Three of the highest profile smartphones right now also happen to pack three of the most capable camera systems around.
The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max debut key everyday upgrades like a higher-resolution telephoto snapper and a flexible new Center Stage selfie camera, as well as professional-grade video abilities, like GenLock.
Note: Unless otherwise specified, comparison shots in galleries are presented in the following order: iPhone, Pixel, Galaxy.
Specs comparison
Here’s how the three phones in question compare from a specs perspective:
| Header Cell – Column 0 | iPhone 17 Pro | Pixel 10 Pro | Galaxy S25 Ultra |
|---|---|---|---|
Price (at launch): | Pro: $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,999; Pro Max: $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$2,149 | Pro: $999 / £999 / AU$1,699; Pro XL: $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$1,999 | $1,299 / £1,249 / AU$2,199 |
Chipset: | Apple A19 Pro | Google Tensor G5 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy |
Main camera: | 48MP, 1.22μm pixels, ƒ/1.8, 1/1.28-inch, sensor‑shift OIS | 50MP, 1.2μm pixels, ƒ/1.68, 82° FoV, 1/1.31-inch sensor, OIS | 200MP, f/1.7, 24mm, 1/1.3-inch, 0.6µm pixels, OIS |
Ultra-wide camera: | 48MP, ƒ/2.2, 120° FoV, 1/2.55-inch sensor | 48MP, ƒ/1.7, 123° FoV, 1/2.55-inch sensor | 50MP, f/1.9, 120˚ FoV, 1/2.55-inch sensor |
Telephoto camera: | 48MP, 100mm, ƒ/2.8, 1/2.55-inch sensor, 3D sensor‑shift OIS, auto-focus, 4x tetraprism optical zoom | 48MP, ƒ/2.8, 22° FoV, 1/2.55-inch sensor, 5x periscope optical zoom, Super Res Zoom up to 30x, OIS | 10MP, ƒ/2.4, 67mm, 1/3.52-inch, 1.12µm pixels, PDAF, OIS, 3x optical zoom |
Secondary telephoto camera: | N/A | N/A | 50MP, ƒ/3.4, 111mm, 1/2.52-inch, 0.7µm pixels, PDAF, OIS, 5x periscope optical zoom |
Front camera: | 18MP, ƒ/1.9, 1:1 square sensor, PDAF + TrueDepth system | 42MP, ƒ/2.2, 103° FoV, 1/2.51-inch sensor, dual pixel PDAF | 12MP ƒ/2.2, 1/3.2-inch, 1.12µm pixels, 26mm, dual pixel PDAF |
Key imaging technology: | Camera Control, Smart HDR 5, LiDAR scanner, Apple ProRAW, Dolby Vision HDR recording at up to 4K 120fps, Apple LOG 2 video recording, Academy Color Encoding System, Cinematic video recording, latest-gen Photographic Styles | Pro controls, 10-bit HDR video, Cinematic Blue & Pan, Magic Editor, Best Take, Add Me, Photo & Group Unblur, Camera Coach, Motion Mode, Real Tone, Night Sight, Astrophotography, Top Shot, Live HDR+, Video Boost | ProVisual Engine, Reflection removal, Generative fill, Astrophotography, Pro Mode, Pro VideoMode, Dual Recording, Nightography, Instant Slow-mo, Photo Assist, Super HDR, Super Steady video |
Main sensor
Let’s start with the main sensor. We’re assessing these shots as if we’d just fired up the camera app, framed up our scene and tapped the shutter; no tweaked settings or filters, with focus and exposure as decided by each phone.
God Rays
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As with last year’s three-way camera comparison, the iPhone produced the darkest image in this highly dynamic scene. It arguably proved the most authentic in the shadows, but also doesn’t manage to render the orange sunbeams breaking through the clouds fully.
The Pixel offers the best overall composition, with the broadest dynamic range and those all important highlights in the light beams and surrounding cloud cover, as with its predecessor, its color science appears offset from its rivals, with the yellow light appearing far more orange (and thus less true-to-life). Under scrutiny – especially in the darker foreground parts of the scene – Google’s heavy-handing post-processing becomes more evident.
The S25 Ultra captured the flattest of the three images; not as dark and the iPhone, not as bright as the Pixel, but evening out the dynamism of the real-world scenario. While it’s technically the most well-rendered scene overall, by pulling back on the highlights in the light rays, you lose the impact that lies at the heart of the scene.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Lancing College Chapel
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Turning to some architecture, this gothic chapel presented lots of detail for each phone’s camera to pick out against bright afternoon winter light.
In a reversal of the last image, the iPhone this time works hard to brighten up the building against the sky. This does give the image an over-processed, unnatural appearance, but in return there’s plenty of color and detail throughout the scene, even if the overall result is a little flat.
The Pixel arguably presents the most true-to-life offering, with similar detail capture to the iPhone, but more accurate exposure of the building against the sky, whilst still retaining detail in darker areas. Call it inconsistency, but the over-processing from the previous test shot doesn’t rear its head here, creating the most striking, accurate shot of the three.
The Ultra once again brightens first and foremost, paired with Samsung’s typical penchant for more vibrant colour rendition than what’s accurate. While more appealing overall, that brightening has resulted in far more noise in the darker parts of the scene, muddying the phone’s fine capture detail somewhat.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Chapel organ
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Switching to artificial light, the 17 Pro looks to have been the most heavy-handed when it comes to sharpening and detail retention. It’s a gamble the, for the most part, pays off, which nice sharp forms, even if you can see the excessive processing under scrutiny. The iPhone’s shot fall short with regards to color depth, compared to the Pixel and the Galaxy.
The 10 Pro once again offers up the most dynamic image, with plenty of shadow detail contrasting highlights that aren’t blown own, running down the pipes of the organ. It too has applied sharpening to keep details in-hand, but with a less aggressive, more natural approach than Apple’s. Superior white balance means more accurate colors throughout the scene too.
Once again, the Galaxy delivers a warm, inviting bright image overall, but the longer you consider it, the more issues arise. More even contrast means a flatter, less dynamic image, colors veer away from authentic, and it sports the softest details of all three phones.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Macro
Main camera
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Each of these phones comes with a dedicated macro shooting mode, letting you get up-close and personal with a subject, but they can also deliver pleasing close-ups with their superior main sensors as well.
The iPhone offers the most accurate color balance in this scene but also has quite a long minimum focus distance and the deepest depth of field. The bokeh is at least the most natural looking of the three, manifesting towards the back of the scene.
Just as with its predecessor, the Pixel’s main sensor was able to capture the closest shot and the sharpest macro imagery at the flower’s center. It delivered nice colors, brightness and a natural-looking fall-off too.
As for Samsung’s latest, as ever, brightness and vibrancy are the most prominent aspects of the shot, it’s more balanced here than with some of the other test scenes, and boast nice sharpness too. You can’t get quite as close as the Pixel, however, and there are some strange post-processing faux pas with the edge detection around the leaves further back in-frame.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Ultra-wide
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Flipping to each phone’s dedicated macro mode, it’s a close-run race between the iPhone and the Pixel, with impressive fine detail capture in both cases. The 10 Pro clinches it, however, thanks to its superior white balance, and its tighter minimum shooting distance.
By comparison, the S25 Ultra’s ultra-wide produces a significantly over-processed shot, with less appealing aberration, weaker dynamic range, inaccurate colors and over-sharpening.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Motion
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This flag flapping in high coastal winds seemed like a great subject to test each phone’s ability to freeze fast motion; essential for shooting moving objects, like pets or your kids on sports day.
The Pixel once again takes the top spot for its command of white balance, accurate color representation and sharp detail, offering up much more than either of the other combatants here.
As for the S25 Ultra’s shot, meanwhile, it has significantly less definition and inaccurate white balance; tinting everything – most evident in the clouds and the white of the flag – slightly too yellow.
The iPhone delivered marginally sharper details than the S25, but demonstrated obviously weaker dynamic range and a green-tinted miscoloring of the scene, turning the red elements of the flag almost brown.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Zoom
The last two camera comparisons I’ve conducted between these three brand’s flagships see the Ultra’s rear quad-camera hardware grant it the win in both cases, when it comes to zoom capabilities.
This year, however, the iPhone 17 Pro debuts an upgraded 48MP telephoto sensor sensor, while the Pixel integrates AI to offer a Galaxy-matching focal range. As such, zoom supremacy is more hotly contested than ever.
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On of the other alterations to the 17 Pro’s telephoto snapper beyond a new higher-resolution sensor, is the jump from 5x to 4x optical magnification (with a losses 8x crop).
While this might sound like a downgrade, in everyday shooting, most Pro users seem to be happy with the change, with 4x finding more utility when shooting everything from architecture to portraits.
As for the test samples, the iPhone demonstrates good consistent across its three rear lenses, in terms of exposure, white balance and detail capture. In fact, the only shortcoming is that – in this particular comparison – its maximum magnification of 40x is significantly shorter than its competitors and the resultant image lack definition.
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The Pixel 10 Pro allows for up to 30x capture out the box, but if you download the appropriate AI model within the camera app, you can unlock up to 100x Pro Res Zoom, which use AI image generation to essentially fill in lost detail in shots at higher zoom ranges.
Wider testing reveals the AI doesn’t always get it right, when trying to generate lost detail, but in this instance it nailed it (the last two samples in the above gallery let you compare the phone’s 100x zoom shot with AI both on and off).
Like the iPhone, there’s again a pleasing consistency across all of the phone’s sensors – even if the main sensor (1x and 2x zoom) is marginally brighter than the other two – with nice contrast and detail throughout.
At those higher zoom ranges, the Pixel’s AI does an impressive job of preserving the subject accurately. You just have to reconcile with the inauthenticity of these otherwise usable shots.
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There’s no doubting the S25 Ultra’s camera versatility, but its lack of generative AI at higher zoom ranges – although more honest – means weaker results in comparison to the Pixel, namely in terms of detail.
There’s also more inconsistency in color and white balance between the ultrawide, main and 3x sensors, with the ultra-wide offering oversaturation compared to the main sensor, and shots from the 3x snapper adopting a magenta tinge, which carries across to the 5x telephoto camera and up.
It’s otherwise still an excellent camera system, but only falls short because it doesn’t resort to AI like the Pixel does.
Winner: Pixel 10 Pro
Low light
Using a light meter, I tested all three phones in artificial light, with the control scene above taken with the lights on. I then turned the light off and – with about 50 times less available light – I captured a shot on each entry.
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The iPhone did a respectable job brightening the scene back up, with the longest exposure time, using a five-second shutter. Fine detail recovery was middling, but the most glaring issue was the magenta hue it dressed the entire image in, resulting in inaccurate colors.
Unlike the other two phones, I had to manually flip the Pixel into Night Sight to capture a usable shot, but once doing so, the three-second shutter captured the darkest, but otherwise most appealing image. Detail retention, in particular, was significantly better than either the 17 Pro or S25 Ultra, with the most accurate colors and white balance too.
It’s just a shame it wasn’t able to serve up a brighter scene. Mounting the phone to a tripod, it did also switch to a super-long exposure mode (similarly to the phone’s astrophotography feature), which took 2 minutes 19 seconds to capture. This obviously recovers much of the definition in dark areas that the three-second exposure lacked, but although I didn’t count that toward this comparison, knowing the option’s there is, important, however.
The S25 did a decent job of brightening and trying to accurately reassess white balance, but color accuracy could have been better, with the red and blue controllers appearing oversaturated, while the neon yellow controllers lack vibrancy. Higher contrast hides some definition, but the main weakness is poor fine detail retention, likely as a result of the incredibly short two-second shutter.
With the iPhone failing on white balance, the Pixel falling short on exposure and the S25 Ultra on detail, all three phones leave room for improvement, but each has obvious strengths and weaknesses that might sway you one way or another, if low light photography is of particular importance to you.
Winner: Tie
Portrait mode
By default, each of these phones defaults to 2x crop, when shooting in Portrait Mode with their respective main sensors, however, I punched out to 1x for the purposes of this test.
As with its predecessor, the Pixel has the fewest available focal lengths when in Portrait Mode (1x and 2x), followed by the iPhone 17 Pro (1x, 2x and 4x), while the S25 offers the greatest versatility, covering 1x, 2x, 3x and 5x.
These shots use each phone’s default artificial bokeh (background blur), but in each case, you can dial the effect up and down both at the point of capture and after the fact.
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One of the most glaring issues is that the Pixel struggles with edge detection, a criticism I levelled against last year’s Pixel 9 Pro in my previous comparison too. And I found the same is true when snapping using the phone’s front camera with Portrait Mode too.
Not only that, the Pixel’s usually beneficial white balance accuracy works overtime to try and wrestle my skin tones back to what they would appear as under around 5600K, which negates the truth the scene, where the warm glow of the afternoon sun dresses highlight with a yellow/orange tint.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra grabs silver, if only for the slightly washed-out skin tones. The default bokeh is also much more pronounced and artificial looking compared to the other two phones, which can, of course, be dialled back at capture, but means you have to fiddle with the settings to get the perfect shot.
The iPhone 17 Pro doles out similar results to the Samsung, but gave me more authentic skin tones, keeping some of the rosiness afforded to my cheeks and nose, thanks to the December wind.
Winner: iPhone 17 Pro
Selfies
In the age of content creation we find ourselves in, the often overlooked front camera is arguably more important now than it’s ever been. While the Pixel and S25 Ultra look to use the same selfie hardware as their respective predecessors, Apple has equipped the entirety of the iPhone 17 series (including the base iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air) with an unorthodox new 24MP square sensor, which captures 18MP stills.
While not tested here, that square aspect ratio, paired with Apple’s Center Stage tech means the 17 Pro can automatically frame cropped or ultra-wide selfies in either portrait or landscape, without you needing to rotate your phone. Something to consider if it’s the camera you use a lot.
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Thankfully, it also takes some excellent photos. There’s pleasing dynamic range, accurate colors, good detail retention and skin tones without looking artificial, and even taking these shots in ultra-wide mode, good lens correction, which means no frame-edge distortion.
The Pixel produces a similar shot to the iPhone, in terms of color, contrast, dynamic range and skin tone. Under scrutiny, however, heavier post-processing is evident, especially with regards to aggressive sharpening.
As has cropped up time and again throughout this comparison, the S25 Ultra is something of an outlier, namely due to its post-processing. Saturation has been pushed and brightening on the face is evident too, making for the least natural looking of the three selfies here. That said, it isn’t a bad image.
Winner: iPhone 17 Pro
Video
The iPhone 17 Pro proves as dependable as ever, when comparing its 4K 60fps video capture samples.
As well as fast autofocus and quick exposure adjustment, it also demonstrates the smoothest stabilization of these three phones, particularly when things get very bumpy. It also offers the smoothest and most natural transition, when zooming between lenses, whilst recording.
As with photos, the Pixel’s footage offers a decidedly more magenta finish, and seemingly weaker color balance and dynamic range, with rougher exposure adjustment, stabilization and lens transitions. It also has the weakest audio capture of the three, particularly with regards to voice capture, whilst also suppressing wind noise.
The S25 Ultra again delivers vibrant footage, with a warmer overall appearance, and stabilization and lens transitions that sit between the iPhone and Pixel in terms of quality and fluidity. Where the Ultra’s footage really shines is with audio capture, offering the fullest, clearest sound and the best background noise suppression against the wind.
Winner: Galaxy S25 Ultra
There’s a lot more to these phone’s video experiences than simply comparing 4K 60fps footage.
Samsung’s noise suppression, including its Audio Eraser tool, gives you the best retention in fidelity. The Pixel has a similar feature, but is a little more heavy-handed in its execution.
The Pixel’s Video Boost feature also remedies a lot of the shortcomings the stock footage falls foul of, but requires that you have enough cloud space and that you’re willing to upload your chosen video to said cloud in order to use the feature. As well as improving HDR performance, Video Boost also unlocks up to 8K 30fps capture (although that’s something the Ultra can do natively).
Apple doesn’t readily compare the iPhone’s cameras to the best camera phones, but rather the best cameras out there, which is why its video feature set includes more professional-grade tools. Apple LOG 2 support, ACES for color grading, Dolby Vision capture at up to 4K 120fps and more – like GenLock, render the 17 Pro more of a serious tool, than its rivals here.
Conclusion
While the previous comparison saw the S25 Ultra more or less sweep the field with Apple’s and Google’s former top entries, there’s more nuance where the latest iPhone and Pixel are concerned.
For everyday shooting, the Pixel 10 Pro has the edge, with the best detail retention, motion capture and color balance, particularly with its main lens.
If it’s selfies or social you tend to use, the upgraded front camera of the iPhone 17 Pro is unrivalled amongst these three.
Samsung’s current Ultra, meanwhile, is great for content creators who want a self-contained system that includes good audio capture, flexibility and editing.
Seldom is there a one-size-fits-all answer, but hopefully this comparison has highlighted each phone’s strengths and weakness, and which strikes the best balance for you.
The iPhone 17 Pro used in this comparison was supplied by Vodafone. For the latest iPhone contract deals, head to Vodafone’s dedicated iPhone deals page, and check out TechRadar’s Vodafone discount codes page for further savings.
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