Great write up and comparison. Only thing I don't quite understand is how the fact that the camera app seems to crash (even just occasionally) isn't a deal breaker in itself.
A camera crashing at the wrong time could mean a moment is totally missed that you wanted to capture and it's something I really need to trust. The reason I use my iPhone as my primary camera over my 'better', 'real' camera is that I can literally have the phone out and camera loaded within seconds. Crucial moments are never missed.
It's basically the one reason I will never be able to move from iOS to android, no matter how much more customisable or open the OS is, I can't ever see it working as smoothly as iOS does. iOS has its bugs and annoyances for sure, but it's never let me down at a crucial moment, and neither has OS X when windows has. It's the main reason I always go for Apple products.
My iPhone 5s had a buggy camera issue and once crashed twice in a row when I was supposed to photograph something for my daughter's teacher. The teacher had brought out an art project my daughter was working on and asked me to take a picture of it and email it to her so she could use it as a reference. I had my 5s on me so I tried to take the pic but had to reboot the phone twice. It also took horribly grainy pictures. I believe now from reading another person's random comments in a different thread that I got one that was a bit of a lemon. But at the time I thought all Apple iPhones were created equally and that's just the way they all were.
A few months ago my SE got stuck in some view, I can't remember which one, and wouldn't respond for a few moments and I had to exit out of the camera and fiddle around to get it to work. I don't recall the details and fortunately it hasn't happened in awhile. I love my SE and don't think this one is a lemon but I think one of the iOS versions was buggy on it for awhile because the first few weeks I had it, it randomly did that to me.
My 6s Plus camera is prone to creating photos with too much grain that makes scenes look like watercolor paintings. My SE is less prone to doing this.
The variance does puzzle me since they are supposed to be essentially the same camera but the 6S Plus camera has OIS.
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Yes, this actually happened to me on more than one occasion with the Galaxy S7 Edge. When the phone got too hot, it literally told me to wait until it cooled down before I could record video again. I believe this can happen with the iPhone as well (at least I've read reports of it), but I've never had it happen with any iPhone I've ever had. And other times it wasn't as severe as having to wait for the phone to cool down, but I could tell the phone was throttling because of heat and it just wasn't as responsive. The most consistent problem on the S7 Edge was the stuttering at the beginning of 4k video recording, which happens all the time. Sometimes you can even literally see the framerate dropping (again, when the phone is hot and must be throttling). I had similar issues on previous Galaxy phones, so I somewhat expected them, but the camera was so good that I was willing to deal with them (at least for a while).
So far, the iPhone 7 Plus camera has been rock solid, though it's not as hot out now so it might not be a true comparison.
I've not had the Galaxies long enough to experience that. I did have problems with my loaner s7 over heating at random a lot. And when I did a test video with it, I noticed it producing s jerky stuttering image when I panned the camera around. My Note 7 doesn't do that, but did produce odd artifacts when I aimed the camera at a wall with a large window in it. The IPhone 6S camera merely had trouble adjusting exposure so that the window wouldn't dominate the scene in the room. So I'm guessing the artifacts I was seeing on the wall were an attempt by the Note 7 camera to hold steady on the exposure. That's my guess anyway. P
I recorded a lot of video out in California at a sporting event, in bright sunlight and the IPhone 6 Plus I had at the time and the SE I had the following year both stayed cool and reliable despite recording as long as 20 minutes.
At home in a theater I frequently record school plays for up to forty five minutes at a time on 1080p. The iPhone does okay but I've had my real cameras overheat!
Edit to add: I had a hard time using that loaner S7 for anything during the hot weather. Warm to hot ambient temperatures turned the S7 into a hot potato in my hands. I think I got a lemon since only some people have that happen to them and only a handful of people report overheating on various review sites.
