The camera phone face-off

The Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro are both excellent camera phones but which is the absolute best? 

- Shouvik Das

Since the early days of the iPhone, Apple has prided itself upon its ability to take mobile photography further with each generation. The iPhone 5s was a benchmark for its time, while the two-camera iPhone 7 Plus was a stepping stone in training Apple's computational photography algorithms to understand object blurring. The iPhone 11 Pro series migrated Apple's phones to three-camera setups.

Google, meanwhile, has been all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) since the very first pixel. Every enthusiast will tell you that the Pixel 8 series makes for excellent phones in their own rights-a flag-bearer of how everything in smartphones will soon be about AI. The Pixel 8 Pro, as a result, is a showcase of how it's not just optics-software does play a legitimate role in improving photography.

Neither, though, are particularly affordable while the Pixel 8 Pro's single variant costs ₹1.07 lakh, the iPhone 15 Pro Max starts at 1.6 lakh. At this pricing, what do each of the cameras offer? Do either of them lack anything? Or, is it simply an ecosystem choice to make?

MAIN CAMERA

In pretty much every lighting condition, the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the Pixel 8 Pro appear to process nearly comparable levels of detail. Apple captures better textures and depth of shadows, while Google's camera shoots brighter images with more consistent edges around subjects.

Both the cameras have nearly indiscernible differences in their processing of foreground and background blur-Pixel's optical blurring is a whisker better.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max uses a "new" 48-megapixel primary camera that, on paper, upgrades the details that you would expect to see in each photograph.