What is the best phone camera? There are lots of opinions on this by many reviewers, users and of course, “influencers”.
Many will say the iPhone 17, others the current flagship Samsung and a bunch will suggest a Google Pixel, Motorola or other model.
One sad fact of course, is that many of these folk will simply accept all the defaults when shooting a still or video, and so in real terms, I reckon they are just giving an opinion on the easiest phone camera to use, not the best.
Terms such as ISO, shutter speed, aperture, iris, white balance and lens size are mostly alien as they never use them. Turn the dial to “A” for automatic, and off we go! Whee!
So, moving swiftly on to which camera is best taking all these factors into account, I’d boldly suggest that for video at least, none of the native phone cameras can hold a candle to the Blackmagic Camera app, available for both iPhone and Android.
First Time
The fist time I saw the Blackmagic Camera app (I am on Android), I made a point of asking Blackmagic directly how the daffy duck did they get so much technology into such a small place? I mean, they have successfully managed compress the functionality of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera into a smartphone, and that is simply incredible in my book.
They’re answer, which must be one the understatements of all time, is “We have good engineers”.
As well as its functionality, and a quick run through the setup menu gives you an idea of the breadth of capability you’ll have at your fingertips, a big thing – and quite astounding really, is that Blackmagic make the app available for free.
Amazing.
Digression
Over the years I have seen some wonderful engineering, both hardware and based. The original VisiCalc in 48K of RAM on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 and AutoCAD on an Olivetti M24 with 640MB RAM spring to mind from the past.
In the so-called IBM PC era, packages like Thinx broke new ground as did Lotus Notes, and of course Adobe Premiere and After Effects revolutionised digital desktop video with Photoshop becoming an all time standard most likely for image manipulation.
More recently, DJI has some amazing tech in its drones and cameras, way beyond anything that we could have envisaged even probably 5 years back.
My point here is that is fantastic that with Blackmagic Design, along with another Aussie company RØDE, we have amazing tech capability right here in Australia and should be supporting it.
Back to Blackmagic Camera
When you start the Blackmagic Camera app, you can see the interface is neatly packaged up into four distinct areas. Across the top are the results of setting things such as lens size, frames per second, iris (aperture) size, ISO, white balance and frame resolution. You can also optionally display the phone’s battery status.
Each if these can be chosen either by touching them, or by choosing from a menu option on the right and selecting a new value. You can also lock a value so whilst shooting, it can’t be inadvertently changed.
Also available to you are different versions of on-screen guides, exposure +/-, choosing a preset LUT and stabilisation, either optical, standard or off.
Down the bottom of the screen are values for the amount of storage you have left, meters for your microphone levels, and both the internal mic and external mics such as those from Sennheiser, RØDE and DJI are supported. Finally at left is a histogram showing the different light levels.
If you are not familiar with the histogram, if you learn nothing about photography / videography beyond being able to interpret a histogram, you’ll be well ahead of the average pack I promise you, and it makes all the difference between “meh” imagery and “wow” in many cases.
Down the far right of the screen besides the camera icon which is the default, you are able to chose to view the stored media of images / video, use the chat facility via Blackmagic Cloud or as mentioned, go into the main settings menu.
This is where I suggest you start, and set the Blackmagic Camera app up as you like to use it, and this also gives you a feel for the full capability of this app.
Of course, there is also the Big Red Button to start and stop recordong.
Conclusion
I would reckon it’s a safe bet that once you have tried the Blackmagic Camera app, you won’t go back to your standard smartphone camera for video anymore.
Aha! You say. But can you take stills with the Blackmagic Camera app?
Well, no – and yes.
You cannot go into a still camera “mode”, that’s true, but if you shoot in 4K or Open Gate mode (chosen under Settings… Resolution) you have the option of either 4080×3060, 4000×2252 or 3840×2160 pixels resolution, and you can pull a still from these in say, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve (also free from Blackmagic Design for Mac, Windows and LINUX), and then crop and modify to your hearts content. If you download the new beta 21 of Resolve, you also have access to the new Photo page giving you Photoshop like tools – all for free!
Finally, make sure to regularly visit he Blackmagic website, because those clever engineers are forever tweaking and adding new features to all Blackmagic apps and devices.