Tired of hauling around an extra camera? Grab one of the best smartphones for taking photos and you might find your point-and-shoot collecting dust.
Your phone is the camera you always carry. If you haven’t upgraded it in a few years, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much phone camera performance (particularly low-light image quality) has improved. In fact, we’ve pretty much reached the point where you can leave your old point-and-shoot at home as long as you’ve got a good camera phone in your pocket. But not all phone cameras are created equal. We put every phone we review through a rigorous series of camera evaluations to determine which are the best shooters on the market. We’ve gathered the top camera phones here. You’ll never have to worry about carrying a separate camera if you’ve got one of these in your pocket, and each is also a stellar smartphone in its own right. From Selfies to Portraits One think we’re finding frustrating right now is that many of the best cameras are on smartphones that aren’t available in the US. There’s intense camera innovation going on from manufacturers such as Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi, but for various reasons they don’t sell phones in the US and their phones don’t work very well on our networks. In the US, the usual suspects of Apple, Google, and Samsung have the best cameras. Higher-end phones perform better, of course, but we’ve included a few less expensive phones on the list, notably the Google Pixel 4a and the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G, which have the best cameras you’ll find in their price range. The most important factor in any photo isn’t the camera—it’s the photographer. No matter what phone you have, following our camera expert Jim Fisher’s tips and tricks for camera phone photos can make your images better. The Google Pixel 4a takes a great shot with a single lens. Trends and Accessories A few years ago we saw a blossoming trend of phones with lots of lenses, and it’s still in full bloom. Many phones now have a standard lens, a magnifying zoom lens, and a wide-angle lens. An infrared time-of-flight sensor can help judge depth for bokeh and augmented reality apps.
