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Or they haven't reviewed it yet?

That's no excuse when the Pixel 2 has been out longer than the iPhone X. It's not like CR can't afford to buy one or loan one to do a complete test. A race where you bar the suppose #1 contender from competing is no race. DxOMark did something worse where they cleaned slate the current rankings at the time then announced a winner without retesting the competition.
 
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My opinion is that the second lens brings in issues as well as it’s advantage. I said a long time ago that the 7 Plus had problems that seemed to come from the ‘math’ between the two lenses. The basic 7 doesn’t have this issue and you can see the 7 beat the 7 Plus.

I made a case, with examples, to Apple over a year ago that the 6S Plus camera was better than the 7 Plus and .. well.. this article supports that.

I have the 8 Plus.. the pictures are amazing.. but I think a zoom lens on a small device such as a phone is a gimmick.. even with OIS as is on the X.

Ok imagine that almost always the second lenses don’t work properly but either makes the main camera worse, if once it works properly, by definition it’s a better camera. So how the heck they can say that a 7 has a better camera than the 7 Plus. This is absurd.
 
Almost all the reviews on the Pixel 2 say otherwise. Apple has a firm grip on Consumer Reports. They wouldn't dare to rank anyone other! It would mean death for them!
 
I guess they haven’t taken any low light photos. The X takes awful low light photos and it has really ruined my experience with the phone. You either get red eyes or white eyes that are blurry. Apple should be ashamed.

I am a little disappointed with the iPhone X low light shots too. I wouldn't say they should be ashamed though as the camera is good. But I know they can do better and hopefully getting whooped by Google will make them step up their game. With that said I love everything else about the X including FaceID, which works great for me.
 
Almost all the reviews on the Pixel 2 say otherwise. Apple has a firm grip on Consumer Reports. They wouldn't dare to rank anyone other! It would mean death for them!
hardly given their recent reviews. More say they have something against apple than favouring them.
 
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That's no excuse when the Pixel 2 has been out longer than the iPhone X. It's not like CR can't afford to buy one or loan one to do a complete test. A race where you bar the suppose #1 contender from competing is no race. DxOMark did something worse where they cleaned slate the current rankings at the time then announced a winner without retesting the competition.

CR rates dozens of lines of products. They don't exist solely to rate Apple products and the products that compete with Apple. Generally, they are not trying to have reviews for every available product in every category at any given point in time.

Others have generally crowned the Pixel's camera BETTER than the iPhone's camera. CR not reviewing Pixels in this list is not necessarily some nefarious plot to prop up Apple's product nor beat down Googles.
 
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The f/1.5 lens is useful in low lighting conditions because it lets in more light, but with a wider aperture comes a compromise in image sharpness in certain areas of the photo. Therefore, in conditions where the lighting is better, the f/2.4 lens that's also included will provide a crisper, higher-quality image.

Not quite. The wider f/1.5 aperture will allow very sharp pictures at the focal plane, and a shallow "depth of field" so that the further from that focal plane the more pleasantly blurred objects appear; the f/2.4 aperture will also offer very sharp pictures at the focal plane (as aperture closes down to values above f/8 or so you start hitting appreciable light diffraction effects which soften the image, but there is no meaningful difference between a well-made f/1.5 and an equally-well-made f/2.4), but the depth of field is moderately larger so objects just a little outside the focal plane are not noticeably blurred. At the same time, an f/2.4 aperture is about 2/3rds of a stop - 1.6x - "slower" than the 1.5 aperture, so shooting with f/2.4 means you are more likely to see motion blur from either your phone or from the subject.

If you are seeing more blurred-subject images coming from an f/1.5 aperture than from an f/2.4 aperture, that is all about technique and can be corrected - take better care in selecting the focal plane and not moving between focus and picture taking. If you are seeing, however, the "eyelashes out of focus while the eyeball is perfectly in focus" (or worse, "the tip of the nose is crystal clear and sharp while the eyes are all blurry") then you have too wide-open of an aperture and stopping down will help. That said, the natural depth of field of an f/1.5 aperture lens on a phone camera is already very deep (around the same as an f/8 or so in a DSLR by my eye, when viewed at full resolution), so the benefit of going "almost a stop smaller" in aperture is not really going to be meaningful in almost all situations. That "natural depth of field" characteristic is due to how smartphone lenses are constructed, prioritizing compactness over "subject separation" image quality measures.

IMHO the "dual aperture" of the Samsung is a gimmick. Instead of providing something that really could solve the problem of limited depth of field (a variable aperture, using 9+ rounded blades etc, as seen in all modern standalone cameras/lenses but heretofore never seen in a smartphone camera, or something with multiple stops down not just one 2/3rds stop down) they provided a cheap and easy gimmick that doesn't really do what they claim to the extent they claim it, and you see a bunch of malinformed parroting of Samsung talking points out there as a result.
 
Almost all the reviews on the Pixel 2 say otherwise. Apple has a firm grip on Consumer Reports. They wouldn't dare to rank anyone other! It would mean death for them!

Not true. Sometimes CR ranks Apple less than best, sometimes even being pretty critical of Apple. Other times, Apple can win a top rating.

Around here: CR ranks Apple best and they are absolutely right. But CR ranks Apple less than best and they are "outdated", "click bait" chasing, etc... basically wrong in every way.

Recently, CR did not rank HomePod best and was generally skewered in collective sentiment. Of course, not ranking best did not mean CR ranked it worst either. In fact, all 3 speakers in the "head to head" earned the very SAME rating from CR- a CR tag called "Very good"... equivalent to a "B" grade on an American Schools report card rating. The 2 other speakers happened to have a very slightly higher numerical B than HP but all 3 earned a B. However, since CR dared to rate HP less than perfection in a box, they were pounded to no end with insinuation of everything from click bait to payola slung to try to poke holes in their very obviously flawed review.

Here they happen to be reviewing a part of an Apple product best so collective sentiment will probably not be nearly so bad-to-outrageous. Unfortunately, not all 3 Apple products in the group can rate best, so some will have to find great fault with them anyway... because, let's face it, all 3 should be (equal) perfection since they were touched by the hallowed hands of Apple.

The common spin that CR is biased/bribed/bought to be against or for Apple are both wrong. They've reviewed Apple stuff very highly and not so highly, implying at least good potential to be considered unbiased much more so than anyone else that seems to worship all things Apple and/or bash all things Apple.
 
They don't sell advertising. As such, clicks & views don't monetize unless someone buys a subscription from them. And they are giving away enough of this particular report for free to see where the iPhones rank vs. the other phones rated, so the "meat" of this particular info does NOT require anyone to spend a nickel.

As to "click bait," the point of click bait is to draw eyeballs to maximize ad revenue and/or sell something. We can imply that 1000 times in this thread- and probably will- but there is no typical point of "baiting" here. If we want to spin "click bait" we should be doing that with all of those other articles- including many pre-release "reviews"- that DO make much of their money on advertising and are thus highly motivated to stay on Apple's good side to get advanced peeks at Apple products to be among the very first with "reviews." Do we scrutinize that kind of press so very hard... even imply stuff with tags like "click bait" and similar? Of course not. Think!


I generally agree, except that the clicks CR gets are definitely coveted there, as they are marketing for the magazine overall. More important to CR though is that it is mentioned in articles coming from all over the place - it is hard to forget that CR exists when every tech news site for a day references them (as an authoritative source most of the time) in a headline.

"Clickbait" is correct in denotation, perhaps not in connotation. CR definitely wants the attention and the clicks, although for them someone loading the page isn't the full payoff as it is for advertising vendors who generally rely on clickbait.
 
If mobile camera market consists of Apple and Samsung then maybe yeah but with all other out there it's absolutely not.

Video that comes from iPhone X is utter garbage. When it comes to still imagery, it over exposes very good lit interior scenes, it warms up skin tones and fails, it oversaturates landscape shots like an amateur retouching landscape photography in Photoshop but on top of it all it's image post processing often gets confuses and it just does weird things.

I personally prefer neutral and well balanced shots and that's something Iphon X can't give it to me. But once again Video is a joke.
 
As happy as I am seeing the X top a chart, without seeing how CR did their testing, I will file this away with everything else that they recommend or don't, in the trash can.

...and then there's the regular models beating the Plus models. Or how the S8/S8+ (literally the exact same sensor and software) are higher than the N8 with the same sensor and a telephoto.
 
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