Photo Compare Tool

Welcome to the GSMArena Photo Compare Tool. The tool puts up to three phones and their cameras head to head, testing their performance on three charts.

The overview picture on the left shows each chart through the "eyes" of the phone and the windows on the right show a part of the photo zoomed at 100%. You can drag the green viewfinder (or just click on the overview) to pan around the chart.

Using the scale dropdown (just below the overview picture) you can also scale all the photos down to a matching resolution - from 2MP or 3MP to the maximum resolution of the currently selected phones, or switch them back to their native resolutions.

To swap one phone with another, you can use the dropdown menus below each window. A click in the window will also change which phone’s photo is used for the overview (the current phone is marked with a red border).

The tabs below the overview – ISO12233, Gray chart and Color poster – load one of our three test charts. Each of the three charts emphasizes the camera performance in some area (e.g. resolved detail or color rendering). Note: only the ISO12233 chart is available for phones reviewed before October 2010.

Changing the overview photo from one phone to another makes some differences between cameras very easy to spot – the colors, potential lens distortions or even the dreaded pink spots.

The Compare Tool allows you to evaluate a phone’s camera performance in terms of resolved detail, colors, noise, image processing and lens defects (such as pinchushion distortion, vignetting or pink spots). The charts are high-quality and can (in theory) be used to test cameras up to 30 megapixels, so even the newest cameraphones will have room to show their best.

Since cameras are optimized to shoot real-life scenes and not charts, the GSMArena Photo Compare Tool isn't good for comparing exposure accuracy and dynamic range (printed black and white does not compare to a bright light source and a dark shadow).

All camera samples are taken at the lowest ISO for the cameraphone (where such setting is available) and we pick the published sample as a best pick from at least 10 test shots we take of each poster.