200MP vs 1-inch - testing the best Android phones for photography

Shooting experience

Before you can even begin capturing photos, let's address how quick it is to open the camera app on each phone. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is by far the quickest with its double press of the power button to launch the camera. As a bonus, this feature is on by default. The two Xiaomis and the Vivo also offer a quick launch feature, but you need to enable it. For the Xiaomi phones it's a double press of the volume down button while the phone is locked; for the Vivo, it's holding the volume down while the phone is locked. On the Galaxy, you can double press the power button in any app when the phone is unlocked, and the camera will still pop up.

Then there's the speed of capture. The Galaxy S23 Ultra and the Vivo X90 Pro are the snappier with no tangible delay from the moment you power on the camera to the time to take the picture. Zooming in and out of different lenses is also fast.

The two Xiaomi phones are noticeably slower. In a world of super-fast phones, taking a photo with either of their cameras is palpably slow. But it's the 75mm and 120mm zoom cameras that are the worst offenders. You can miss shots if you jump in and expect either Xiaomi to shoot like a Galaxy S23 Ultra or X90 Pro.

However, once you get used to the added time, your photo-taking will get back on track.

What's harder to get used to is the amount of missed-focus shots we got from the Vivo X90 Pro's 50mm and the Xiaomi 13 Pro's 75mm zoom cameras. It's different for each. The Xiaomi 13 Pro's zoom will blur just about any slow-moving object in any light that isn't sunny. And you can't really adjust for this, aside from telling people to not move. The Vivo's 2x camera will sometimes ignore a face in the frame and focus on a random object instead. Keep this in mind, and you can intervene and focus by tapping on your intended subject to save the day.

Conclusions

It's hard to quantify four phones with three cameras into a single sentenced verdict. But if you must have a TLDR conclusion of our shootout, here it goes: the Xiaomi 12S Ultra takes impressive photos, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is the most consistent shooter, the 13 Pro takes mature photos, and the Vivo X90 is the phone we'd pick to be our pocket camera any day of the week.

But as it's often the case, the TLDR version only tells so much. There's more to each of these cameraphones, so let's elaborate a bit.

The Vivo X90 Pro left us the most impressed. It captures truly wow shots in bright and very low light. It regularly snaps brighter photos with very punchy colors, brilliant highlights, and radiant shadows. At night, the X90 Pro's photos look as if we'd taken them at an earlier time of the day - it's that good. But beneath the over-processed-for-social-media look lies an immaculate technician. There's a great level of detail, expert sharpening, and very low noise. Plus, you can always put the Vivo in Zeiss Natural mode for a more subdued approach. Not that we think you should - it would be like caging a savant.

And while not that zoomy, the Vivo's 50mm f/1.6 camera is the only lens here that gets photographers excited to go and shoot with a phone.

At first, we thought the Xiaomi 13 Pro would be the 12S Ultra that we never got on the global market - even with the bonus of a higher-quality zoom camera. We were wrong. Xiaomi went in an entirely different direction with the 13 Pro. It's more of a photographer's phone. Its images are technical and professional. If you give it a moment, it will capture proficiently great results any enthusiast shutterbug will be proud of.

On the other hand, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra will turn out sharp photos with buoyant colors and dramatic exposures. It's the phone for the person who likes some wow factor to their photos.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has a 200MP main camera - combine the other three, and they'll only reach 150MP - but it's not the megapixels that differentiate the Galaxy from the rest. It's its experience. The Galaxy S23 Ultra looks like the result of years of refinement and is the most consistent shooter here. From 13mm all the way to 240mm, its photos share the same characteristics - sharp, with plenty of detail, excellent dynamic range, and great-looking colors. There were no flukes - no missed focus, not one blown-out sky, and not one undersaturated or oversaturated mess of a photo. No other phone here gives us as consistently good results. It's reliably good and will be brilliant at times.

Since the title of our shootout is 200MP vs. the 1-inch type sensor, we'll say this - Samsung's camera doesn't look twice as small as the others. Yes, it has the smartphone camera look that the others don't, but photo for photo, the 200MP sensor doesn't have any major disadvantages compared to its bigger-pixel competition. Even more impressive, the 200MP is nearly as good in low light. But nearly as good is the highest praise we can give Samsung's camera in this refined company - the 1-inch type sensor is superior in most situations.

Then it's important to look at the whole picture. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the most versatile cameraphone here. It does have a super telephoto 240mm camera, another 69mm camera, and a 23mm wide, and 13mm ultrawide. We've only talked about quality so far, but zoom reach matters as well. The Galaxy is the best phone here for travel, and the Vivo is the most limited.

We're not pretending the Google Pixel 7 Pro and Apple's iPhone 14 Pro don't exist. We expect either would've done great in this company. But it's hard enough to test four phones with three cameras against each other in good and low light, adding two more isn't realistic. But if you guys like this format, we'd gladly do a follow up, including perhaps even the Honor Magic5 Pro - another cameraphone with lots of promise.

And, of course, this was merely an out-of-the-box comparison. You could get different results by using Samsung's Expert RAW, the Xiaomis Leica Authentic, or Vivo's Zeiss mode.

We believe that if you put any of these phones (or any other, really) in the hands of a person with a good eye for capturing the moment, all the technicalities will fade away. At the end of the day, photography is about capturing an interesting scene, the moment, the fleeting feeling, that smile, that frown, that rainbow, that time of happiness shared with the people you care about.