Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I wouldn’t say I’m a photography purist (I shoot with a Fuji after all), but one thing that continues to draw me to using my mirrorless over all but the very best smartphone cameras is a more natural look to my pictures.
It’s not that smartphones are bad by any stretch of the imagination; some smartphone cameras are absolutely brilliant. But take a closer look, and even the best handsets leave telltale signs of overprocessing; whether it’s oversharpened skin textures from the Pixel’s portrait mode or overly dark shadows in Apple’s HDR algorithm.
You don’t have to take my word for it; the internet is plastered with complaints about overprocessing and artifacts found even in some of the best camera phones. And yet, brands seem determined to cram even more processing into mobile imaging in pursuit of modest boosts in image quality, rather than taking the plunge on better camera hardware. I’m looking at you, Samsung, and your years of identical camera specs.
How do you feel about modern phone camera processing? 29 votes It's great. 0 % OK. It's worth the trade-offs. 24 % I don't like it. 59 % I'm not sure. 17 %
Virtually everywhere you look, the latest smartphones promise to use AI (or perhaps we should call it machine learning?) to enhance the appearance of your pictures — from Google’s 100x Pro Res Zoom and “AiMAGE” features embedded, such as outpainting and restyling, in the new HONOR Magic 8 Pro, to the Photonic Engine in the latest iPhones. We can’t escape, and yet the results are mixed at best and sometimes outright atrocious.
2025 was the year that AI photography really took off, but it was mixed at best.
As impressive as Google’s and OnePlus’s AI-infused long-range zoom capabilities seem at first use, we quickly tired of their uneven application. Texture details look mostly good, but it’s a no-go for distant human subjects, and these two have some of the better AI photography implementations on the market right now. At the other end of the spectrum, last year’s HONOR Magic 7 Pro looked far too heavy-handed in every scenario it used AI. Thankfully, the new models seem to have dialed things back a bit.
Rather than attempting to plaster over the cracks with AI, in all the cases where we’ve been let down, these phones would have performed much better simply by having better hardware. The OnePlus 15 is a prime example of how even minor hardware downgrades obviously produce an inferior experience. Despite relying more heavily on its DetailMax Engine, the higher-specced OnePlus 13 came out on top during our reviews.
By contrast, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and OPPO Find X9 Pro are two of my favorite camera phones from last year. Although they also dabble in AI, both employ some of the best hardware in the business, and not just in their primary lens. If you look at Apple, Google, or Samsung, they’re still stuck in the tiny-periscope-camera paradigm, while these rivals have moved on to large-sensor, 200MP zooms with bright apertures. Honestly, I’d take a great 20x snap over an AI 100x picture nearly every time.
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