The German IT online magazine Computerbase asked its community to rate smartphone images. Fifteen different motifs were captured using nine smartphones. However, the community was not informed which devices were included in the vote:
The Fairphone 6 achieved second place in the night shot category. In daylight shots, it landed in the middle of the pack in fifth place, where it also sits in the overall ranking.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max trailed behind the Fairphone 6 in all categories
Interesting…most of my night shots so far are not in the same league as on my iPhone 14 Pro.
Even had some very weird (violet) colour filter in a shot this morning. But the FP6 went on a screen on/screen off rampage directly after…so maybe some system hiccup. Will test this again soon.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the night shots with my FP6. But that’s just my subjective impression and I haven’t compared them directly with other smartphones. Besides, my expectations weren’t particularly high.
However, I did notice that the quality of the FP6 images can vary considerably. Occasionally, photos are significantly oversharpened with low-contrast areas appearing very smudgy and lacking detail at the same time.
Still, when I look at the photos in the test, I really don’t see any advantages of the flagship phones over the FP6.
I think the Fairphone 6 makes pretty good photos, with the ultrawide and the main camera. Mostly on par (sometimes better, sometimes worse) with my iPhone 14 Pro and seemingly the iPhone 16 Pro as well.
Given the very different price points and how small Fairphone is compared to Samsung, Apple and Google that IS very impressive.
Because the kind of photos the majority of people take (e.g. for use on Instagram) can easily be done with an equal amount of quality without a flagship model.
Wow that’s awesome! I have the /e/os version and am fairly disappointed with the camera so far. But I’m hoping for a software update that might fix it.
Most annoying is that I can’t really take outdoor pictures where a clear sky is visible. Either the sky becomes completely overexposed and white, or whatever I am photographing on the ground becomes extremely dark. I never had such issues with my old iPhone 11.
Isn’t that exactly what photography looked like in the good old days if you didn’t do any postprocessing? I recently came back to my DSLR which does have a HDR mode already but it is much slower than in modern smartphone cameras. So usually I don’t use it. And then it’s completely normal that if I take a photo against the sun, people’s faces may be barely visible or the sky is completely white depending on where the measurement focus was. So in other words: Does your camera app have a HDR mode, do you use it and does it probably not work well with the FP6 camera. However, it seems like the efforts that Fairphone put into their own camera app have not made it to the open source world unfortunately.
Photographers learned/knew how to control focus and exposure. Photographers controlled the image by foot, esp. when using a normal lens. Taking a snap mostly is not photography.
