S6 Camera sucks compared to Note 4?

[Matrix Leader]

Look at the red carpet image in this link:

http://www.gsmarena.com/shootout_galaxy_s6_note_4_galaxy_s5_iphone_6-review-1229p2.php

Scroll down till you see the comparison of the red carpet on the balcony, the S6 doesn't show any of the lines of the carpet while the Note 4 shows them clearly.

What is this? I thought the cameras were the same. Now I am contemplating getting the Note 4 or the S6 Edge because I wnat a good camera but this lack of detail capturing is very bad.

Please advice

 

[EarlyMon]

Personally, I'd say it's too soon to worry and far too soon for the camera reviews.

The blogs do it every time.

The S6 is not running the software that it's going to ship with, and it's being compared to three devices that have been through update cycles.

It's the same with the M9 photo reviews and it was the same with last year's LG G3 photo reviews.

Either every new phone reviewed that I've seen for years has a terrible camera somehow or the blogs are doing it wrong.

Could the two top phone releases this year have really crappy cameras?

Sure. Anything is possible. I just doubt it.

Take a picture in the store when it releases, see if I'm right.

 

[Matrix Leader]

Personally, I'd say it's too soon to worry and far too soon for the camera reviews.

The blogs do it every time.

The S6 is not running the software that it's going to ship with, and it's being compared to three devices that have been through update cycles.

It's the same with the M9 photo reviews and it was the same with last year's LG G3 photo reviews.

Either every new phone reviewed that I've seen for years has a terrible camera somehow or the blogs are doing it wrong.

Could the two top phone releases this year have really crappy cameras?

Sure. Anything is possible. I just doubt it.

Take a picture in the store when it releases, see if I'm right.

That makes sense, I can't imagine that such a flafship phone could take such useless phoots with that lack of detail as we saw with the carpet in that review. It is worse than any pic I've seen.

To be honest, I was actually wanting to get the M9 but I was shocked by the image quality and lack of vibrance in the images taken with its 20 MP camera. that and the lack of OIS made my only choices now the Note 4 or the S6 but I am leaning towards the Note 4 now for the bigger battery and hopefully the better camera if we take into consideration that review from GSM Arena

 

[EarlyMon]

I'm a big HTC fan myself, but I know a lot of people with the Note - personally, I just don't think that you can go wrong with one if you're cool with that size phone. I'd go for one in a heartbeat if I could manage the larger carry. Fwiw, I betcha dollars to donuts that the M9 camera review is the same business as the S6. They all want reviews to influence the sales the day it hits the shelves - they never have the as-to-be-shipped software ready, and we all get stuck at the back end of confusion.

I have the most hated phone camera of 2014. Takes really good pictures despite the reviewers.

 

[Cobravision]

You should really look at the entirety of the picture instead of a tiny part of it blown up. None of the cropped areas look particularity nice - they all have grain and other artifacts. No one uses a camera that way. At least, no one sane. Judging a camera as sucking based on a blown up crop is kind of missing the point entirely.

 

[EarlyMon]

And yet that's exactly the excuse that the entire Internet gives for hating the M7 and M8 cameras.

 

[Cobravision]

At 4mp, even a small amount of cropping shows a lack of detail. The examples in the gsmarena shootout are extreme crops. I crop all of my pictures to frame them, just not as much as gsmarena.

 

[EarlyMon]

At 4mp, even a small amount of cropping shows a lack of detail. The examples in the gsmarena shootout are extreme crops.

Fine.

/facepalm

Moving on.

The OP got himself a new Note 4.

 

[Cobravision]

This is what I'm getting at -- here's a resized version of the original picture from the GSMArena article. The box in red is the cropped area:

And this is a normal picture, not a panorama shot. No one crops their pictures to that degree. So it's really bizarre to claim the S6 camera "sucks" because this tiny little square didn't display the detail. Note that I didn't use the word "resolve", because it did resolve the squares. They're just very subtle:

The difference is that the S6 processing software dials back on the sharpening. What you see on the Note 4 and the GS5 are enhanced by sharpening, which may be fine and dandy if you're cropping out 300 X 300 pixel areas from a 16mp picture, but it also introduces a ton of noise and artifacting. Check out the difference between the two:

There's noise all over the Note 4 crop. When you look at it on your phone or even your monitor the noise will get lost when it scales down just like the perceived softness of the S6 will get lost when you scale to your display device. But that's not softness, it's that the Note 4 is much more aggressive with the sharpen filter.

Here's a more typical crop. It's 4mp, which is a quarter of the original size.

Which one is more pleasing to the eye? Can you guess which one is which? Can you resolve any sharpening artifacts or softness? That's why someone bugging out over the squares on a 300 X 300 cropped area of a 16mp image is totally missing the forest for the trees.

Spoiler

The top is the S6 and the Note 4 is the bottom. In truth, I think the top one is much better looking and I can totally see the noise artifacts on the bottom one. But it's also quite possible that the differences in lighting on a semi-cloudy day are the source of the more pleasing image on top.

 

[SonnyGreene]

Note 4 Edge shot (top) vs S6 Edge shot (bottom)...