Imaging Matters (Premium)

In 2013, I attended the Nokia Lumia 1020 launch in New York City and was blown away by the quality of the photos it could take. It was the beginning of a new era, and for the subsequent several years, I’ve only used smartphone cameras to capture my memories.

Flash forward to 2021, however, and everything is in flux. The camera systems in modern smartphones offer dramatic improvements over the Lumia 1020 in quality, functionality, and performance, but our expectations have likewise grown as well. And these modern camera systems have moved to multiple camera lenses and AI-based computational photography techniques to help overcome the size limitations of devices that we can and do carry around in our pockets.

We all have different needs and wants, but even those who don’t value camera quality above all other smartphone features would at least begrudgingly agree that photography is a key selling point of almost any smartphone, premium or otherwise, and that the handful of firms that get this right have a key differentiator over the competition. Imaging isn’t just important, it’s job one.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the world’s top smartphone makers have filled the gap left by Nokia’s absence with an obvious focus on photography. Google was perhaps the first with its Nexus 5X and 6P and then the Pixel family of handsets. Apple finally got the message starting in 2016 with the iPhone 7 Plus and its dual-lens setup, but it didn’t really become a contender until the iPhone 11 Pro/Pro Max in 2019. And Samsung, the market leader, didn’t rise into the upper echelon of this market until the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G in early 2020.

But the biggest innovations in this market, especially in what I’ll call the post-Pixel era, came from Huawei. The Huawei P30 Pro, released in early 2019, still has the best overall camera system I’ve used, but that’s because I was never able to get my hands on a P40 Pro. Among that handset's camera innovations is a ludicrously good periscope-based telephoto lens with 5X optical zoom. Two years later, it still hasn’t been matched by Apple, Google, or Samsung.

Of course, Huawei has some issues. Despite availability issues here in the U.S.---Huawei handsets were always rare in the U.S. and hard to find---the firm was on the fast track to overtake Samsung as the number one maker of smartphones by 2019. But then the China-based corporation was brought down by U.S. trade sanctions and its handsets no longer offer full Android or Google’s applications and services, making them almost pointless no matter how good the cameras. Huawei, once the obvious choice, is suddenly no longer in the running.

Concurrent to all this, a new challenger had emerged, with its unit sales and overall presence in the U.S. increasing each year. OnePlus smartphones have long been hailed for their tremendous value---premium specifications at mid-tier prices---but as the innovations have outpaced tho...