Why Modern Smartphone Cameras Are Getting Worse: The Over-Processing Problem
Alright, so I decided to try something. I broke out every single iPhone generation from 1 to 17… and took the same picture with every single one of them, back to back. And the results… were super interesting. I did this with a couple of different phones in a couple different scenarios… And what ended up surprising me and quite a few other people… is it doesn’t always look like the latest generation is always physically far and away the best… And I’ll tell you why.
See, for years, smartphone cameras have been focused on getting… better and better for regular photos, right? Because they were bad. Of course, when it first started, the first iPhone camera was almost an afterthought. It was this little pinhole 2-megapixel webcam type of thing. No autofocus, no video recording, didn’t even have a selfie camera.
But as people and culture… valued the ability to take quick, high quality pictures and videos more and more, you—we of course see the cameras improving drastically on the back of our phones year over year. It would be a legitimate selling point that a camera on a new generation of phone is way better than the year before.
The Limits of Physics in Mobile Photography
And so this continued as phones got bigger and better and cameras got a bit bigger and better, until… right around the 2010s, phones did eventually stop getting… way bigger. And camera bumps of course still grew. But now at this point, we’re basically maxing out how much phone you can carry in your pocket. Like there’s basically no more room left in here. It’s physics.
So the dramatic improvements were getting less dramatic. See these two photos? pretty similar, right? Without zooming in and pixel peeping, they almost look like they could be taken with the same phone, just with a little contrast curve saturation bumped a little bit. This one was taken with the iPhone 17 and this one… was taken with the iPhone 11.
Now of course, if you pixel peep, there are some more nuanced small differences. Like if you’re a photographer, you probably already quickly noticed that the s- 17 has a larger sensor. That’s why the background’s a little bit more blurred while the 11 has more in focus. But generally, for most people, they both look fine.
Why Modern Cameras Focus on Edge Cases
And basically any phone from the past five years can take a perfectly usable photo… in broad daylight. Perfect ideal conditions like this. So now what they’re more focused on is getting better around the edges… Like the more difficult shooting scenarios, low light, super fast moving subjects, deep zoom. Like these edge cases are where you can still see a bigger difference between a good and bad smartphone camera.
Read more:Xiaomi 17 Pro Max vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: The Ultimate Spec Monster?
So you can start to see where this is going, right? Basically any phone these days can take a good enough quality photo in good lighting conditions, no matter what the price. That doesn’t separate them anymore. So the real separation between a good and a bad smartphone camera… comes when the user throws the absolute worst possible conditions at it.
Computational Photography and the Pixel 10
So something like this photo right here, right? This. To an untrained eye this might look like a pretty normal photo, which it should. But if there’s a photographer in the room watching this article over your shoulder, then you- they’ve probably already pointed out that this scene is… literally entirely backlit.
And that smartphone, which happens to be a Pixel 10, is doing a ton… of clever computational photography, multi-frame HDR, tone mapping and exposure adjustment and face detection… It’s making sure… somehow you can see my face… and the black hoodie that I’m wearing and the blue sky behind me in one shot, which is actually insane.
For some perspective, here’s the same shot with… a Nexus 4, which was before the days of smart HDR coming along. So that’s how terrible the scene is supposed to look. It’s like one of those self-correcting basketball hoops. That Stuff Made Here made, the BMathz, where no matter where you throw the ball, it goes in the hoop. That is what a modern smartphone camera has turned into. No matter what you point the camera at, you’ll get a good picture. It refuses to spit out a bad one. To the point where you think there’s no way your skills could be that bad because you never miss.
The Problem with Over-Processing
But this is where it started to get… weird… I think… that in pursuit of this perfect photo-taking machine where you can’t miss no matter how insane the situation is, it’s actually… started to make regular… daylight photos slightly worse. You’ve probably noticed the over-processed look before. We’ve probably seen it here and there.
Some brands are more guilty of it than others. It’s a little bit hard to articulate what what it is, but I think in general, the more likely a brand or a phone camera is to throw… every trick in the book to try to save a photo. The more likely they are to throw all of those same tricks at a regular photo… that doesn’t really need it… kind of messes it up a little bit.
Samsung Galaxy S Evolution: S1 to S26
See here, this is the progression of every Samsung Galaxy S ever taking the same photo from S1 to S2, S3, S4, S5 all the way to today. And yes, they did skip S10 to S20 to line up with the year, but you can specifically around the Galaxy S8 when the window behind me is blown out but then with the introduction of multi-frame HDR with the S9, suddenly you can see the blue sky and everything else is preserved.
Then keep going. S10, S20, S21, S22, all the way to today’s phone, the S26. And… I… I…. don’t… I don’t like this photo anymore. Like this is the exact over-processed look I’m talking about… Yes, you can see more than ever outside the window, in the building, in the sky outside, but there’s also this kind of a haloing around the window and the plant next to the window now. And yes, you can see more details than ever in my face, but my face is not actually that light.
Why Older Cameras Can Look More Natural
So spin back to the Galaxy S23… And I don’t think I’m the only one who prefers this older and maybe slightly worse photo because it just looks a little more natural… There’s a little less shadow detail and a little less HDR, but there’s also less haloing and less unnatural glowing and flatness and it just overall looks better. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. Look at the comments on the Short that I published with all these photos in them. A lot of other people feel that way too.
The Balancing Act of Camera Tuning
So this is now the balancing act of tuning one of these cameras. I think a lot of these companies, they already know, you know, they pull a lot of these tricks, the tone mapping, the multi-frame HDR, the face detection, the exposure adjustments. And they know that that stuff in excess can look kind of weird on a regular photo. So it’s all about knowing when to turn it up and when to turn it down. If you need all that stuff to save a bad situation, then turn it up. But if you don’t need it, turn it down.
Really the easiest way to appreciate this… Every… modern smartphone camera has this gap between… what you see in the viewfinder as you’re about to take the photo and, and then once you take the photo… and then it processes and then that new-looking photo. some take longer than others to process, but you can always see it snap into place. And the more difficult the shooting scenario, the more dramatic that snap. That is the post-processing that we’re talking about here.
Conclusion and Solutions
So look, if the iPhone 11 has more natural color than the iPhone 17 and the Galaxy S23… looks better in a lot of ways than the S26, then we know that some more tuning… is definitely still needed.
There are some really good apps on these phones that will let you turn down the post-processing or even try to turn it completely off. I’ll link some good ones below… Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a little bit more difficult, but you can try it if you want. Also, I’ll link all the Shorts down below where you can watch all of the generations of every smartphone through every single photo because they’re fun too. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace.
