**A Camera Comparison: OnePlus 9 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra**

When it comes to camera systems, both the OnePlus 9 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra are highly regarded devices. However, which one comes out on top? In this article, we'll delve into each phone's camera capabilities and determine who reigns supreme.

**Portraits: A Draw**

One area where both phones excel is in portrait mode. The OnePlus 9 Pro uses its telephoto lens to capture faster and more detailed portraits, but it also has the tendency to introduce more irregularities in its photos. On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra relies on the main camera for portrait mode, resulting in a slightly less crisp image due to digital zooming. We'll call this category a draw.

**Video: A Close Match**

When it comes to video recording, both phones are capable, but there's one key difference: the OnePlus 9 Pro doesn't offer the same level of focus as the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, particularly in low-light conditions. The latter phone can quickly lock focus, while the former takes a full minute to do so. Additionally, the Samsung phone allows for more extensive zoom capabilities when recording video.

**Nighttime Photos: A OnePlus Advantage**

One area where the OnePlus 9 Pro excels is in nighttime photography. Its ability to better control bright spots and capture cooler tones results in cleaner-looking photos with more texture on objects. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, on the other hand, tends to sacrifice texture for a smoother, more accurate image.

**A Closer Look at Each Camera System**

While the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has traditionally been considered one of the top camera systems available, the OnePlus 9 Pro is not far behind. In fact, its camera system is significantly cheaper than the Samsung's, making it an attractive option for those who want a high-end camera without the premium price tag.

**The Verdict: A Galaxy S21 Ultra Victory**

While neither phone excels in every category, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra edges out the OnePlus 9 Pro by a hair. The former phone's superior focus and zoom capabilities, as well as its ability to record video at higher frame rates, give it a slight advantage.

**But Is It Worth the Price Gap?**

Considering the significant price difference between the two phones, the question remains: is the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra worth the extra cost? The answer depends on individual preferences and needs. If you value extreme smoothness in your photos and don't mind sacrificing texture, the Samsung phone may be the better choice.

**A Note from the Creator**

I'm Aaron, and this is my channel, "MrWho'sTheBoss." I strive to create high-quality content for my audience. Your feedback is invaluable in helping me improve my work. Please let me know if this camera comparison meets your expectations, and I'll continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in smartphone reviews.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis phone the galaxy s21 ultra is my current camera champion it's well ahead of samsung's last phone it beat out the iphone 12 pro max but now we've got a new contender the hasselblad branded camera centric oneplus 9 pro we've got 12 short categories leading up to one winner the best phone camera ever so when i compared this samsung to the iphone a few months ago the simple fact that samsung's camera had so many features just gave it a slightly higher starting point but that's not the case here for almost every interesting thing that samsung can do like hyperlapses or portrait mode video oneplus can do them too sometimes better so in terms of software features they're pretty neck and neck but the secret source of what makes samsung's camera so fun is that it's not just software the entire hardware every lens that's picked here are built around trying to give you options like how the ultrawide camera is made to double as a super close-up macro camera good news for one plus fans this has that too it's just not as good the quality of close-ups is comparable as you can probably tell but samsung's phone can get like twice as close which is the entire objective of a macro camera this applies to zoom as well both can do it the oneplus 9 pro has a pretty good 3.3x optical zoom camera but the samsung is built to zoom at extreme levels with both a three times and a 10 time zoom camera so it shouldn't surprise you that samsung can go further if you put both phones side by side and slowly zoom in then as soon as you pass 10 times and samsung's main telephoto camera kicks in it's in a completely different league yes samsung's footage does start to look a bit like a watercolor painting when you get to 30x but by the time you get to 30x on oneplus you can count the pixels but i am curious about something when you take zoom shots on your phone how often do you find that you actually want to go past 10 times like i'd imagine if i had to guess that the majority of people when they're zooming in they'd probably go closer to 5x 6x or 7x but yeah i mean the samsung still looks better it takes better selfies too there is an element of personal preference here but i can't help but feel like oneplus is inventing colors that weren't there and even selfie video for some bizarre reason the oneplus 9 pro maxes out at 1080p of pretty mixed quality footage on the front camera which means that if all you wanted it for was instagram it's it's serviceable but it straightaway means that unless 4k gets added in a software update i pretty much can't recommend this phone to anyone who's planning on doing any kind of vlogging if you're buying a flagship phone now in 2021 you'll probably be using it till 2024 and i think by then 1080p footage is gonna it's gonna feel like a relic and this is an audio test so right now you're listening to the oneplus microphone this is what that sounds like and now you're listening to the samsung they're both very good to be honest i don't think i don't think the microphones on any one of these phones is a reason to pick one over the other okay this is oneplus big chance to come back general photography in all of the teasers and promotional material for this phone the overarching message was this we heard you didn't like our past cameras we fixed them oh and did we tell you that we partnered up with hasselblad so so far we've looked a zoom we've looked at selfies and a couple of other things but the only two cameras that hasselblad has had any involvement in are the main two cameras the wide and the ultrawide so given that hasselblad is almost regarded as an authority on photography are they any good well when i first started pulling up side by sides of these two phones i had a couple of moments of wait have i just pulled open the same photo twice both phones are stylistically aiming for the same kind of finish but then i started noticing things first of all oneplus tends to crush darker areas like if you look at my trousers in this shot here it almost looks like someone's just doodled a black silhouette on top it's not always a bad thing to underexpose subjects but more often than not when you put the oneplus in a challenging situation its photos just look a little bit too dark yes i realize i'm basically having a wedding photo shoot for one but hey if i'm having 200 photos taken i might as well look good in them and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be smooth secondly oneplus adds a lot of sharpening you notice it a lot in backgrounds while samsung is perfectly happy to let trees behind you sort of blur away a little bit oneplus wants to keep everything in the frame sharp mind you it's not necessarily a bad thing this extra sharpness i think it does come in handy when you're in those lower light indoor situations where a photo starts to look a little soft otherwise and to oneplus credit this is a much faster camera when you tap that shutter button you're literally capturing a photo in half the time and it almost makes us feel like i'm using two phones from different weight classes a middleweight versus a heavyweight the main problem though that i'm having with this oneplus camera is that i can't trust it like this is me trying to very literally monkey around and in all three shots while the samsung retains a fairly consistent look the oneplus just completely flips the way the image comes out depending on where you're standing it's better than their past phones but it's still not quite at a stage where i can just snap a photo and be confident in the fact that it's come out okay and this applies to the ultrawide camera too it's fairly accepted that as you move between different camera lenses you're going to experience some color shift but this is an enormous shift especially for a phone that's branded as being calibrated to an exact color science also oneplus did talk a fair bit about how their new ultrawide removes distortion around the edges but honestly compared to the samsung they're pretty comparable these are both good cameras for photos but if someone said to me that i could only use one phone for photos for the rest of my life it would be the samsung and at the risk of this sounding like oneplus has just showed up to the wrong tournament this applies to portrait mode too like this photo here was our third attempt on the oneplus it took two other photos that looked more like this before we got to that and oneplus edge detection is almost always worse or here not only does oneplus color profile shift yet again between shots but on one of them it just decided that i was meant to be the background ouch to be clear i'm not saying that samsung is particularly good at portrait mode it's actually one of this phone's main weaknesses too it's just that i'm finding that the oneplus is even less consistent however there's one thing that that we've got to give it it's the fact that because it's capturing faster its portraits are much more likely to be crisp even if they do have more irregularities it still blows my mind though that we've got two phones here which both have telephoto cameras and yet for portrait mode they insist on using the main camera and then digitally zooming in we'll call this category a draw before we can crown either of these king we've got to talk about video and you actually find that a lot of the traits we saw with photos kind of come through here both very capable but even though oneplus has a bunch of new features like dole hdr it still crushes the darker areas and sometimes overexposes the brighter areas it's not that oneplus is doing a bad job this phone would hold its own in video against most 2021 smartphones but it's just that right now we're comparing it against what's probably the second best phone camera for video apart from the iphone and at that level it is behind it doesn't seem to focus quite as well like in this situation we were trying to set up a shot and it took like a full minute to get the oneplus to actually lock focus on it whereas it was done within five seconds on the samsung and whilst with the samsung you can use your telephoto cameras to take video so you can record it three times zoom and ten times zoom at 4k oneplus doesn't let you which means that as soon as you apply even minor levels of zoom in video it looks bad it does have one interesting feature though when you get to low light you can turn on something called nightscape video which does mean brighter cleaner nighttime footage but i'm a little torn about it on one hand it can make things look prettier but on the other hand it seems to make the camera very averse to motion which can make the footage look a little jumpy and you see the same traits echoing in slow motion too it looks like oneplus is almost trying to compensate for the lack of resolution by dialing up the contrast but again it's crushing the blacks if samsung does take this a little further it gives you the option to record short bursts of super slow-mo but to be honest given that we're now in 2021 and given that this feature hasn't dramatically improved in quality since the galaxy s9 it's starting to look a little rough i'm sure with the power of this phone that 1080p footage at that frame rate is possible it just it feels like they don't care about slow-mo anymore anyways two final things one they're both stable phones i tried walking while both phones were following me and i even tried lagging it apologies to the bride but both phones seem to be similarly affected by motion and two you might be wondering is there anything that the oneplus actually wins at well yes there is and it's probably my favorite category nighttime photos there's just something very satisfying about seeing a really dark grainy scene and then watching as your phone slowly pieces it together into something bright and cohesive samsung goes for extreme smoothness like it's trying to make sure there's not a single bit of grain in sight but the result of that is that you do lose texture on objects and so oneplus overtakes it in detail at night plus i think the cooler tones on both the main camera and the ultrawide as well as the phone's ability to better control the bright spots lends its photos a cleaner look but this is personal preference i think samsung's photos look more accurate but i think oneplus is look better so on one hand this has been a bit of a whitewash samsung has just beaten oneplus by almost every single metric but there's something we need to bear in mind that yes whilst the oneplus 9 pro is the highest end phone that oneplus makes it's still significantly cheaper than the highest end phone that samsung makes and so even though there's very little that i could point to and say that oh oneplus does this better there is some credit to be had in the fact that in a lot of situations it is as good or not much worse so the message to take away from this video is that a the galaxy s21 ultra still definitely has the throne but also that b the oneplus 9 pro is not a bad camera system it's just it's about what you would expect for its price if samsung was an a plus then this would be a b plus maybe even an a minus and so for the sake of a 200 gap that might be worth it for you okay thank you so much for watching i'm trying to improve on this whole camera comparison concept let me know if it worked my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one youthis phone the galaxy s21 ultra is my current camera champion it's well ahead of samsung's last phone it beat out the iphone 12 pro max but now we've got a new contender the hasselblad branded camera centric oneplus 9 pro we've got 12 short categories leading up to one winner the best phone camera ever so when i compared this samsung to the iphone a few months ago the simple fact that samsung's camera had so many features just gave it a slightly higher starting point but that's not the case here for almost every interesting thing that samsung can do like hyperlapses or portrait mode video oneplus can do them too sometimes better so in terms of software features they're pretty neck and neck but the secret source of what makes samsung's camera so fun is that it's not just software the entire hardware every lens that's picked here are built around trying to give you options like how the ultrawide camera is made to double as a super close-up macro camera good news for one plus fans this has that too it's just not as good the quality of close-ups is comparable as you can probably tell but samsung's phone can get like twice as close which is the entire objective of a macro camera this applies to zoom as well both can do it the oneplus 9 pro has a pretty good 3.3x optical zoom camera but the samsung is built to zoom at extreme levels with both a three times and a 10 time zoom camera so it shouldn't surprise you that samsung can go further if you put both phones side by side and slowly zoom in then as soon as you pass 10 times and samsung's main telephoto camera kicks in it's in a completely different league yes samsung's footage does start to look a bit like a watercolor painting when you get to 30x but by the time you get to 30x on oneplus you can count the pixels but i am curious about something when you take zoom shots on your phone how often do you find that you actually want to go past 10 times like i'd imagine if i had to guess that the majority of people when they're zooming in they'd probably go closer to 5x 6x or 7x but yeah i mean the samsung still looks better it takes better selfies too there is an element of personal preference here but i can't help but feel like oneplus is inventing colors that weren't there and even selfie video for some bizarre reason the oneplus 9 pro maxes out at 1080p of pretty mixed quality footage on the front camera which means that if all you wanted it for was instagram it's it's serviceable but it straightaway means that unless 4k gets added in a software update i pretty much can't recommend this phone to anyone who's planning on doing any kind of vlogging if you're buying a flagship phone now in 2021 you'll probably be using it till 2024 and i think by then 1080p footage is gonna it's gonna feel like a relic and this is an audio test so right now you're listening to the oneplus microphone this is what that sounds like and now you're listening to the samsung they're both very good to be honest i don't think i don't think the microphones on any one of these phones is a reason to pick one over the other okay this is oneplus big chance to come back general photography in all of the teasers and promotional material for this phone the overarching message was this we heard you didn't like our past cameras we fixed them oh and did we tell you that we partnered up with hasselblad so so far we've looked a zoom we've looked at selfies and a couple of other things but the only two cameras that hasselblad has had any involvement in are the main two cameras the wide and the ultrawide so given that hasselblad is almost regarded as an authority on photography are they any good well when i first started pulling up side by sides of these two phones i had a couple of moments of wait have i just pulled open the same photo twice both phones are stylistically aiming for the same kind of finish but then i started noticing things first of all oneplus tends to crush darker areas like if you look at my trousers in this shot here it almost looks like someone's just doodled a black silhouette on top it's not always a bad thing to underexpose subjects but more often than not when you put the oneplus in a challenging situation its photos just look a little bit too dark yes i realize i'm basically having a wedding photo shoot for one but hey if i'm having 200 photos taken i might as well look good in them and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be smooth secondly oneplus adds a lot of sharpening you notice it a lot in backgrounds while samsung is perfectly happy to let trees behind you sort of blur away a little bit oneplus wants to keep everything in the frame sharp mind you it's not necessarily a bad thing this extra sharpness i think it does come in handy when you're in those lower light indoor situations where a photo starts to look a little soft otherwise and to oneplus credit this is a much faster camera when you tap that shutter button you're literally capturing a photo in half the time and it almost makes us feel like i'm using two phones from different weight classes a middleweight versus a heavyweight the main problem though that i'm having with this oneplus camera is that i can't trust it like this is me trying to very literally monkey around and in all three shots while the samsung retains a fairly consistent look the oneplus just completely flips the way the image comes out depending on where you're standing it's better than their past phones but it's still not quite at a stage where i can just snap a photo and be confident in the fact that it's come out okay and this applies to the ultrawide camera too it's fairly accepted that as you move between different camera lenses you're going to experience some color shift but this is an enormous shift especially for a phone that's branded as being calibrated to an exact color science also oneplus did talk a fair bit about how their new ultrawide removes distortion around the edges but honestly compared to the samsung they're pretty comparable these are both good cameras for photos but if someone said to me that i could only use one phone for photos for the rest of my life it would be the samsung and at the risk of this sounding like oneplus has just showed up to the wrong tournament this applies to portrait mode too like this photo here was our third attempt on the oneplus it took two other photos that looked more like this before we got to that and oneplus edge detection is almost always worse or here not only does oneplus color profile shift yet again between shots but on one of them it just decided that i was meant to be the background ouch to be clear i'm not saying that samsung is particularly good at portrait mode it's actually one of this phone's main weaknesses too it's just that i'm finding that the oneplus is even less consistent however there's one thing that that we've got to give it it's the fact that because it's capturing faster its portraits are much more likely to be crisp even if they do have more irregularities it still blows my mind though that we've got two phones here which both have telephoto cameras and yet for portrait mode they insist on using the main camera and then digitally zooming in we'll call this category a draw before we can crown either of these king we've got to talk about video and you actually find that a lot of the traits we saw with photos kind of come through here both very capable but even though oneplus has a bunch of new features like dole hdr it still crushes the darker areas and sometimes overexposes the brighter areas it's not that oneplus is doing a bad job this phone would hold its own in video against most 2021 smartphones but it's just that right now we're comparing it against what's probably the second best phone camera for video apart from the iphone and at that level it is behind it doesn't seem to focus quite as well like in this situation we were trying to set up a shot and it took like a full minute to get the oneplus to actually lock focus on it whereas it was done within five seconds on the samsung and whilst with the samsung you can use your telephoto cameras to take video so you can record it three times zoom and ten times zoom at 4k oneplus doesn't let you which means that as soon as you apply even minor levels of zoom in video it looks bad it does have one interesting feature though when you get to low light you can turn on something called nightscape video which does mean brighter cleaner nighttime footage but i'm a little torn about it on one hand it can make things look prettier but on the other hand it seems to make the camera very averse to motion which can make the footage look a little jumpy and you see the same traits echoing in slow motion too it looks like oneplus is almost trying to compensate for the lack of resolution by dialing up the contrast but again it's crushing the blacks if samsung does take this a little further it gives you the option to record short bursts of super slow-mo but to be honest given that we're now in 2021 and given that this feature hasn't dramatically improved in quality since the galaxy s9 it's starting to look a little rough i'm sure with the power of this phone that 1080p footage at that frame rate is possible it just it feels like they don't care about slow-mo anymore anyways two final things one they're both stable phones i tried walking while both phones were following me and i even tried lagging it apologies to the bride but both phones seem to be similarly affected by motion and two you might be wondering is there anything that the oneplus actually wins at well yes there is and it's probably my favorite category nighttime photos there's just something very satisfying about seeing a really dark grainy scene and then watching as your phone slowly pieces it together into something bright and cohesive samsung goes for extreme smoothness like it's trying to make sure there's not a single bit of grain in sight but the result of that is that you do lose texture on objects and so oneplus overtakes it in detail at night plus i think the cooler tones on both the main camera and the ultrawide as well as the phone's ability to better control the bright spots lends its photos a cleaner look but this is personal preference i think samsung's photos look more accurate but i think oneplus is look better so on one hand this has been a bit of a whitewash samsung has just beaten oneplus by almost every single metric but there's something we need to bear in mind that yes whilst the oneplus 9 pro is the highest end phone that oneplus makes it's still significantly cheaper than the highest end phone that samsung makes and so even though there's very little that i could point to and say that oh oneplus does this better there is some credit to be had in the fact that in a lot of situations it is as good or not much worse so the message to take away from this video is that a the galaxy s21 ultra still definitely has the throne but also that b the oneplus 9 pro is not a bad camera system it's just it's about what you would expect for its price if samsung was an a plus then this would be a b plus maybe even an a minus and so for the sake of a 200 gap that might be worth it for you okay thank you so much for watching i'm trying to improve on this whole camera comparison concept let me know if it worked my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you\n"