The Samsung S10 Plus and Huawei Mate 20 Pro are two of the top smartphone cameras on the market, but how do they compare to each other? To answer this question, we put them head-to-head in a camera showdown. First, let's take a look at the ultra-wide lens on both phones. While the quality is not as good as the primary lens on both devices, it's still a useful feature that can add a unique perspective to your photos.

The Samsung S10 Plus has an ultra-wide lens with a 0.5 times magnification, which is wider than the Mate 20 Pro's 0.6 times magnification. This means you can fit more of the scene in one frame on the S10 Plus, making it a great option for landscape shots or capturing more of a group photo.

However, things get a little more interesting in low-light conditions. One common misconception about the Samsung S10 Plus is that it has a bright night mode like the Mate 20 Pro's Night Mode. However, this is not entirely accurate. The S10 Plus does have a Night Mode feature, but it's tied into the phone's scene detection algorithm and can only be used when the phone decides it's dark enough. This means you can't simply turn on Night Mode at will like with other devices.

In medium lighting conditions, the S10 Plus' Night Mode can still provide great results, especially in terms of controlling bright areas or making a photo look sharper. However, if you want to take a Night Mode shot when it's not truly dark enough, you won't be able to do so.

To test out the cameras, we took some shots in a pretty dimly lit hotel corridor. We used the S10 Plus' standard camera and Night Mode, as well as the Mate 20 Pro's standard camera and Night Mode. The results were striking - while the Mate 20 Pro's Night Mode was able to capture more detail in the dark, the S10 Plus' standard camera performed surprisingly well.

One notable feature of the Samsung S10 Plus is its variable aperture lens, which allows it to open up in low-light conditions and let more light into the camera. This results in better color representation and less blown-out effect than some other phones, including the Mate 20 Pro.

In terms of night mode performance, the S10 Plus' standard camera was able to capture more detail than the Mate 20 Pro's Night Mode in many cases. However, it also had some issues with noise reduction, which resulted in a slightly softer image.

One cool feature on the Samsung S10 Plus is called "Starburst," which detects lights at night and adds a bit of flair to them. This can be seen in one of our test photos, where it helps to enhance the colors of the building's lights.

Finally, let's talk about flash performance. All three phones have decent flash modules, but the iPhone XS Max stands out as having the best flash quality. The Mate 20 Pro's flash often produces a greenish hue that can make images look unnatural, while the S10 Plus' flash is also somewhat lacking in terms of color accuracy.

However, when it comes to filming videos at night, the Samsung S10 Plus holds its own against the iPhone XS Max and Mate 20 Pro. While neither phone has any new next-generation technologies to cope with low-light conditions, they both perform well enough that you won't notice a significant difference in most cases.

Overall, the Samsung S10 Plus is an excellent smartphone camera, especially when it comes to capturing detail in bright lighting conditions. Its variable aperture lens and color representation make it stand out from the competition, although its Night Mode performance could be improved with some tweaks.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right so you might know that a couple of days ago I posted an s10 plus vs. iPhone tennis max this is made twenty throw camera comparison and basically YouTube completely screwed up the processing on event which was upsetting because I kind of spend nearly two sleepless nights putting a video together but because there's an opportunity to take this test up a notch yeah that is how the meet twenty pros microphone sounds sadly now the first thing we're gonna test is front cameras and to do this over can I know but we got a speedboat and to clarify one thing that this boat was going fast and so with this in mind I'd say all three phones have done a pretty good job as stabilizing the video a fair bit better than I was stabilizing myself at this point you'll notice that the s10 plus has a wide-angle front camera it's not massively wide but it does fit in a noticeable amount more in this shot one other thing worth taking note of is the fact that Samson's latest shoots in 4k on the front camera a massive leap above 1080p on the other phones also as you can see here all three - a pretty good job of handling really harsh background lighting which is about as tough a scenario as it gets so yeah when it comes to front camera the s10 plus is a mile ahead in terms of resolution but when it comes to colors and actually stabilization the iPhone tennis max is a little more balanced now Samsung is super proud of the dual cameras they've got on the front of the s10 plus in fact to quote their website they call it the front camera that outperforms other rear cameras bold claim but I'm happy to tell you they are not far off with that it's got the rich colors of the iPhone but also manages to produce a crisper image I've shown these photos to quite a few people and some do prefer the iPhone it is what I'd say a more realistic portrayal of the actual colors but at the same time the skin tones are brighter on the Samsung and this produces - a lot of people are more visually pleasing image and because you've got two cameras you've got two different focal lengths so you can actually take a slightly wider angle selfie it really comes into its own though when you start taking portrait mode selfies or live focus as Samsung likes to call it I would say the iPhone does things pretty well considering that it's only using one camera but Huawei is definitely on the Wii current here it first too overexposed to beautify the face but in a lot of cases this actually results in loss of detail the s1000 tection could be better in fact as you can see here it's messed up my jacket a little bit but at the same time it's a marked improvement there's quite a consistent trend here the mate 20 probe consistently over exposes almost on purpose the earth in Telus max is pretty well exposed and the STM plus I'd say is generally slightly overexposed on all the shots but not enough to look blown out like the Huawei Samsung also has a few new ways that you can manipulate the background in your selfies probably not something I'll use very much but nonetheless well-executed see ya one of the other ways we're gonna test the phone is with a copter and I'll show you footage from it in a bit but this was a pretty good opportunity to capture some slow-motion all three can shoot continuous 240 frames per second slow-mo but the s10 and the tennis max have a big advantage in that they can do this at 1080 P versus 720 on the hallway whilst I would say the iPhones slow motion is the cleanest looking it misses out on super slo-mo or 960 FPS which the other two can do both the s10 and the iPhone can shoot 4k video at 60fps but for some reason Huawei has kept their phone at 4k 30 and this frame shows you just how differently each one processes color the friends look completely different even though it's the same scene even though the wall we made 20 pro actually has generally very good dynamic range here it is up against the two best and it shows because those phones just handle it better if you have a look at the Huawei footage especially just above those buildings you can see that it's overexposed and it feels like the company tries to compensate for this by just adding loads of saturation when you're standing still though hallways stabilization completely kills it they use what they're calling AI stabilisation and whether that's actually the case it looks almost like it's on a tripod but when you start moving especially at 4k and especially compared to these two phones you can tell it loses its polish a little bit and I can't help but feel like the color offices vibrant and saturated is too much when we move to 1080p those Samsung has a bit of an ace up its sleeve they call it super steady video and essentially it uses the extra ultra white camera that this phone now has for computational video so because the ultra white can be aware of what is happening outside of just what the main camera sees it can almost calculate and preempt how the stabilization needs to counteract this it works really well it is a marked improvement of it the note 9 but it does still do a little bit of drifting compared to the iPhone in this scene which stays pretty constant when looking at those buildings something kind of shifts from being super steady to then drifting and then becoming super steady again now you might know by now that the STM plus animate 20 pro both have ultra wide lenses and you can film video with this but the only thing worth bearing in mind is that the quality is noticeably less good and in fact the quality degradation is much more noticeable and video than it is with photo so even without zooming in you can still see grain especially on the May 20 Pro so before we get to photos and night mode the last thing we need to test in video is autofocus capability and I got to say that something didn't blow me away here compared to the iPhone animate 20 proach have quite a smooth transition between the foreground and the background as we change the S tens is a little jerky it takes a little second to figure out what it needs to focus on and I've tried this in an indoor environment especially when it's less well lit and the problem is intensified it doesn't seem to pick up close objects very well and even when it does oftentimes it's a little temperamental with them and it'll sometimes resort to just focusing on the background again also final reminder that I'm giving away 5 s 10 phones with everything Apple Pro all the rules are in the description below when we start looking at photos one thing to bear in mind is that hardware wise the STM plus camera is very similar to the note 9 last year and the main improvement comes from its software I was initially pretty disappointed with this I was hoping that the S 10 would have a big sensor upgrade but actually this software tuning has made quite a bit of difference ai scene detection has been beefed up and colors are vibrant appropriately sharpened and even with harsh back getting four grounds remain well exposed I'd still say though that the iPhone has the best most consistent high dynamic range between photos and videos admittedly it makes the shadows a little brighter than I would like but at the same time it is the absolute best at controlling bright areas the mate 20 pro also shoots really great photos with a really fast shutter time but I would say and you can probably tell here the colors are slightly on the warm side if you take a closer look at your screen right now at the hotel in the background that kind of curved dome shape you'll be able to tell down the hallway the whole texture has disappeared into the light Samsung's scene detection doesn't always pick up the scene that you're looking for but when it does more often than not you tend to get a better photo because of it like this one I remember when I took this photo I could see that it was picking up that there were buildings as the focus and it automatically sharpened the lines and increased the contrast in only the areas where it was needed portrait mode on all three phones will probably make most people happy but on balance the iPhone definitely takes the most consistent shots it again controls the really bright areas and exposes the skin and the body in a way that seems more natural and you can tell in this photo that it does a good job of distinguishing subjects that are two meters behind from subjects that are 40 meters behind whereas I mean if you look at the hallway that pretty much looks like it's just applied a massive blur filter to everything that's not me that's not to say that hallways portrait mode can't be good in fact I'd say in this scenario it produced a really cinematic shot straight out of the camera it's more just the fact that it's got the capability to be quite inconsistent to test the zoom I tried seeing how well I could read this sign from a distance and the mate 20 pros three times zoom is still unbeaten that's all there is to really say about it the Samsung in the iPhone can only zoom in two times optically which is standard it's decent but you can see for yourself how much difference huawei's extra zoom makes I also tried zooming in all the way ten times and because of the WHA weighs more advanced optical zoom you can tell it's more comfortable here but the S 10 isn't as far behind as you think and I think the fact that it's got a higher contrast color pallette kind of helps to give it the definition that it needs I'm a big fan of ultra wide lenses so it's great to see that both the s10 plus and the mate 20 Pro come with one and while the quality is not as good as the primary lens on both phones if you're shooting with plenty of light you don't notice the disparity and it just adds a really cool perspective also a lesson or in fact is that Samsung's ultra white is wider it gives you a 0.5 times magnification as opposed to 0.6 on the mate 20 Pro it just means you can fit that little bit more in one frame things get a little more interesting in low-light so to address a misconception the s10 has a bright night mode but there's a complication unlike devices like the Maine 20 pro where you can take night mode shots at will Samsung has tied night mode into part of its scene detection algorithm and so instead of being able to turn it on when you want you have to wait for it to decide that it's dark enough and it's not a deal breaker it's not the end of the world but there are a lot of times when you're in medium lighting conditions where you might want to take a night mode shot anyway because that can help to control the really bright areas or just make a photo look a little sharper you can't do that on the Samsung it has to be really really dark for it to work take this shot taken in a pretty dimly lit hotel corridor I used night mode on the meet 20 pro and that really helped to give some definition to the lights on the floor whereas on the other two phones it kind of just looks like a blown out mess but there is light at the end of the tunnel literally because the s10 Plus has a variable aperture which means that in low-light it'll open up its aperture to let more light in and so although you're taking standard non night mode photos in the dark they're actually really good colors are realistically represented and it avoids the problem that some people have with the Huawei that it's nightmare it brightens the image so much that in a lot of cases it stops it actually looking like it's nighttime although I don't personally think that's a problem I think after pixels nitesite probably has the second best smartphone camera at night mode if you pay attention to the purple rings around the building here you'll see that the iPhone is the only one that's managed to control those white areas and stop them being overexposed but at the same time its images are at the risk of being a little on the soft side one cool thing that the Samsung lets you do actually is called starburst it detects the lights that you see at night and adds a little flair on to them you can see it in this photo pretty effective I suppose one of the most important things here is how much detail do you capture at night and I was really impressed by the s10 plus here just a normal photo on that phone is capturing as much detail as the mate 20 pros night mode its photos are a little less smooth because the noise reduction algorithm isn't as powerful on the s10 plus but that's not necessarily a disadvantage and compared to the iPhone it definitely has the less grainy shots okay in really low light Samsung's bright night mode comes on you hold the phone steady for a few seconds and it uses AI to stabilize the shot just like Huawei's but not as good as the name implies photos taken with this bright night mode are indeed bright they weren't kidding around but the stabilization and therefore the resulting sharpness of these photos is definitely low it's definitely possible that because the s10 Plus has literally just been announced we're in early days and we might get an update to this mode soon I hope so it kind of needs it on the subject of things being dark it's also worth addressing flash quality now all three have pretty good flash modules but you can tell the iPhone Tenace max does a better job of readjusting the colors to compensate for that flash compared to the greenish looking images on the s10 plus and m8 20 pro the iPhones looks not just more true to life but also just more aesthetically pleasing it's kind of how you'd want to present an image filming a video at night is pretty much the toughest thing you can do on your smartphone camera and unfortunately the S tan is not uttering in any new next-generation technologies to cope with this but it keeps up and I would say it's at least as good as the tennis max and the mate 20 pro just don't use the ultra white it'll suck alright guys this video has been a long time in the making so if you did enjoy it it would mean a lot to me if you could smash our subscribe button down below giveaway rules are in the description and as always my name is Aaron this is nice - who's the boss I'll catch you in the next one youall right so you might know that a couple of days ago I posted an s10 plus vs. iPhone tennis max this is made twenty throw camera comparison and basically YouTube completely screwed up the processing on event which was upsetting because I kind of spend nearly two sleepless nights putting a video together but because there's an opportunity to take this test up a notch yeah that is how the meet twenty pros microphone sounds sadly now the first thing we're gonna test is front cameras and to do this over can I know but we got a speedboat and to clarify one thing that this boat was going fast and so with this in mind I'd say all three phones have done a pretty good job as stabilizing the video a fair bit better than I was stabilizing myself at this point you'll notice that the s10 plus has a wide-angle front camera it's not massively wide but it does fit in a noticeable amount more in this shot one other thing worth taking note of is the fact that Samson's latest shoots in 4k on the front camera a massive leap above 1080p on the other phones also as you can see here all three - a pretty good job of handling really harsh background lighting which is about as tough a scenario as it gets so yeah when it comes to front camera the s10 plus is a mile ahead in terms of resolution but when it comes to colors and actually stabilization the iPhone tennis max is a little more balanced now Samsung is super proud of the dual cameras they've got on the front of the s10 plus in fact to quote their website they call it the front camera that outperforms other rear cameras bold claim but I'm happy to tell you they are not far off with that it's got the rich colors of the iPhone but also manages to produce a crisper image I've shown these photos to quite a few people and some do prefer the iPhone it is what I'd say a more realistic portrayal of the actual colors but at the same time the skin tones are brighter on the Samsung and this produces - a lot of people are more visually pleasing image and because you've got two cameras you've got two different focal lengths so you can actually take a slightly wider angle selfie it really comes into its own though when you start taking portrait mode selfies or live focus as Samsung likes to call it I would say the iPhone does things pretty well considering that it's only using one camera but Huawei is definitely on the Wii current here it first too overexposed to beautify the face but in a lot of cases this actually results in loss of detail the s1000 tection could be better in fact as you can see here it's messed up my jacket a little bit but at the same time it's a marked improvement there's quite a consistent trend here the mate 20 probe consistently over exposes almost on purpose the earth in Telus max is pretty well exposed and the STM plus I'd say is generally slightly overexposed on all the shots but not enough to look blown out like the Huawei Samsung also has a few new ways that you can manipulate the background in your selfies probably not something I'll use very much but nonetheless well-executed see ya one of the other ways we're gonna test the phone is with a copter and I'll show you footage from it in a bit but this was a pretty good opportunity to capture some slow-motion all three can shoot continuous 240 frames per second slow-mo but the s10 and the tennis max have a big advantage in that they can do this at 1080 P versus 720 on the hallway whilst I would say the iPhones slow motion is the cleanest looking it misses out on super slo-mo or 960 FPS which the other two can do both the s10 and the iPhone can shoot 4k video at 60fps but for some reason Huawei has kept their phone at 4k 30 and this frame shows you just how differently each one processes color the friends look completely different even though it's the same scene even though the wall we made 20 pro actually has generally very good dynamic range here it is up against the two best and it shows because those phones just handle it better if you have a look at the Huawei footage especially just above those buildings you can see that it's overexposed and it feels like the company tries to compensate for this by just adding loads of saturation when you're standing still though hallways stabilization completely kills it they use what they're calling AI stabilisation and whether that's actually the case it looks almost like it's on a tripod but when you start moving especially at 4k and especially compared to these two phones you can tell it loses its polish a little bit and I can't help but feel like the color offices vibrant and saturated is too much when we move to 1080p those Samsung has a bit of an ace up its sleeve they call it super steady video and essentially it uses the extra ultra white camera that this phone now has for computational video so because the ultra white can be aware of what is happening outside of just what the main camera sees it can almost calculate and preempt how the stabilization needs to counteract this it works really well it is a marked improvement of it the note 9 but it does still do a little bit of drifting compared to the iPhone in this scene which stays pretty constant when looking at those buildings something kind of shifts from being super steady to then drifting and then becoming super steady again now you might know by now that the STM plus animate 20 pro both have ultra wide lenses and you can film video with this but the only thing worth bearing in mind is that the quality is noticeably less good and in fact the quality degradation is much more noticeable and video than it is with photo so even without zooming in you can still see grain especially on the May 20 Pro so before we get to photos and night mode the last thing we need to test in video is autofocus capability and I got to say that something didn't blow me away here compared to the iPhone animate 20 proach have quite a smooth transition between the foreground and the background as we change the S tens is a little jerky it takes a little second to figure out what it needs to focus on and I've tried this in an indoor environment especially when it's less well lit and the problem is intensified it doesn't seem to pick up close objects very well and even when it does oftentimes it's a little temperamental with them and it'll sometimes resort to just focusing on the background again also final reminder that I'm giving away 5 s 10 phones with everything Apple Pro all the rules are in the description below when we start looking at photos one thing to bear in mind is that hardware wise the STM plus camera is very similar to the note 9 last year and the main improvement comes from its software I was initially pretty disappointed with this I was hoping that the S 10 would have a big sensor upgrade but actually this software tuning has made quite a bit of difference ai scene detection has been beefed up and colors are vibrant appropriately sharpened and even with harsh back getting four grounds remain well exposed I'd still say though that the iPhone has the best most consistent high dynamic range between photos and videos admittedly it makes the shadows a little brighter than I would like but at the same time it is the absolute best at controlling bright areas the mate 20 pro also shoots really great photos with a really fast shutter time but I would say and you can probably tell here the colors are slightly on the warm side if you take a closer look at your screen right now at the hotel in the background that kind of curved dome shape you'll be able to tell down the hallway the whole texture has disappeared into the light Samsung's scene detection doesn't always pick up the scene that you're looking for but when it does more often than not you tend to get a better photo because of it like this one I remember when I took this photo I could see that it was picking up that there were buildings as the focus and it automatically sharpened the lines and increased the contrast in only the areas where it was needed portrait mode on all three phones will probably make most people happy but on balance the iPhone definitely takes the most consistent shots it again controls the really bright areas and exposes the skin and the body in a way that seems more natural and you can tell in this photo that it does a good job of distinguishing subjects that are two meters behind from subjects that are 40 meters behind whereas I mean if you look at the hallway that pretty much looks like it's just applied a massive blur filter to everything that's not me that's not to say that hallways portrait mode can't be good in fact I'd say in this scenario it produced a really cinematic shot straight out of the camera it's more just the fact that it's got the capability to be quite inconsistent to test the zoom I tried seeing how well I could read this sign from a distance and the mate 20 pros three times zoom is still unbeaten that's all there is to really say about it the Samsung in the iPhone can only zoom in two times optically which is standard it's decent but you can see for yourself how much difference huawei's extra zoom makes I also tried zooming in all the way ten times and because of the WHA weighs more advanced optical zoom you can tell it's more comfortable here but the S 10 isn't as far behind as you think and I think the fact that it's got a higher contrast color pallette kind of helps to give it the definition that it needs I'm a big fan of ultra wide lenses so it's great to see that both the s10 plus and the mate 20 Pro come with one and while the quality is not as good as the primary lens on both phones if you're shooting with plenty of light you don't notice the disparity and it just adds a really cool perspective also a lesson or in fact is that Samsung's ultra white is wider it gives you a 0.5 times magnification as opposed to 0.6 on the mate 20 Pro it just means you can fit that little bit more in one frame things get a little more interesting in low-light so to address a misconception the s10 has a bright night mode but there's a complication unlike devices like the Maine 20 pro where you can take night mode shots at will Samsung has tied night mode into part of its scene detection algorithm and so instead of being able to turn it on when you want you have to wait for it to decide that it's dark enough and it's not a deal breaker it's not the end of the world but there are a lot of times when you're in medium lighting conditions where you might want to take a night mode shot anyway because that can help to control the really bright areas or just make a photo look a little sharper you can't do that on the Samsung it has to be really really dark for it to work take this shot taken in a pretty dimly lit hotel corridor I used night mode on the meet 20 pro and that really helped to give some definition to the lights on the floor whereas on the other two phones it kind of just looks like a blown out mess but there is light at the end of the tunnel literally because the s10 Plus has a variable aperture which means that in low-light it'll open up its aperture to let more light in and so although you're taking standard non night mode photos in the dark they're actually really good colors are realistically represented and it avoids the problem that some people have with the Huawei that it's nightmare it brightens the image so much that in a lot of cases it stops it actually looking like it's nighttime although I don't personally think that's a problem I think after pixels nitesite probably has the second best smartphone camera at night mode if you pay attention to the purple rings around the building here you'll see that the iPhone is the only one that's managed to control those white areas and stop them being overexposed but at the same time its images are at the risk of being a little on the soft side one cool thing that the Samsung lets you do actually is called starburst it detects the lights that you see at night and adds a little flair on to them you can see it in this photo pretty effective I suppose one of the most important things here is how much detail do you capture at night and I was really impressed by the s10 plus here just a normal photo on that phone is capturing as much detail as the mate 20 pros night mode its photos are a little less smooth because the noise reduction algorithm isn't as powerful on the s10 plus but that's not necessarily a disadvantage and compared to the iPhone it definitely has the less grainy shots okay in really low light Samsung's bright night mode comes on you hold the phone steady for a few seconds and it uses AI to stabilize the shot just like Huawei's but not as good as the name implies photos taken with this bright night mode are indeed bright they weren't kidding around but the stabilization and therefore the resulting sharpness of these photos is definitely low it's definitely possible that because the s10 Plus has literally just been announced we're in early days and we might get an update to this mode soon I hope so it kind of needs it on the subject of things being dark it's also worth addressing flash quality now all three have pretty good flash modules but you can tell the iPhone Tenace max does a better job of readjusting the colors to compensate for that flash compared to the greenish looking images on the s10 plus and m8 20 pro the iPhones looks not just more true to life but also just more aesthetically pleasing it's kind of how you'd want to present an image filming a video at night is pretty much the toughest thing you can do on your smartphone camera and unfortunately the S tan is not uttering in any new next-generation technologies to cope with this but it keeps up and I would say it's at least as good as the tennis max and the mate 20 pro just don't use the ultra white it'll suck alright guys this video has been a long time in the making so if you did enjoy it it would mean a lot to me if you could smash our subscribe button down below giveaway rules are in the description and as always my name is Aaron this is nice - who's the boss I'll catch you in the next one you\n"