Here's the best smartphone camera you can buy

The Samsung Galaxy S9+, the iPhone X, and the Google Pixel 2 XL all claim to take incredible photos. But we wanted to know which one was the absolute best - here's what we found out. Following is a transcript of the video.

So, I have the top three smartphones you can buy right now. Got the Google Pixel 2 XL, which has an amazing camera. Got the Galaxy S9+ with a dual lens camera. And got the iPhone X or iPhone 10, which has also a dual lens camera.

Let's start off with the office environment at the BI offices. This is mixed lighting there's some of the artificial lights up top, there's some light coming through the windows, so this is a good test for a smartphone camera. And I gotta say in this one, it was the Pixel 2 XL that really won out. The Pixel just offered the best color, it was the most accurate color. It's what I see when I look at it through my own eyes.

Now for a look at how each phone handles colors in an indoor lighting environment. So, taking a look at these flowers with indoor lighting, it's kinda warm, yellow lighting. Colors on the S9 photo kinda looks washed-out. The Pixel and the iPhone did really well here, with the iPhone winning out for colors in indoor lighting.

Alright, let's take a step outside to check out how these photos do with HDR, High Dynamic Range. That's basically how a camera handles super bright spots when there's also like a darker spot in the photo as well. So here we have these tall Manhattan buildings, and then just the super bright sky in the middle with the clouds. So that's the perfect test for HDR. And here I'm gonna call the Pixel on this one. Again, the HDR on the Pixel kinda won out on the others. That's not to say that the others looked bad. The iPhone looks good also, it's just a little yellow.

So, here's a really tough one for smartphone cameras. This is a dark, reflective surface. That means that the camera has to deal with this dark surface, but also these super bright spots on this dark surface that are reflecting off it. So that's really tough for smartphone cameras, and honestly, a lot of cameras as well. But here, I gotta say, the iPhone won out here for sure. And actually, the Pixel just totally blew this one.

Next up, we have the Statue of Liberty taken from Lower Manhattan, and here I gotta say it's pretty clear to me the iPhone or the Pixel did the best. The S9 again did this thing where it just homogenizes the whole photo. It kinda just looks grayish. So, I couldn't leave it there, especially with the Statue of Liberty being so far away. This was a perfect test for the 2X zoom lens on the iPhone X, or 10, and the Galaxy S9+. The Pixel is not part of this test here, because it doesn't have a zoom lens. I think the iPhone looks better here. It just has this sort of deeper contrast, which we've seen in a lot of the previous photos. S9 again kinda does its thing, where it's just sort of like makes things a little too bright, washes out some colors.

Now we go into Galaxy S9 territory, Samsung territory: low lights. So I took this photo here of this painting at home. The Galaxy S9 does incredibly here. I am just amazed and still shocked how good Samsung's cameras are at low light situations.

I guess it's time to call it. Which one is the best? This is a tough one, guys. I gotta say, I think the Pixel 2 is still the best smartphone camera you can find right now. That's not to say that the S9 and the iPhone are bad, it's just the Pixel just edges them out a little bit overall, and that's what we're gonna see for the foreseeable future. We might see something with the Galaxy Note 8 in a few months time, maybe Red's special crazy camera phone will hold some surprises for us. We'll have to see. But, for the foreseeable future, and for a little under a year now, the Pixel 2 still has the best smartphone camera.