhone 11 Pro and can deliver lossless 10x zoom as well as up to 50x digital zoom.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review.

Apple’s Night Mode sets a benchmark for low-light photography within the industry, while the company’s Smart HDR technology utilizes a breakthrough machine learning technique called Semantic Rendering to selectively over- or underexpose specific areas of the scene differently. And on the video front, all three of the iPhone 11 Pro’s rear cameras can record at 4K resolution and 60 frames-per-second.

Both the regular 5.8-inch model and the 6.5-inch Max variant feature the same cameras, while the cheaper 6.1-inch iPhone 11 ditches the telephoto lens, but can still capture the same quality photos from its primary and ultrawide optics.

Read our full iPhone 11 Pro Max review.

You could easily select the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus as your go-to camera phone, and it would be an excellent choice. The S20 Plus produced the best photos of any of the Galaxy S20 models released this spring. But the Galaxy Note 20 features the exact same optics, including that impressive 64MP telephoto lens, so you’ll get the same fantastic camera performance. Even better, the Galaxy Note 20 costs $200 less than the S20 Plus.

You don’t make a lot of trade-offs to get that lower price. The Note 20 has a plastic body, not a glass one, but it’s a pretty stylish design. Battery life on the Note 20 could be better, too. But the phablet is also powered by Qualcomm’s top-of-the line Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset — just like the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra — and you get the powerful S Pen too.

It’s the camera, though, that really impressed us with the Note 20. Samsung’s $999 phablet takes excellent pictures that stand up well against anything the other best camera phones can produce.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Note 20 review.

One look at the Pixel 4a’s spec sheet, and you might be underwhelmed by its 12.2-megapixel, ƒ/1.7 aperture rear camera. There’s only one lens on the back of the device, which pales in comparison to, say, the quartet of the optics on the back of the OnePlus Nord.

The difference is that the Pixel’s one lens benefits from all of Google’s imaging knowhow, from Night Sight to Super Res Zoom and Live HDR+. The result isn’t just the best cheap camera phone ever, but one of the best camera phones overall, because it does everything the Pixel 4 can do for less than half the price. And because there’s 128GB of storage built in, you’ll have a ton of space for photos and videos compared to what you get from most budget phones (including the 64GB iPhone SE).

Read our full Google Pixel 4a review

The new, $400 iPhone SE packs the iPhone 8’s 12-megapixel, ƒ/1.8 single-lens camera, but also benefits from Cupertino’s latest and greatest processor — the A13 Bionic — to kick its computational photography powers into high gear.

The results simply speak for themselves. The Pixel 4a has an advantage when it comes to nighttime photography, as well as shallow depth-of-field portraits and digital zoom. That said, the iPhone SE is nearly as capable in many scenarios, as it benefits from many of Apple’s sophisticated imaging techniques, like Smart HDR and Semantic Rendering.

Read our full Apple iPhone SE 2020 review.

6. Google Pixel 4

With the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, Google gifted its flagship smartphones with a dual-lens imaging system for the first time ever. Two cameras — a 12.2-MP primary wide-angle and a 16-MP telephoto — work in concert to deliver phenomenal images in all conditions, boosted heavily by Google’s amazing computational photography techniques.

A new machine learning-based white balance feature corrects for strong color casts in even the most challenging scenarios, while a Live HDR+ feature allows users to see the final, processed result in real time, before they tap the shutter button.

Google has boosted its Super Res Zoom technology as well. Combined with the focal length advantage of that telephoto lens, the Pixel 4 can capture images at up to 8x power digitally that look nearly as good as what an optical lens would produce. We still believe that the ultrawide cameras in both the S20 Ultra and iPhone 11 Pro unlock potential the Pixel 4 can’t realize, but even despite that caveat, Google has once again delivered an all-time best camera phone here.