iPhone 14 Pro Max vs Samsung S22 Ultra Camera Comparison

The iPhone 14 pro has promised the biggest camera upgrade ever on an iPhone, a more sophisticated flash a more advanced ultrawide camera, better close-up shots, and better video. Not to mention a new image processing algorithm they call the photonic engine.

So we’ve got 12 categories, and through them, we’re gonna see if these upgrades are enough to beat Samsung’s Galaxy s22 ultra and make this the best smartphone camera in existence.

Front Camera

Okay so let’s start with front-facing cameras because apple has improved cameras this time around by opening up the aperture compared to the last iPhone 13s. The new ones can let in a significant amount more light technically speaking Samsung’s front camera is still a better front camera and you can kind of tell by how much natural separation there is between foreground and background. But apple makes up for it with how they’re able to process the video that they do get they can do a lot with a little which I could actually learn from you’ll find that the iPhone takes cleaner footage in bright lighting it takes cleaner footage in darker environments.

If I try to record with both front cameras within a third-party app like Instagram this is what it looks like on the iPhone this is what it looks like on Samsung apple just has better integration with these apps.

Specification	iPhone 14 Pro Max	Samsung S22 Ultra
Weight	240g	229g
Display	6.7inches 120Hz refresh rate Dynamic island	6.8 inches 120 Hz Punch hole
Processor	Bionic chip A16,	Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
Rear Cameras	48 MP main camera 12 MP Ultrawide 12 MP telephoto 3x zoom	108MP Main Camera 12 MP ultra-wide 10MP telephoto,3x zoom 10MP telephoto,10x zoom
Front Cameras	12MP	40MP
Battery Capacity	4323mAH	5000mAH
Charging	27 W Charging 15 W wireless charging	45W Charging 15 W wireless charging
Price	1100$ from the base variant	1200$ for 128GB varient

Auto Focus

When it comes to autofocus, the iPhone delivers a lot of improvements in front selfies. Selfies come with great details. So in this category iPhone surpasses the Samsung s22 Ultra.

Samsung bridges the gap when it comes to selfie photos when you’re taking a photo it doesn’t need to be captured in real-time as a video does and so it allows Samsung to heavily process it and the truth of it.

I quite like Samsung’s processing the way it smooths my skin without reducing the clarity in my beard. It feels like a more three-dimensional slightly higher quality image with the less heavy-handed use of sharpening that said it’s not enough to win the category given. It’s more of a stylistic preference that the iPhone can now completely separate you from your background by just holding on screen that alone can literally half the time it takes me to make a youtube thumbnail.

The photonic engine is a new bit of tech that apple’s just released and the idea is every single time you take a photo now on any one of the cameras on any one of the iPhone 14s your phone will be able to comb through every single pixel and optimize the noise texture and the detail.

It’s the next step above the deep fusion that current iPhones use and you can tell when it comes to those middle light and lower light selfies there’s a real cleanness to the phone’s image which leads us to about a draw-in this category.

Rear Cameras

Fancy main rear cameras on these phones,s one of the not very often mentioned but very important factors for me is which one is more fun to use and as much as I think that apple is heading in the right direction with this they’ve added a fair sprinkling of cool features over the last few years like a cinematic mode like photographic styles.

Camera Zoom

Iphone’s max optical zoom is just 3x compared to Samsung’s 10x.

Mega-Pixels

It’s a difference that software is going to struggle to recuperate the iPhone does have one new trick here the fact that the company has quadrupled the resolution of their normal main camera from 12 megapixels on last year’s iPhones to 48 megapixels.

It means that they’re now also giving you the option to be able to losslessly zoom in two times using that camera and still apparently get a full quality 12-megapixel output as for how good it is. Well if we start from this point and then we use two times zoom on both phones this is the output you get and then if we magnify this shot you can see that in fact yeah apple’s two times zoom photo is definitively clearer than Samsung’s.

Thanks at least in part to the photonic engine this applies to three times zoom photos it applies to four times zoom photos it applies to every zoom level until you get to 10 times and only at this point does Samsung’s 10x optical zoom camera kick in and absolutely demolish the iPhone

So it’s not actually as clear-cut as you might have thought, and what it really boils down to is when you’re taking zoom photos are you spending more time zooming in between 1x and 10x in which case I’d hand it to the iPhone or between 10x and 100x in which case I’d hand it to Samsung I’ll give Samsung the overall win in this category because technically its upper limit for what it could potentially achieve is higher but just know that the iPhone is quickly becoming the more well-rounded option.

One thing that apple made very clear at their iPhone 14 pro launch was that it’s not just the main camera that’s been upgraded it’s also the ultra-wide up to three times better. I first noticed this improvement when I started to take macro shots which used the phone’s ultrawide camera because it has a really short focal distance.

Portrait Mode

Samsung is leading in the category of portrait mode for a couple of years. iPhone 14 pro max Uses its 2x optical zoom lens for portrait photos. This lens’s focal length is about 50mm. This Focal length is essential for Portrait photography. So in the portrait mode comparison, iPhone leads in this category.