Take Photo

I recently purchased a Samsung NX300 camera. I purchased mine from Best Buy and although the price in the store was $599.99, they price-matched Amazon's $499.99 listing! No, I haven't defected to "the dark side" and abandoned my iPhone, I just wanted another camera to use when photographing my grandchildren and my Canon was cumbersome and outdated. I opted for the NX300 on the advice of @lomokev on Instagram who highly recommended it. 

I've only had it for about a week and haven't even read the user's manual yet, but I did manage to do some side by side shooting with the Samsung and the iPhone 5s today to see how the results compare. So far the one feature I really like on the NX300 is the wi-fi capability which allows me to automatically back-up to my Mac or transfer to my iPad. I can even crop, adjust and edit images right on the camera - so, is this considered a mobile device or a traditional camera or somewhere in between? It is mirrorless, so what does that make it? I can even use my iPhone as a remote shutter which will help when I want to get in a group family photo!

I'll leave it to you to figure out which are the Samsung shots and which are the iPhone 5s images. No editing was done except for cropping and I shot with the automatic setting on the Samsung in order to make the playing field as even as possible. If you'd like to play along, just go through the images and make a note of the numbers you think were shot with the iPhone. Then check the bottom of the post to see if you were right. Side by side collages were made using Diptic and numbers were added with Font Art (I was unable to find link to Font Art - it may have been removed from The App Store).

Well, do you give up or was it easy for you to spot the iPhone photos? Some of the differences are obvious, like the obvious depth of field in #11 and #12 show that #11 is the iPhone shot, but other images like #5 and #6 are so close, it's hard to tell the difference. I'd say if you have an iPhone, you have a pretty good little camera on your hands. 

Below are the numbers of the iPhone shots:

#2, #3, #6, #8, #10, #11

Did you get them all right?  It looks like the Samsung may deliver a more true-to-life result for color and you can't get the shallow depth of field with the iPhone...but there's an app for that. Just see what I did with image #11 using AfterFocus and Snapseed.

I'm still thinking the best camera is the one I have with me and nine times out of ten that will be my iPhone!