First we bust a myth, then we prove how it might be true….

Chances are, if you take a lot pictures with your smartphone (like almost everyone who owns a smartphone does), you’ve likely heard the common belief that Apple’s iPhones have the best smartphone cameras. We’re going to start by saying this as plainly as possible: that common belief is exactly just that, a common belief, as the iPhone has actually rarely had the definitive best camera on the market even if Apple’s new iPhone 11 Pro phones may be about to change that.

Now let’s start by getting one thing clear:  iPhones have always had really good cameras, so good that if like most Zimbabweans, you don’t get to play around with many flagship phones per year, then it would be easy to believe that whichever current iPhone you would’ve gotten your hands on has the best camera you’ve ever seen. In fact, let’s start with saying that term, “the best camera” is as elusive a term as “the best smartphone”. With the rate that the industry keeps improving per year you can’t really choose a definitive best smartphone brand of all time or best smartphone camera of all time either. The best you can do is choose on a year-to-year basis and when we go into that history Apple’s iPhones have dominated the camera market only in 2014 and 15 with the iPhone 6 and 6S respectively. The years before that were dominated by (surprisingly for some) Nokia especially with their Pureview camera lines and more recent years have seen Google, Huawei and even LG and Sony tend to rise with new and impressive camera technologies.  Google’s Pixel 3 and Huawei’s P30 have especially blown everyone away as of late with very different but both astonishing camera approaches that blew competing iPhones out of the water. The Pixel used Google’s computational photography algorithms (which actually work even on non-Google Pixel phones) While Huawei added a little computational magic of their own, but went in heavy on building powerful camera sensors in the form of a 40+ MP sensor, a periscope, and even a 20 MP ultra-wide angle sensor, tech that was made popular by LG’s V series back in 2016 and 2017. Thankfully, Apple has finally decided to catch up and try to take it’s crown back with the iPhone 11 Pro, and amusingly enough it seems to have employed tricks from both Google and Huawei in it’s new phones can check out the capabilities of these new phones in the video below courtesy or The Verge.