HTC 10 vs. LG G5 vs. Samsung Galaxy S7

Introduction

Cameras are just about the only thing in a smartphone that gets a meaningful upgrade each year and we keep a close eye on that. HTC was late to the Galaxy S7 vs. LG G5 party, though, so let's have a do-over!

We've prepared a detailed text article complete with full-res camera samples and all, but if you are more into video, you can also check out the video version of this camera shootout embedded below.

The big news with the HTC 10 is that UltraPixel has been resurrected and the second generation promises to fix the mistakes of the first. 4MP were never going to cut it, not even in 2013, but now 12MP seems to be the sweet spot. They may not be 2µm pixels like before, but are 1.55µm big.

The bad news is that this isn't so exciting because of HTC's slowness. The Nexuses (5X and 6P) have 1.55µm 12MP cameras (but the HTC 10 has a brighter aperture and OIS), the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge have 1.4µ pixels and a slightly brighter aperture (f/1.7 vs. f/1.8).

Then there's LG, which picked up the dual-camera idea that HTC dropped, but is using it for something more exciting than digital bokeh - the wide-angle 135° camera has a much more meaningful impact on photography.

The LG G5 keeps the resolution higher - 16MP - and relies on the f/1.8 aperture and OIS to keep the quality up in the dark. There are also things like Laser AF and a color spectrum sensor.

The HTC 10 also has Laser AF but brings no major innovations on the focus front. Samsung, meanwhile, introduced Dual Pixel AF, which is the best autofocus system we've seen yet - in good and bad light.

HTC's "world's first" claim is about the selfie camera - it equipped the 5MP shooter with optical image stabilization of its own. It has fairly big pixels (1.34µm), but no dedicated flash like some mid-rangers have. We'll see how it performs against the competition.

Outside

We kick things off with a particularly challenging shot - the small dark tiles of the building will be obliterated by poorly tuned noise reduction while the brightly colored squares contrast strongly against the dark background.

The HTC 10 shot at a higher ISO (125 vs. 50 for the other two), which prevented the trees from becoming too dark. The black tiles have the cleanest edges in the HTC photo while the Galaxy and the G5 smudge them in various places.

In terms of color rendering, the brightly colored squares caused a lot of headaches for the cameras.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge had issues in all three color channels, the HTC 10 did too but to a lesser extent and finally, the LG G5 mostly struggled with the blue squares, less with the red ones and did okay with green.

This is most likely from the color saturation that each camera adds, but is not the only issue. Some tiles have a subtle gradient as paint from two colors were speckled on. The LG G5 didn't get some gradients (especially on green tiles) quite right.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

The HTC 10 uses higher ISO even in broad daylight (ISO 100 vs. 50 in this case), which allowed it to better capture shadow areas. This doesn't increase the noise, so the sacrifice comes from the other side of the equation - the darker parts of the image are softer.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge underexposed dark parts of the image, but the rest is rendered with rich detail. The S7 also handled the grassy lawn the best. The LG G5 comes second in terms of detail, and the HTC 10 came in last.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

This next shot is a tricky mix of well-lit and shadow areas. It once again shows how dark areas in HTC 10 photos are softer. Both the Galaxy and G5 maintain even sharpness across the lawn, and tree crowns, the 10 noticeably blurs them.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

We did not include the wide-angle camera on the LG G5 in the quality comparison - the 8MP fixed-focus camera can't compete on quality or dynamic range. But in terms of just how much more of the scene it captures in a single click, it has no equal in the smartphone world. Here's a shot to illustrate how big the difference is. Where with the HTC or Samsung you may be forced to use panorama mode (or just step way back), the G5 makes it as simple as a tap on the "wide" button.

 
Field of view: 85° • 135°

Winner: Tie. All the phones have their pros and cons in rendering this scene.

Indoors

Fabrics are even harder to photograph than small tiles - the rich detail of fine threads often gets obliterated by the noise reduction algorithms.

The HTC 10 is an example of how to do it right - the fabric of the chair has a lifelike look to it. The Galaxy S7 edge comes close, but some of the camera's strong sharpening creates artefacts. The LG G5 smoothed out too much of the detail and the sharpening could not bring it back.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

In the previous shot, the Samsung didn't quite focus on the same spot as the others. This next photo is of the carpet, guaranteeing the focus point will be in the same place.

The HTC 10 again did the best job of rendering the fabric, followed closely by the LG G5 (which overexposed the shot a bit). Samsung's image processing removed all traces of fibers.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Moving on to a more complex shot, there's a lot to get right or mess up. The Samsung Galaxy S7 captured the black cabinets the best, including all their imperfections after years of use. In the LG G5 shot the black makes the noise quite visible.

The HTC 10 did the best job of the yellow cabinet - yes, yellow. Someone should probably tell the Galaxy.

A completely different topic are the printed pages on the cabinets. The Samsung rendered the pages black on white, but the boost in contrast necessary eroded the text somewhat. The text is sharpest in the LG G5 shot.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Brushstrokes are similarly difficult to capture. The HTC 10 once again does the best job of preserving subtle detail.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Real world objects tend to have a lot detail and imperfections and if strong noise reduction takes those away, they can look unnatural.

Here's yet another shot where the HTC 10 bests its opposition while the LG G5 once again discarded too much detail.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Winner: HTC 10. It often rendered its targets in sharp detail, compared to the LG G5, whose photos were often on the soft side. The HTC has its own softness issues when it comes to shadowy areas. The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge is a solid, all-around performer, though it had some weaknesses against the G5.

HDR

As we saw on the previous page, shadow and light in the same scene can be difficult to capture just right. HDR mode is an indispensable tool that handles just that.

The LG G5 offered the widest dynamic range of the three. It also has immaculate processing, you can see it in the spray of the fountain - the small, fast moving water droplets are clearly visible while the Galaxy S7 smudged them. The HTC 10 photo is quite sharp, but it struggled with the highlights (not as bad as the Galaxy, though).

  
HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

The next LG G5 photo also has better dynamic range and is sharper than the other two. The HTC 10's struggle with the highlights continues, which lost a lot of detail in the sunbleached fountain.

  
HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

When a camera is short on dynamic range, it can really miss the boat on light colors in the sun. This yellow flower is a good example - if you look at the Galaxy S7 edge photo, you'd think it's white. The HTC 10 made it pale yellow, which is closer to the truth, but still not on the money.

  
HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Here's another flower. The saturated colors of the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge photo look the most pleasing (HDR mode on the G5 bleaches out the flower slightly). The HTC 10 did a solid job of capturing the fine detail of the veins of the petals. If you're going to pixel peep, you'll also notice the strong noise in LG G5's bokeh.

  
HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Winner: LG G5. Having the best dynamic range is a great virtue in an "HDR" test. The HTC 10 sometimes produced a sharper image, but it struggles to capture highlights. The Galaxy S7 did not have a fun time doing this.

Bokeh

HTC tried once to push a dual-camera design for depth effects (including bokeh), but single-camera designs proved quite good while being much cheaper. LG G5 seems to be an exception as its second camera really gives you an entirely different view of the world.

But this chapter is about the bokeh. Both the G5 and the HTC 10 boast Laser AF, which should help them get perfect focus in closeups (the G5's system works up to 50cm/20", for example). And yet it didn't.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge is the only one of the three that captured the closeup subject in sharp detail. True, its bokeh looks more artificial, but the S7 photo is the best by a long shot.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S7 edge. It produced the only photo that looked good, the other two didn't do too hot despite their Laser AF magic.

Selfies

Selfies became the next battleground of smartphone photography after daylight shooting was conquered (that and low-light shots, but more on that later).

The LG G5 has the highest resolution camera - 8MP (and it's a single camera, not two like on the LG V10). The other two have 5MP cams, but with wider apertures, which may come back to haunt the LG.

Not when there's enough light, though. It captured the most detail hands down, our only complaint is that everything in the shot - including the background - is in focus. A slight blur creates a nice separation between subject (you) and the background.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge did okay, but the image is too soft (so it's not the resolution that's the real problem). In the LG G5 photo, skin and hair look artificially smoothed out.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

The next shot was taken indoors. Here the G5 maintains the sharpness advantage, but the color of the ceiling light affected the white balance too much. The HTC 10 maintained the most accurate white balance while the Galaxy S7 gave some areas a slight pinkish hue.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

And here comes the low-light shot. The G5's f/2.0 aperture is indeed a problem, but S7's f/1..7 aperture didn't give it much of an advantage.

The HTC 10 used its OIS to drop the shutter speed to 1/7s (vs.1/13s for the other two), which helped it produce a slightly more pleasing image.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

For the next shot, we enabled HDR. That really helped the HTC 10 produce a much better shot while it had barely any effect on the other two.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

None of the three have a proper front-facing flash, but the screen can lend a hand when needed.

The extra light helped the HTC 10 maintain its lead, though we have to say we still prefer the HDR shot. The LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 edge improved, but not enough to beat the HTC.

  
HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

We also recorded handheld selfie videos (no selfie sticks). While the OIS on the front-facing camera on the HTC 10 didn't help it that much when taking photos in the dark, video is where it can shine (and so far it's a feature unique to the 10). Unfortunately, the effect it has isn't huge, the LG and Samsung videos look quite steady without stabilization.

Panorama

While the LG G5 has a wide-angle camera, you can get much, much better quality out of the Panorama mode. The G5 uses its main 16MP camera to produce images with a vertical resolution of 5,000px, the Samsung 4,000px and the HTC with just 2,000px. Note that the Galaxy S7 edge panorama is huge in file size - 36MB, more than double the weight of the higher-res LG panorama! Also, some viewers had issues displaying the image, but browsers seem to do fine.

Anyway, for all that file size, S7's panorama doesn't actually have more detail. The LG G5 is the winner here and it's largely thanks to the slightly cleaner stitching (you can see vertical "stripes" in the grass in the Galaxy image, where the software couldn't quite make the pieces fit). The HTC 10 does a fairly poor job of stitching, the seams are very visible and sometimes there's noticeable ghosting (you can see the branches of the trees have been photocopied).

HTC 10

LG G5

Samsung Galaxy S7 edge

Winner: LG G5. It has the highest resolution image at a reasonable file size (even with fast mobile Internet, 30MB+ files can be a challenge), plus the cleanest stitching of the three.

Low-light photos

There are a lot of photos in here, so bear with us. We shot in various lighting conditions (dark, dark with bright lights, etc.) and we used three modes - Normal, HDR and flash.

The reason for trying the HDR mode is since the merging process involved helps some phones reduce the noise in the image and also helps with achieveing a better exposure of the darkest and brightest parts of the image.

You can't quite see it in most shots, but there's black grout between the small red tiles - only the LG G5 captured this detail without flash. The Galaxy S7 finally noticed it when we turned its flash on, the HTC 10 never did.

HDR mode resulted in a major decrease in noise for the HTC 10 without having huge impact on sharpness. It didn't do much for the other two.

LG G5's "flash off" photo was quite noisy, but its strong dual-flash brought on a great improvement in quality when shooting at close range. The HTC 10 seems to have a fairly weak flash, because it boosted the ISO to a whopping 4,000 (compared to 550 and 640 for the other two). This resulted in tons of noise.

  
Flash, HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
Flash on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Here we tried to use HDR to brighten up the dark courtyard, since the bright light of the vending machine affected exposure.

The HTC 10 did the best job at it while the LG G5 tried a little too hard (it looks bright, but there's no detail). The Galaxy S7 edge photo was a bit dark, but it had the best detail.

  
Flash, HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
Flash on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

This next shot is quite dark, with very little lighting from the environment. The HDR mode again helps the HTC 10 drop the noise. LG G5's color spectrum sensor helped it preserve the most accurate colors.

HTC 10's issues with flash are especially visible in this shot. ISO explodes to 8,000 and the noise is unbearable. The LG G5 photo is noisy, but fairly detailed thanks to its strong flash.

  
Flash, HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
Flash on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

This photo may have been taken at night, but the strong light from the parking lot bathed part of the scene.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge produced the best shot in all three modes - the lit areas are sharp, the dark areas have little noise. This scene is more of an exception to the rule, though.

  
Flash, HDR off: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
HDR on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

  
Flash on: HTC 10 • LG G5 • Samsung Galaxy S7

Winner: LG G5. Viewing photos at 100% reveals noise in all of them, but the phone captures the most detail without flash and has the strongest flash to boot. The Samsung Galaxy S7 had its moments, though not quite matching the G5. The HTC 10 was a mess - noisy photos are made worse by enabling the flash (despite what common sense would dictate).

2160p video recording

HTC lagged behind with 2160p video adoption - the HTC One and One (M8) didn't have the resolution for it (a 2160p frame is 8MP, they had 4MP cameras), so it was only the One M9 last year that brought the company into the world of 4K. Meanwhile, LG and Samsung have several years of experience on the matter.

The HTC 10 records the 2160p videos at a slightly higher bitrate - 56Mbps, compared to 48Mbps for the other two. It also offers an interesting option - lossless audio, FLAC. It's available for both 1080p and 2160p videos and replaces the already good 192Kbps/48kHz lossy option (16-bit AAC).

The FLAC is captured in an impressive 24-bit 96kHz format, what could be called "studio quality." So the limiting factor here is the quality of the microphones, not the audio format (unlike Apple, which still uses mono). And unfortunately for HTC, those don't live up to promises, to our ears the LG and Samsung audio sounds better.

Moving on to video quality. Here the HTC 10 impresses with a high dynamic range, allowing it to preserve both highlights and shadows. The footage has a low contrast, though, giving it a washed out look. The problem with noise in the shadows appears again.

The LG G5 videos have pleasing colors and a punchy contrast, but there's noticeable underexposure in the shadowy areas. Still, overall the image looks sharp and rich in detail. One annoying thing we noticed is a "pulsation" (look at the road surface). It seems to be caused by compression and it's periodic nature makes it noticeable.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 edge video is softer, not as soft as the HTC, though, and the higher contrast makes the video look better. The Samsung maintained perfect focus throughout videos, the LG G5 was fairly stable (with minor twitches here and there) and the HTC 10 did a lot of focus hunting.

1080p video recording

In 1080p mode only the Galaxy S7 offers a 60fps mode, but we'll stick with 30fps anyway as the most popular option.

The HTC 10 maintains its dynamic range advantage, but again videos could use a bump in contrast.

A bigger issue is that the field of view narrows significantly, so changing the video resolution would also require taking a few steps back to frame the scene the same way. The other two also shrink their FoV when going down in resolution, but to a much lesser extent.

The levels of resolved detail even out. LG G5 footage appears more detailed, but that's largely thanks to the sharpening and contrast boost rather than resolving power.

The Galaxy S7 edge is more restrained with that kind of image processing (the tables are turned compared to still images).

Slow motion video recording

All three phones offer a slow-mo video option at 720p resolution. The Galaxy S7 edge records at 240fps, while the other two at half that - 120fps. Thanks in part to the higher frame rate, the S7 edge produced the smoothest videos by a wide margin, while the LG G5 showed us really choppy video with no fluidity. HTC 10's video was smoother, but not all that slow.

Conclusion

Smartphone cameras has come a long way since the early days. It's safe to say that photography in good light has been mastered and we've seen impressive advances in low-light shooting. The quality of 4K videos is still improving (while 1080p clips seem to have hit the ceiling of what's possible). HTC is hopeful selfies are the "next big thing" and that OIS would give them the edge.

While selfies are indeed a popular genre on social networks, we've seen more dedicated efforts to capture that crowd - 16MP front-facing cameras and dedicated flash seem more worthwhile than a 5MP snapper with OIS. So this won't be the feature that saves the company.

To HTC's credit, the main camera is the best it has ever produced - better even than the HTC One camera was back in 2013. Photos, especially ones taken indoors, have an amazing level of detail that the other two couldn't match. For outdoor shots, it seems like the LG G5 or the Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 edge have the upper leg, but still the HTC produces high-quality photos.

We were quite disappointed with HTC 10's performance in the dark, though. ISO is boosted to untenable levels and the flash made things worse. The LG G5 did so much better with and without its lights on, Samsung's large pixels and bright aperture produced pleasing results as well.

As we mentioned earlier, HTC is comparatively new to the 4K video game (it did beat Apple by about six months). Quality has improved since the One M9 and is very good for a 2016 flagship, but videos were still not without issue. The FLAC audio option (while unique) doesn't have an impact for daily use, the camera was too eager to hunt for focus and in the end, the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 edge videos just looked better.

We also dug into things like HDR and panoramas, but again the HTC struggled to best its two opponents. The LG G5 seemed to have the edge over the S7 in dynamic range and panorama processing.

This test was largely motivated by the HTC 10 - we had already seen the LG G5 and Galaxy S7 go head to head before. The HTC flagship arrived late to the scene (launching almost a full quarter after the S7) and is currently more expensive than either of the Korean handsets. If it was unanimously best, we'd end this on a high note, with hope for the struggling company. However, the camera - while very good - will need help from the beautiful metal body and the clean Android install to move HTC 10 units off the shelves.