Low Light Christmas Trees on 2019’s Best Phones (and an iPhone SE)
We have a little tree my wife and I put up every year and it’s a thing that is kinda hard to take good pictures of. There is quite a bit of dynamic range which typically means photos look overly darkened to compensate for the bright lights.
2019 has been a very good year for smartphone cameras, so I gave a few of them a shot last night to see how they’d do.
Samsung Galaxy S10e
![](https://birchtree.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/82670897-D6EB-404A-8E2E-1A83BD38525F-scaled.jpeg)
Pixel 4
![](https://birchtree.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/6FA9BB03-51E4-4BD1-9635-1D2B31722522-scaled.jpeg)
iPhone 11 Pro
![](https://birchtree.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/E47ADB0C-00D1-4EA4-BFCB-3E34231D8B5C-scaled.jpeg)
And for fun context, the 2016 iPhone SE (with the 2015 iPhone camera)
![](https://birchtree.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/FE1695B5-90B7-4A29-95A3-21CD2E54526E-scaled.jpeg)
![](https://birchtree.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/F2C8613A-99B2-4B34-895F-CE3EEC7EC44C-scaled.jpeg)
Overall, I’m pretty impressed! Especially when you look at what we were using just 3-4 years ago, the differences in color and clarity are striking. Outside of the SE clearly being worse than the newer phones, the Pixel 4 is the outlier here in terms of color; it’s much cooler than the other images and is not an accurate representation of what the tree actually looked like. I think this has to do with Google’s new smart white balancing feature, which usually makes great choices, but sometimes results in crazy decisions1.
- Supposedly this was fixed in a previous update, so maybe this is a choice and not a bug, but either way I’d say this is not right. ↩