Why would I get an external camera when I have a fully capable phone? That doesn’t make any sense.
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I wasn’t trying to say I think you should do this, but I just wanted to point out that if you found GrapheneOS’s privacy and security benefits enticing enough, and if the main thing preventing you from using it was camera quality, you could have the option to connect another camera to the phone. This can have the effect of a hardware killswitch if you cover up or remove the built-in cameras, and this option has the potential for better camera quality.
I admit that for most people, this option probably isn’t very suitable for everyday use with a lower-risk threat model, though
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The Video Boost feature of Google Pixels (only available on Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL AFAIK) blows away the competition according to Dxomark. The official score does not take account of this feature but they wrote in the camera test of the Pixel that with this feature, it gets the best score of any phone, ever.
Google also says so and I tries the feature and it is impressive.
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And for the record here are the summaries of the scores of the latest flagships of Google, 
and Samsung.
Overall :
Pixel gets the best score for : main photos, ultra-wide and telephoto.
iPhone gets the best main and ultra-wide videos.
Samsung gets the best bokeh and zoom videos.
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thank you!
Apple fanboys never fail to crack me up
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I don’t care about extremely tiny differences in cameras. I’m looking for the phone the offers the absolute best security and privacy. For sure that isn’t Samsung or iPhone.
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then you shouldn’t even be in this thread. or even commented in the first place… This thread is for camera quality debate, not privacy and security of each.
Not just tiny differences. You can see the difference especially on darker environments, when moving and when zooming.
If you want privacy, go with Pixel and Graphene OS. This topic is about camera quality of the flagship phones.
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I looked at the blind test video.
My opinion is heavily skewed by having a beginner camera which does outperform phones simply because bigger is better when it comes to optics.
I’d have preferred to view the original photos on full screen, which makes the mistakes each camera tends to much more obvious.
The processing the phones use has become a tad too obvious for me in most cases. Latest or next gen might change that with changes to “AI” processing though. At the scale of most Smartphone sensors optical abberations also tend to be a much bigger issue forcing the procssing to deal with it.
Overall I’m most impressed by the Pixel, especially the A-series.
I do personally prefer the iPhone. I though it was a bit more consistent and closer to what my camera would do. The first photo with the cloudy background would be backlit without some serious studio lighting (a cloudy day is still about 10 times brighter than a well lit home), so the backlit look it ended up with just seems normal to me. The HDR was either off or it performed terribly.
Pixel seems heavily reliant on “AI” processing with some funky editing effects in darker scenes with more movement on a more detailed review I found of the Pixel 7 Pro camera. Google Pixel 7 Pro Review | Photography Blog
But I can’t argue with the results. The pictures generally look great.
While I’ve used a Samsung budget smartphone camera and have no issues with it. The overall look generally feels more mediocre.
Not bad, but not good either.
Sony’s bad results are a surprise. It might be specific to the pictures they took, but I wouldn’t know.
They dominate the smartphone camera market and have supplied Apple’s iPhone cameras for years.
I believe Samsung and Google both used Sony cameras in the early 2010’s and have since started producing their own.
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