I shot the eclipse with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, Google Pixel 8 Pro and a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – here’s which one did best
I had three flagship phones on three different tripods, all aimed at a sun quickly crowded by a troublesome moon, and all I wanted was one or two excellent eclipse photos.
It turns out that photographing a solar eclipse with your smartphone isn’t that easy. In fact, finding a repeatable process without cauterizing your retinas is downright challenging. But I did it. I grabbed some of the best smartphones money can buy, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the Google Pixel 8 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and prepared myself for 180 minutes of heavenly excitement.
This latest selection might turn a few heads. This is, after all, a now-aging flagship Android phone that lacks the latest image processing or even the faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip in the Galaxy S24 Ultra (the S23 Ultra has the Gen 2). However, one thing none of my other flagship smartphones offer is 10X optical zoom (even the S24 Ultra doesn’t have it).
Throughout this process, I committed to not using any enhancements, letting the phones’ zoom lenses do their best without digital magic. I never pinched or zoomed. I just pointed each phone at the eclipse and pressed the shutter button.
Make an adjustment
Except as soon as I did that, I realized it wasn’t going to work. The sun naturally destroys the exposure of all phones. It’s not that I’ve never taken photos of the sun before. I’ve taken quite a few with the iPhone and to overcome the flare I tap the sun on the screen, which speeds up the exposure to reduce the light and bring out the definition of the sun.
An eclipse wreaks havoc on a smartphone’s exposure controls, and the more the moon obscures the sun, the sharper the light becomes. My solution was simple and probably one you’ve seen elsewhere. I took my Celestron Eclipse glasses and carefully placed the film from a sunglasses lens onto the zoom lens of each phone. If you ever have trouble identifying which camera is zoom, simply open the Camera app, select the maximum optical zoom and place your finger on each camera lens until you see your finger on the screen .
Solar sunglasses helped reduce massive glare. After that, I tapped on the screen and adjusted the exposure until I could see the sun getting the Pac-man treatment from the moon. In most cases the result was a very orange sun.
For about an hour I moved from phone to phone, repositioning my tripods, aligning the sun and taking my photos.
There were a few non-smartphone issues, like cloud cover just before our peak totality (90% where I live), but I had more success than expected and smartphones, for the most part, worked. was up to the challenge.
Not all smartphone cameras are equal
You’ll see some of my comparisons above and below (I used the best of all phones in the photos above) that I haven’t resized or enhanced other than cropping them where possible to display them side by side.
While the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro shoot at 12MP (the latter is taken from a 48MP sensor, meaning four pixels combined in each), the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra’s 10X zoom camera is only 10MP. I think these numbers factor into the overall quality.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro matched the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 5x zoom and sometimes seemed sharper than the iPhone or Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I also struggled the most with the Pixel 8 to capture a photo properly exposed. It was also the only phone that required a long exposure after peak 90% coverage. The good news is that some of these long exposures offered the most atmosphere, managing to collect some of the cloud cover blocking my full view of the eclipse.
Things just got more interesting with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its 5x Tertrapism lens. The eclipse appears a little closer than on the Pixel 8 Pro, but also more vibrant. There are a handful of iPhone 15 Pro Max photos where I can see the clouds and it’s pretty beautiful. As with all phones, this image capture process was a bit hit and miss. The colors changed from orange to almost black and white, and staying focused was a challenge. When I managed to take a decent photo, I was delighted.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 10x optical zoom brought me excitingly closer to the eclipse. It was definitely easier to get the exposure and focus correct. At a glance, the S23’s images look better but closer inspection reveals significant grain, so much so that some almost look like paintings or raw canvases.
As I dug deeper into all the photos, I noticed how each camera on the phone used ISO settings to manage image capture and quality. The iPhone 15 Pro Max ranged from ISO 50 (very slow light capture) to ISO 800 (super fast for ultra-bright situations and action photos). Naturally, those at the higher end of the spectrum are just as grainy as those on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which range from ISO 250 to 800.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro offers the widest range, from ISO 16 to an astonishing ISO 1,536. He used it to capture the sun 90% eclipsed behind the clouds. Aesthetically, this is one of the best shots.
If I had to pick a winner here, it would narrowly be the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. This extra optical zoom means you have more detail before grain appears.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max comes in a close second, but only because it was easier to capture a decent photo. I also think that if it had a larger optical zoom, the iPhone’s powerful image processing could have outperformed the Galaxy by a year.
Google Pixel Pro 8 has great photos, but also a lot of bad ones, because I couldn’t get it to lock on to the convergence of the sun and moon. It is also the one that has suffered the most in terms of exposure. I’m nevertheless impressed by the ISO range and the sharpness of some shots.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro also deserve a special mention for taking my two favorite shots. These aren’t the closest or clearest, but by capturing some of the clouds they add an ethereal atmospheric element.
If I live long enough to see another eclipse (there will be one in the US Midwest in 2044), I’ll look for special smartphone eclipse filters and try again. By then, we may well have 200x optical zoom cameras with 1,000 MP sensors.
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