 I'm Robert Walkman, staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times. And I'm Allison Sheridan, the chief podcaster at the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com. We decided to take a look at the iPhone 5s camera. We wanted to look and see, is it really worth going to the iPhone 5s if you already had an iPhone 5 just for the camera alone? We're not looking at any other features except the camera. But then we thought, well, you can't just look at those two cameras, right? What's the big daddy in the iPhone, in the phone category for cameras? I would say Samsung with their S4, probably one of the more popular Android phones. Right. But then you've got the Nokia 1020. I know it's Windows phone, but the Nokia 1020's got that 41 megapixel sensor. We've got to take a look at that, right? That's certainly a lot of megapixels in the phone and even in a regular camera. That's true. That's true. And then the HTC One, I hear a lot of people say, well, yeah, but don't forget the HTC One camera. It's been a lot of people like it better even than the Nokia 1020. I knew this was going to be a big project. It's a lot of cameras. It's a lot of pictures and to try to get it done, you know, in a short amount of time. Even with help. That's why I enlisted Allison to help out because I knew I couldn't do it myself. So we thought we should take a lot of different kinds of pictures. One of the things I have a pet peeve with my phone cameras has always been trying to take a picture of a bright red flower. They tend to oversaturate and you just get these washed areas of all the exact same color of red. So we went in the search of some boogin value. We found some, I thought they were red, Robert, you said they were fuchsia. That's correct. Yeah, I don't want to be wrong in the whole color thing here. And so we took some pictures of those and we took the cameras and we took two or three or four or five sometimes of each scene that we looked at. And then we took the best picture by each camera. So we showed the best of the best of the best in each case. Then we tried outdoors in bright sunlight, boat scenes, reflected sunlight. And actually, those were the ones that were most similar. The biggest difference we saw, I think, was in low light. Right. So low light is where you take, what, at least half of your photos. You take them indoors, right? And it's really the weakness of most of the smartphone cameras. Because if you ever notice, how do your flash pictures look when you snap that and look at it? I like the green tinge that it gives Grandma. I think it's really attractive. I don't know. Sometimes it's almost hard to look at how bright and how washed out it can be. And the iPhone 5S, this is one of the big improvements they say. So we decided to take a look at that and does it make a difference? Is it going to make me want to get a new phone? And you have, we're also comparing these to what you know you can do with a cheap point shoot, not even expensive DSLR. So you were kind of looking at it in that light, too. Would you ever keep any of those photos that you got from one of the low light photos, right? Well, the problem is you're always carrying your phone with you. Good point. That picture is good enough with a flash. We decided we would rank them and see which did the best and which was our favorite camera. Exactly. So let's head into that section next. It was time to head out and look for some flowers. Yeah. I really wanted to take a picture of some red flowers because red is a really hard color, I should say, for cell phone cameras to take pictures of. Actually, I think it's pretty hard for most camera state pictures. It's a difficult color for those sensors to reproduce. Okay. What I find is that I'll take a picture with my older iPhone and the reds just get oversaturated. It's sort of like the whole area, like a whole leaf will all be the exact same color of red, even though my eyes can see a lot of variation in color there. And it was bright sun, so this was a difficult situation for that camera to capture. Awesome. It was perfect. Okay. So we're taking pictures of some fuchsia flowers. They were some bougainvélia. And the iPhone 5s was more muted than the others in the way the color was reproduced, but it was actually more accurate to what our eyes saw. I think it was the most natural. The iPhone 5s made it look like you really saw it. Right. Now, the Nokia 1020 was way oversaturated. There were big sections of the flowers that were all the same colors. I didn't think that it did a very good job at all. I mean, they were horrible photos, but they weren't nearly as good as the iPhone 5s. I'd have to agree. And then the other three cameras were kind of in the middle. They were more vibrant, somewhat saturated, but not too bad. Next we headed over to the marina and we found some brightly colored kayaks. I think it was good. It really gave us a good photograph to take. It really showed a lot of contrast, bright sun, vivid colors, and actually some deep shadow. How do you think the cameras did? In this case, the iPhone 5s did a really good job of getting the brightness of the colors. They were bright yellow and bright blue, but it also had the dynamic range to pick up the rocks that were under the water in the foreground of the bay there. It definitely did the best. I mean, to see that shadow detail in the water was pretty good. The other cameras had a tendency to overexpose on the yellow kayak. The yellow kayak got wrecked in, I know it was in the 1020 and I think the Samsung might have done, Samsung did an interesting thing. The kayaks looked beautiful and there was no detail at all in the water. You might have looked at that and went, wow, that's an awesome photo and taken it home. Maybe a matter of taste there. If you wanted the full dynamic range, you would have been happier with the iPhone 5s. Yeah, I think the 5s was definitely the standout from all the other cameras. Next we decided to head over to the jetty. This was a perfect spot because there were sailboats in the background, beautiful blue sky, and this is where the Nokia Lumia 1020 really stood out. The photographs from it were really beautiful and you could certainly zoom into that sailboat a lot better than any of the other phones. Wouldn't you agree? Absolutely, absolutely. I do want to mention two cameras had a lot of trouble with this scene. The HTC One, three of the four photos I took were completely out of focus and I don't know why. It had a terrible time focusing with that scene and the one that was in focus when we got it back and looked at it in high res, it was very over sharpened by the software in the camera. So that was a disappointment. The real disappointment, we were really liking, both of us were liking the Samsung Galaxy S4 in bright sunlight and blue skies, it was really rich and vibrant, looked really beautiful, but the camera kept failing. We have a photo of it failing, actually, that we'll show you here. And we would reboot the phone and it would fail again. We'd get one photo out of it and it would fail again. So unfortunately the Samsung Galaxy S4 lost any chance in the running and it was kind of a disappointment. I thought the 5s and the 5 both looked about the same in the scene. Yeah, they looked good. And they looked good. They didn't look bad. You know, they looked okay. The Nokia 1020, just enough better to definitely take the spot. Then we started zooming in and we had to do a lot of math here to figure out exactly how to compare them. This is a little over my head, so hold on here. So let's get out our calculus books here. But the Nokia 1020 is a 41 megapixel sensor, but that's as a circle. So when you actually take a rectangular photo, you don't get as many pixels. And we were doing these at 4 by 3, so we'd have comparable photos because the 5s and the 5 take a 4 by 3 photo. So you actually get fewer pixels and I forget exactly, it's 30 some odd you get. So that's four times as many as the 8 megapixel sensor in the iPhone 5s. So it should be, you would think you could get four times closer. It turns out that's in two dimensions, so you have to square it to get four times, which means it's only twice as big. So when we zoomed in to 200% on the iPhone 5s picture, the boat we were looking at was the same size as the Nokia 1020 at 100%. It looked way better than the iPhone 5s, but it was only twice as big. If that makes any sense at all, half as pixelated. It doesn't make sense to me because I just go out and snap the photos. And I think that's what most people do. Don't you think? Exactly, exactly. But some people do want to zoom into photos. So I think it is an important factor. But it's not eight times better. No. Or 10 times better. It was about twice. It's about twice as much. Next, we decided to take a look at low-light photography. This is probably one of the areas I thought cell phones did the weakest, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. And it's sad because that's where you probably take more than half of your photos as indoors at parties and things like that. Yeah, it's probably never a great thing. I mean, the camera can only do so much. Now, the iPhone 5s did promise that their low-light photography would be a lot better. And it appears it was, wouldn't you say? Yeah, it was definitely better than the 5. By the way, we're talking low-light without a flash right now. We'll get to the flash in a minute. The 5s was pretty good. It had the least amount of grain and noise in it, I think. What was interesting, though, was that the Nokia was just dark. It was underexposed. A little bit, yeah. So we broke our rule. Yeah, we used the exposure compensation dial. And when you got the correct exposure, that photograph was excellent. It was way better. Yeah, it was a really good photo. It was really good for low-light. So I have to say, if there's situations where you would actually need to use a lot of low-light photography, having that Nokia Lumia 1020 really did a nice job. Yeah, yeah. So if you're someone who is willing to do that kind of thing, if you just want to be able to go click, click, click, click, you're not going to get a very good picture with a 1020. But if you're willing to do a swipe and then you get a bunch of dials, and one of them is the exposure compensation, and you just start cranking that up, you would see that you get a better photo. And with enough light, with opening that up, it actually came out with a really nice photo. Yeah, I said. So straight out of the box, the 5S. But if you were willing to put a little effort in, you could go way above that with the 1020. I agree. Some of the other phones also didn't look probably, what would you say, was the worst of the group? Definitely the Samsung. The Samsung was horrible. If you didn't like someone, take a picture of them with a Samsung Galaxy CX-4 in low light. I'd have to agree. There was a lot of grain in that photo. Next, we tried flash photography. And again, this is one of my least favorite areas with a cell phone. Just not good. No, no. Attractive. And again, I'd say in this situation, iPhones knew to flash system did the best. I mean, it's better. It's not as nice even as your typical point to, I wouldn't say, or compact camera. I was hoping for more out of the 1020. But we got a really strange color cast. That was a little yellow also. It seemed like we got a color cast off of the others. I think which one was red and which one was green. Yeah, the Samsung, I think, was pink. One of the HTC One was green. The 5 was just a little too bright. But again, we didn't think any of these photos were ones you would frame. No, that's for sure. So in this situation, I guess they're improving. That would be the best way to look at the way these came. Yeah, it's getting better. But that's it. After looking at all the smartphones, I would say the iPhone 5s was the winner. If you're looking for a camera that you're just shooting on automatic in all types of scenes, what do you think? Yeah, I think so. I didn't think it would do as well as it did in so many different categories. Because we went back and forth a lot trying to judge these different cameras. The two front runners are probably still the 1020 and the 5s. But looking at the 5s versus the 5, I'm not sure I saw enough to make me go, wow, you've got to get a 5s just for the camera alone. I would agree. I would not probably upgrade. And that's actually, I wanted to see the camera to make that decision. Now, we didn't get into the advanced features, like we explained before. So on the 5s, it's got a slow-mo feature that's really fun. It takes pictures of a video at 120 frames per second. You can slow pieces down. I know we've been having a lot of fun playing around with that. And then it's got a burst mode where I'm not exactly sure how it works, but it's supposed to take the best of a lot of shots. So there are some other functions just within the camera. And again, like in the 1020, we didn't explore all of the different functions of that camera either in its advanced features. Yeah, I think the 1020 is a great camera for someone who wants to have features like. More control. Yeah, more control. Manual focus, manual. Yeah, the exposure compensation. It's got white balance you can change. Yeah, not many. Exactly. If you've got family and friends who will sit still while you do that. That's a good point. And we found that you were able to zoom in the photos more. So it kind of gives you what they're calling a telephoto just by having more pixels and being able to have a larger photograph. Right. And it doesn't sacrifice much in quality with the smaller sensor size. I mean, that's smaller sensor size, the smaller pixels. But it makes up for that in the way it combines those pixels together to make a better photo. So the 1020, I'd put it awfully close to the 5S. Yeah, it just depends. I just, it had a few problems in the low light and a little bit of a color shift in some of the photos, which I think overall the iPhone 5S just did a better job. I'm afraid I have to say so too. Taking a look at all these cell phones was a lot of fun. But it was a lot of work. And I couldn't have done it without Allison. You know, with her expertise, there were issues with the computers, the cameras. We had to figure out how to get Windows phone photos onto a Mac and Android photos. It was awesome. I think we're probably ready for next year's crop, right? Exactly. If we start now, we'd be done by then. That's a good idea. For the Los Angeles Times, I'm Robert Lochman.