Remember when cameras on smartphones could not even handle taking photos indoors? Back then low light photography on mobile became a novelty.
As technology improves, so does smartphones’ ability to take photos at night. But now almost every smartphone claims that they are the “bestest evarr” like a badly written movie protagonist.
Since we have a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in hand, we thought we’d take it out for a night shoot out in Ipoh and see how it compares with another flagship smartphone.
Ipoh, The City That Sleeps. Very Early
We headed out into Ipoh city just after sunset and it was virtually empty.
Our first destination was Dataran KTM. Once the heart of the city, it’s a walking distance from the main train station, the main post office, town hall, state library, state court, the police headquarters, and state mosque.
The Train Station
The moon was out, so it and a portion of the train station became our subject. We also included a bit of the tree to see how well the different smartphones render colours at night.
Here the first thing we noticed is the difference in colour temperature between the two photos, and more of the clouds in the photo taken with the S22 Ultra.
The Town Hall
We then walked across the square to take a picture of the oddly lit Town Hall. It was built in 1914, but the lights are relatively new.
Once again we see more clouds in the shot taken with the S22 Ultra compared to the other smartphone.
We also notice that the S22 Ultra took some liberties to make the colour saturation more pleasant and did not apply any unpleasant sharpness to compensate.
Somehow the picture taken on the S22 Ultra has more noise but is also crisp at the same time.
The Fountain
Dataran KTM used to have a single centrepiece, a poisonous tree the city is named after. The tree fell in April 2017.
Now behind where it stood is a fountain.
With this photo, we can take a peek at how night mode works. In most basic terms, most phones either take several photos or take a long exposure, and merge the results into a bright photo.
We can see that the S22 Ultra favours compositing the photos to get a better picture while introducing motion blur.
To Lorong Panglima!
Our next stop is the most hipster spot in Ipoh. It’s usually more lively on weekends, but on a weekday night, a few rare modernised shops stay open.
But First, A Selfie
To test the front-facing camera, we wanted to take a selfie in front of a bright background. So we picked a random store sign. The store was closed at the time.
By default, right out of the box, Samsung phones have a habit of turning on face tuning at level 2. Turning that off, we see that the selfie camera on the S22 Ultra applied some white balancing to the skin.
It also has a lot more detail, but the sign is slightly blown out.
Concubine Lane
Concubine Lane is the old name of Lorong Panglima. Hipsters love the old name probably because it’s titillating.
This is the photo that made us realise that something was different with the S22 Ultra. If you’ve seen photos from Samsung phones before, you know that they have a certain look. A Samsung signature colour pop.
Here we are impressed at how accurate the colours are on the S22 Ultra and especially at how the red is not blown out.
Because the S22 Ultra takes a higher resolution photo, the details are impressive too.
We Turned It Around
With no one around, we walked across the street, opposite Lorong Panglima, turned the camera around and took a selfie with the rear-facing camera.
Again we appreciate how the S22 Ultra takes a picture of how it sees it instead of trying to fix it. But not everyone agrees. The white balance applied by the competitor does seem more pleasant.
Horsing Around
When we saw the stone horse while driving in, we knew we had to take a photo of it. Under the dark amber streetlight, it would make a great test for the two smartphones.
To our eyes, both images look great. Extra points to the S22 Ultra for the higher resolution.
But here the approaches of the two cameras are most apparent. It is as if the two photos were taken under different light conditions.
The S22 Ultra’s night photo takes a picture as is, while the other takes a photo as it would be.
It’s The Oldest Bar In Perak & The Third Oldest Bar In Malaysia
Before we ended our night out, we took pictures of a cat on a car and the Sinhalese Bar.
Established in 1931, it is the oldest bar in the state and the third oldest bar in the country. It even has those swinging bar doors we only saw in cartoons and westerns.
On these photos, the S22 Ultra did a better job at identifying the cat’s face and rendered more details in the bar shot.
