Sunnyvale, California: I used to cringe when I'd see people capturing precious memories with their smartphones. Although most smartphones have megapixel counts similar to what stand-alone cameras offer, they have been inferior in lens quality and manual controls. Images have never been as good... until now.
Over the past two months, I've shot more than 3,000 test photos in four states using nine camera phones, a point-and-shoot camera and a high-end, single-lens reflex camera (also known as an SLR). None of the smartphone cameras are good enough to replace a $1,000-plus SLR, but I'm surprised how well some of the phones did, particularly in low-light settings that challenge even the best cameras.
Three phones stand out: Nokia's Lumia 1020, Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom and Apple's new iPhone 5S.
The Lumia 1020 squeezes a lot of camera innovations into a small device. It can take photos as large as 38MP, which means you can crop the image to a quarter its size and still have enough detail for large poster-size prints. With smaller files, you're limited to smaller prints when you crop.
