Asus Zenfone 6 vs. Samsung Galaxy A80

Selfies and portraits

Let's face it - these rotating cameras are a boon for selfies. Typically phones have higher quality rear cameras - larger sensors, brighter lenses, and less impressive front facing units with smaller sensors and/or dimmer lenses to meet space limitations, though often crazy pixel counts that mean little in the real world. With the Zenfone 6 and the Galaxy A80, the main camera is also your selfie camera.

Generally speaking they capture nice looking selfies with pleasing skintones though the Galaxy will render faces in a slightly more yellowish manner next to the Zenfone's more accurate, though not necessarily more pleasing results. The Zenfone does tend to expose a little dimmer overall, and in this respect the Galaxy's selfies look better out of the camera.

The Zenfone 6's ever so slightly wider aperture makes another difference we wouldn't have thought of without comparing these side by side - it actually produces noticeably blurrier backgrounds even without resorting to portrait mode.

Selfie samples: Zenfone 6 • Galaxy A80

One of our main complaints about the Galaxy A80 when we first got it for review, was that it would lock focus on its main camera at a certain distance once you flipped it to take selfies. This has been remedied in the latest update and you can now examine your skin imperfections from up close, something that the Zenfone could do for you from day one.

Close-up selfie samples: Zenfone 6 • Galaxy A80

Portrait modes are available on both phones, and while the Zenfone only relies on the ultra wide angle cam for depth detection, the Galaxy has an additional time-of-flight module for 3D mapping. This gives the Galaxy an edge in... edge detection and it delivers superior separation of subject from background.

Selfie portrait samples: Zenfone 6 • Galaxy A80

That does come with certain caveats, some of them quite odd. Too often, in fact more often than not, we ended up with faces blurred and the background in sharp focus. However, we only got to find that out when viewing the resulting images in the gallery, while the preview looked just right when we were capturing it.

We experienced this in several scenes where we simply couldn't get usable results at arm's length or any distance that isn't way too close. Only that's half the story, because in these scenes we did capture correctly processed portraits at the same distances when holding the phone in portrait orientation, but not in landscape.

Galaxy A80 portrait woes

You can also take ultra wide angle selfies with these two. As it stands, the ones out of the Zenfone look much better in terms of detail, but the Galaxy A80 does boast superior HDR processing.

Ultra wide angle selfies: Zenfone 6 • Galaxy A80