The Best of Android - Mid-2020 — Which phone has the best camera - Android

The Best of Android awards have arrived for H1 of 2020, and today we're looking at cameras! So which are the best?

The quality of a smartphone’s camera system has become an integral part of most people’s purchasing decisions. We use our phones’ cameras for everything. From selfies to social media, to documentary filmmaking, the ability to have a camera at the ready at any time is a luxury we didn’t have until smartphones arrived.

As part of our Best of Android: Mid-2020 awards, we’re analyzing the smartphones with the best camera systems according to the collective opinion of our team of reviewers editors. We’ll compare and analyze the finalists and announce the Android camera king for H1 2020.

---

Editor’s note: If you’re wondering why your favorite phone isn’t on this list, keep in mind only phones released in the first half of 2020 are here. 2019 phones and phones released after H1 2020 are not eligible.

How and why we test

When we review a phone’s camera system, we’re looking for several factors. We look at aspects like dynamic range, sharpness, saturation, and even natural depth of field. Basically, we try to examine how pleasing an image the phone can produce, alongside special capabilities like optical zoom, software bokeh, and low-light modes.

We're looking at multiple factors, but in the end, it comes down to how good an image looks.

There is a lot more to the quality and usefulness of a camera than data-based tests can provide. Sure, a metric can give a specific score, but photography is frustratingly subjective. What’s technically the most accurate photo usually isn’t the one most people would print out and stick on a wall: most people prefer some edited colors, a dash of post-processing, and maybe even some help from computational photography. So we rallied the troops at Android Authority to compare images from all the phones released in the first half of 2020, relying on our decades of collective photography experience to pick a winner.

Which phone released so far this year has the best camera system? Let’s get right into it.

Best of Android: Mid-2020 camera winner — Huawei P40 Pro Plus

After weeks of analyzing photos, the Huawei P40 Pro Plus is crowned the overall camera winner. Its huge 1/1.28-inch primary sensor allows for incredible light intake and detail, and the innovative 10x optical periscope zoom camera gives it better reach than any other smartphone available today.

Here’s the specs of the camera system:

Huawei nails the sharpness and tonality of images with the P40 Pro Plus. It has a huge amount of dynamic range but uses an appropriate level of contrast that makes images look natural and not overly washed out. Color is on point as well, though it does tend to shift greens towards the yellow spectrum, most likely due to the special RYYB pixel array Huawei uses to capture more light. Still, images look incredibly solid overall (for a smartphone camera, anyway).