Best camera phones 2024 - buyer’s guide

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is one of the best cameraphones in 2024. A favorite cameraphone in the office, the 13 Ultra didn't leave a lot to ask for, yet Xiaomi did find a few areas to touch up for the 14. Close-focusing telephotos have become the latest trend, and the two ones here are possibly the finest at that, but also excel at a distance. The variable aperture on the main camera is also welcome if you'd like that much control over DoF, though we don't see that as quite the transformational development.

An unrivaled selling point of the 14 Ultra is the Photography kit. Realizing its appeal and its potential to drive Ultra sales, Xiaomi has continued to develop the contraption and add features to it. Indeed, it adds further cost to an already expensive phone, but the two combined will get you as close to a 'real' camera as a smartphone can in ergonomics and experience.

The new Ultra is a global phone, finally! It is also a nearly perfect flagship, one that's so easy to love. Its unique design is beautiful and we do appreciate the ingress protection. Then there is one of the best displays in the industry - a 1440p LTPO OLED with 12-bit color depth, dynamic 120Hz refresh, and Dolby Vision support.

Then there is the most current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with class-leading performance. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra also has excellent thermal handling and offers great sustained performance, We certainly cannot praise the battery life (it’s an average one), but we can praise the the charging speed. Kudos for including the 120W charger in the box, too, as this has become a rare thing lately. We also liked the speakers' loudness and quality.

In the end, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is quite probably the finest camera with a phone attached to it that you can buy today.

Another installment in what's become one of our favorite lineups for camera greatness. The vivo X100 Pro lives up to our expectations and brings a one-of-a-kind imaging experience. Only the ultrawide camera is giving us a little pause by not providing quite wide enough of a field of view, but the spectacular primary camera joined by an impressively capable telephoto snapper more than make up for it.

The Dimensity chipset managed to prove its worth during the course of our review with high peak performance and excellent stability under load. It was also efficient enough for the vivo to earn high marks for endurance and the fast charging didn't hurt the X100 Pro either. And just because it's got less than ideal grip, doesn't mean that the X100 Pro isn't easy on the eyes - we can be superficial like that sometimes.

The vivo X100 Pro is an excellent device with all-round flagship specs and features. It is one of the most cutting-edge smartphones and cameraphones in particular. All things considered, you can call us fans of the X100 Pro - vivo made another top-class cameraphone.

There is also an even more beefed-up version sold in China - the vivo X100 Ultra - with a properly great selfie camera and arguably the best telephoto camera on the market. If there is a phone that deserves to be imported, this is the one!

You do not get the most premium iPhone for a single feature. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is worth getting for its well-rounded user experience. But we also believe that the iPhone 16 Pro Max is among the best phones for photography on the go right now. It delivers superb photo and video quality across the board, its 2x zoomed prowess is great and it has some neat features like Dolby Vision and Cinematic video capturing, ProRAW, cool automation like auto portraits and auto night mode.

One of its options targets videographers and will go under the radar for the masses. We are talking about capturing 4K60 ProRes videos straight onto an external SSD drive or memory card, which might open use cases and workflows that have never been possible before.

Also, this is the best iPhone ever made. It has a stunning design, an outstanding display, great performance, impressive speakers, pro-grade cameras with a consistently good photo and class-leading video quality, long battery life and likable if weird iOS.

Overall, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is one of the most versatile and consistently good and reliable smartphones for still and video photography out there. It is a point and shoot device, but it also allows for professional capturing and massive prost processing potential.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra is not the perfect smartphone, this year we even have a cons section, but it is the one of the most versatile cameraphones on the market right now.

The camera system is mostly a source of satisfaction. The rethinking of the telephoto setup is a forward step that adds another layer of versatility. The rest of the rear modules we'd almost call stale next to what we're seeing from Chinese brands and their impressive hardware, but Samsung has managed to squeeze out such performance out of these otherwise uninspired bits that it doesn't feel like we're getting less than what is right.

And, of course, the Galaxy S24 Ultra remains Samsung's ultimate smartphone, and it's the most complete package you can buy today. Samsung didn't just coast for another year, which we felt was the case with the S23 Ultra. We got more new stuff this time around than we could have predicted. The new materials in the build don't just feel nice; they also improve the visual experience. After years of enjoying the coolness of curved displays, we've now grown up to realize that flat screens have their benefits, and Samsung's now giving us flat screens across the range.

Without much fuss around that subject, the S24 Ultra is one of the longest-lasting Androids you can buy, and even if the big names from China charge three times as fast, the Pixel and the iPhone don't. An always-with-you stylus remains elusive outside of the Samsung flagship, and you may not know you want or need one until you've had one.

Yes, there were display issues. And, yes, the charging speed is far from great. But In the end, Samsung's ultimate smart/camera/phone comes easily recommended.

The Xperia 1 VI is the best Xperia yet. The standard aspect ratio, the lower resolution and the implementation of an LTPO OLED all play a big role in our assessment. The new display is probably the reason why the device got impeccable battery Active Use Score. We also liked the loud and nicely-tuned speakers, making this phone the ultimate multimedia device.

The cameras offer consistently great photo and video quality, with natural processing. And, of course, there are unmatched options for tuning if you know what you are doing. If you are a photography nerd, you will definitely appreciate the solid hardware at hand here coupled with excellent battery life and various Pro-oriented modes and settings for photos and, eventually, for videos.

It's not all great, though. The unremarkable video quality with the zoom camera, the uncompetitive charging speed and the underwhelming performance tuning of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 keep us from giving this phone an immediate reccomendation.

The Pixel 9 Pro XL brings relatively major stylistic changes plus some hardware upgrades that do make it a better phone than the previous generation. The brighter display is a welcome improvement, of course, and it's possibly the brightest in the business, though it's not like the 8 Pro was lacking in this respect. Battery life has been a blemish for Pixels in head-to-head comparisons, and the new model is a step up in this respect, though it remains in a trailing position among its peers.

The Pixel's biggest selling point lies in its AI capabilities, Google wants us to believe. A bunch of software features are at your disposal for both work and play and image editing tools can help save a photo that circumstances tried to ruin. Having a phone that's made by the OS maker has its benefits even if they're hard to quantify.

We're not quite as thrilled with the camera system as we would have hoped to be, though. The Pixel is lagging behind some of the trends and just because AI can enhance photos and even make up stuff that wasn't there, doesn't mean it can be used as a replacement for state of the art camera hardware. The brand new selfie camera is pretty great, the others fail to excite. This doesn’t mean the camera quality is not good, it’s just that we expected a bit more.

Of course, the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a well rounded and fully capable high-end smartphone - that's beyond debate. This generation prioritizes the phone's development as a vehicle for Google's AI pursuits - if you're into that and want to ride the AI wave, by all means go for it. There are also meaningful improvements on some of the fundamentals to appeal to the AI skeptics.

Excellence on the fundamentals should go without saying, after all we’ve out the phone on this list exactly for this. Even in this context, however, the OP12 is among the better ones in terms of battery life, charges faster than just about anything else mainstream, and has a display that does more HDR than a lot of competitors.

Sure, we're not quite fond of the 12's video output during the day, though we're almost convinced that the spectacular stabilization makes up for shortcomings elsewhere. Selfies are also unusually good, but more important, we feel, is the overall great stills performance from all rear cameras in all conditions.

In the end, the OnePlus 12 makes it quite easy for us. It's so great in many ways, especially in the camera department, and only has small-ish missteps in just a couple of areas - that sounds like grounds for a recommendation.

The Xiaomi 13T Pro is among the best phones you can get for €550. It delivers on every single promise and has plenty of flagship-grade, class-leading features. The new IP68-rated design, especially the one with the vegan leather back, is classy and stunning.

The Leica cooperation must be paying off, as all rear cameras deliver outstanding photo and video quality day and night with natural-looking and balanced output. We have no complaints from the video stabilization, too.

The 13T Pro impresses with one of the best OLED screens in the industry that is jam-packed with premium features, and it can also brag with the smallest punch hole. Furthermore, the Xiaomi 13T Pro employs one of the fastest chipsets on the smartphone market, which delivers excellent performance and stability across the board.

The only real setback we encountered on the Xiaomi 13T Pro was the selfie camera. It is a 20MP Quad-Bayer shooter that is just an insult to any cameraphone, let alone one developer with Leica. Its photo and video quality are quite average, too. Some might have hope for longer optical zoom, but we guess that will come with the Xiaomi 14 phones.

Long story short - the Xiaomi 13T Pro is one of the best phones right now, with top-notch hardware, exceptional execution across the board and a promising future.

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is our first budget pick here for being the best cameraphone around the €500 mark. The Pro isn't the top model in the Motorola Edge lineup this time around, but it nicely slots somewhere below flagship territory. Even with the remarkably-specced Ultra, the Edge 50 Pro still manages to offer a very capable camera setup for stills - a champion at light gathering of a main camera is joined by a solid telephoto in a segment where dedicated zoom cameras are rare and an ultrawide that's got autofocus and puts it to good use. And then it tops it all off with some excellent selfies for good measure.

It doesn't quite tickle our fancy for video recording though, so it's worth keeping in mind that it's not quite the all-round cameraphone it could have been. Also somewhat annoying is the choice of chipset, which may be adequate for most things, but still doesn't look good next to similarly priced competitors in some markets.

The display is better than most in most metrics and it's also Pantone-validated - a first in the industry and a feat that's bound to attract crowds of buyers (or so thinks the marketing team). The back cover's color also comes from that company's catalog and it sure is nice, but we'd be equally happy with a generically named hue as long as it's that grippy and maintains the water-tightness - something that is still not universally found, even for Edge 50 Pro money.

Motorola says it's big on experiences and transcending the specs wars, which is convenient when the chipset isn't winning any. But the newly renamed Hello UI is a sizable chunk of the experience with an Edge 50 Pro and it's a nice blend of the visual simplicity of 'stock' Android and the personality and functionality that Motorola has built and continued to develop on top of it.

Overall, we do recommend the Motorola Edge 50 Pro as a cameraphone. Read full review

The Realme 13 Pro+ does a remarkable job in one area, while maintaining a very high standard in the rest of the disciplines that matter. Strong on the fundamentals, the 13 Pro+ excels in endurance, charges quickly, and has a super-bright display. It's reasonably tightly sealed against water too, something that does not come by default among its peers.

The 13 Pro+'s trump card among the competition is its telephoto camera that takes photos with unrivaled quality in its affordable segment. Dedicated zoom modules are a rarity in this context to begin with, and not only does the Realme have one, but it's also a properly high-quality one. The main camera is also among the best in the class, and the two can easily make up for the so-so ultrawide.

To sum up - the Realme 13 Pro+ has the best telephoto camera in its price range, so good that it rivals much more expensive smartphones in zoom image quality. The phone is also very good in most other metrics you can think of. We approve.