Cameras are an increasingly important part of smartphones, and as specs start to level out they’re one of the main ways that manufacturers try to make their handsets stand out.
That can mean more lenses, as with the quad-lens iPhone 12 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, higher megapixel counts, unusual features and gimmicks, or just a focus on making the best single or dual-lens snapper possible.
Below, you’ll find the very best smartphone cameras available in 2021. And note also that while this guide focuses on their camera credentials, all of these handsets are great phones in other ways too.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra had Samsung’s best smartphone camera of 2020, and it’s still one of the best now.
It has a 108MP f/1.8 main camera, a 12MP f/3.0 telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom, and a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera, similar to the S20 Ultra.
These all perform brilliantly, meaning that you have three excellent cameras covering the three types of photography that people most commonly want to use on smartphones.
It also offers a longer optical zoom than most smartphones, and its included S Pen stylus can be helpful when editing photos.
Until recently OnePlus phones weren’t really known for their cameras, but the OnePlus 9 Pro changes that, thanks to a new partnership with Hasselblad coupled with some genuinely impressive hardware and software.
The highlight of the camera setup here is the 50MP f/2.2 ultra-wide snapper, which has a freeform lens to avoid distortion at the edge of images – something most other ultra-wide smartphone cameras suffer from.
Elsewhere, there’s a 48MP f/1.8 main camera, an 8MP f/2.4 telephoto one (with 3.3x optical zoom), and a 2MP f/2.4 monochrome sensor, to assist with black and white snaps. It’s a strong setup and aided by a slick camera interface and a multitude of shooting modes, including unusual ones like tilt shift.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max has the best cameras of any iPhone, edging slightly ahead of the iPhone 12 Pro thanks to larger pixels on its main 12MP f/1.6 snapper and a slightly greater optical zoom range (of 2.5x) on its 12MP f/2.2 telephoto camera. Then there’s also a 12MP f/2.4 ultra-wide one, and a LiDAR scanner for judging depth.
So there are a lot of lenses here, and beyond being the best iPhone for photography, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is one of the very best phones for it full stop.
There are a few reasons for that, from its excellent Night Mode (allowing for class-leading low-light shots), to how easy it is to just point, shoot, and get great photos, thanks to Apple’s computational photography doing a lot of the hard work behind the scenes.
That’s helped by clever features like Smart HDR 3 and Deep Fusion, which intelligently alter images and combine multiple exposures to make for the best shot possible.
Thanks to its lack of access to the Google Play Store the Huawei Mate 40 Pro certainly isn’t for everyone, but as camera phones go it’s one of the very best – and there are alternative app stores you can use.
It has a 50MP f/1.9 main camera, a 12MP f/3.4 periscope camera with 5x optical zoom, and a 20MP f/1.8 ultra-wide camera, as well as a dual-lens camera on the front, with both a 13MP f/2.4 main lens and a depth sensor.
It can zoom in further than most phones – matching the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with 5x optical and 50x digital zoom, and it’s also much better at taking photos in low light than most phones.
The ultra-wide camera also performs better than most, and does an excellent job of avoiding distortion at the edge of images – something that lesser ultra-wide snappers often struggle with.
With the Huawei Mate 40 Pro being packed full of shooting modes and options too, and excelling a similar amount for video, it really is a photographer’s dream, so if you like to take a lot of photos with your phone, this handset is well worth considering even with having slightly fewer apps available than most Android handsets.
The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is the best phone at a lot of things, and among those things is photography, as it takes everything great about the snappers on the Note 20 Ultra and Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and builds on them.
If you like taking long-distance shots then nothing else can touch it, as the Galaxy S21 Ultra has both a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom, and a 10MP f/4.9 periscope camera with 10x optical zoom. That means it can both optically zoom further than most handsets, and to two different focal lengths, which is rare on smartphones.
But it also excels at more conventional photography, as the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra additionally has both a 108MP f/1.8 main snapper and a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one. All of the lenses are high-quality, and all but the ultra-wide are backed up by optical image stabilisation.
There’s also a decent 40MP f/2.2 camera on the front, plus the ability to record video in up to 8K quality, and all sorts of useful shooting modes, including a night mode and the option to take photos with multiple lenses at once.
You can even enable a tool that will use AI to highlight the best framing for a shot, ensuring all of your pictures look as good as possible.
The above phones are easily among the very best camera phones you can get at the time of writing. In our view, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is the very best, but it has got some steep competition and it’s not the winner in every category.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max excels if you just want to point and shoot for example, and it’s also great for taking night shots, while the OnePlus 9 Pro is a top choice for ultra-wide photography.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and Huawei Mate 40 Pro meanwhile have similar skill sets to the S21 Ultra, and while for our money they can’t quite match it, they also don’t cost quite as much.
So consider what you want to use the camera for and what your budget is before picking one. But for its versatility and the core quality of what’s on offer, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra is our top pick.
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