Samsung's Opportunity to Shatter the iPhone Camera Myth as Apple Falls Short

Smartphone photography has improved considerably over the past decade. Even the most basic of smartphones can produce decent images now because all of the heavy lifting is done by the camera software. That’s also why smartphone photos often look ultra-processed. The results go beyond realistic, and in the drive to capture great detail, there’s a noticeable degradation in contrast, causing images to appear flat overall.

The consequence of this extreme processing is that photos, particularly those taken with high-end devices, seem unnatural, overly sharp, and with outrageous highlights. This happens because modern smartphone photography is essentially software magic. When you take a picture, the photography engine captures multiple frames, adjusts the exposure on objects and faces, sharpens the image, reduces noise, and presents a highly processed image that seems tailor-made for Instagram.

This often involves brightening up dark areas of an image while reducing brightness in other areas to showcase as much detail as possible. Displeasure with these over-processed photos has been growing, and it’s not uncommon to see serious photographers opting for digital cameras so their photos can reflect the essence they want to capture instead of looking borderline AI-generated.

Apple has led the way with exaggerated over-sharpening of images, and last year’s iPhone 15 lineup was heavily criticized for it. Things aren’t much better with the new iPhone 16 series; in fact, it’s gotten worse. However, Apple has introduced new settings that give users more control. This raises the question: is this a tacit admission of failure?

Perhaps Apple feels that it’s not possible or not worth it to retrain its camera software to produce more natural images. Instead, it’s offering a new set of features and leaving it to users to figure things out. The Photographic Styles feature provides an element of manual control, though many average users may not be comfortable tinkering with these settings.

The Photographic Styles feature isn’t new; it’s been around for several generations of the iPhone. However, Apple has now significantly upgraded it. Users can adjust settings to make images look cooler or warmer, dial in skin tones more accurately, and adjust colors. Both presets and manual customization are offered, and all these changes happen within the camera processing pipeline, so these aren’t just simple filters like the ones in apps such as Instagram.

The iPhone’s camera needs to cater to both average users and serious mobile photographers. For the average user, there’s the familiar exaggerated processing, which they like because their benchmark for judging image quality is different from that of more experienced users who understand contrast, sharpness, and noise reduction.

Apple has taken the easy way out here. Instead of improving its camera software, it is shifting the burden onto users through new features that aren’t intuitive and may cause frustration. Additionally, Photographic Styles can only be used with Apple’s preferred HEIF image file format, which isn’t widely supported, and there’s no option to automatically convert them into JPEG, the gold standard for image files.

Samsung’s camera software has similarly aggressive tendencies, as noted in reviews of high-end Galaxy devices. For example, the Galaxy Z Fold 6’s camera sometimes goes “a little overboard,” and the Galaxy S24 Ultra “struggles with accurate color production” despite efforts to tone down the exaggerated sharpening. However, Samsung offers tools for manual control, such as the Expert Raw app for pro photographers and the Camera Assistant app that lets users prioritize focus speed, capture speed, or picture quality, but nothing quite like Apple’s Photographic Styles.

Rather than follow Apple’s path, Samsung should focus on addressing these shortcomings in its camera processing. Truly intelligent camera processing should navigate the nuances that people want in their images, more so than what users can achieve manually with features like Photographic Styles.

Apple’s Photographic Styles feature provides Samsung with an opportunity to outdo its rival. It has long been argued that image quality on Android phones is inferior to iPhones, a belief held by non-technical fans and Apple loyalists. If Samsung can succeed in refining its camera software without following Apple’s approach, it could end this debate and establish itself as the leader in smartphone photography.