Two verdicts from the same reviewer, both published, both pointing the other way. In his Smartphone Awards 2024, Marques Brownlee gave best camera to the iPhone 16 Pro. In the blind camera test he has been running for years, no iPhone has ever finished first overall.
Neither result is a slip, and picking a favourite is the wrong move. They answer different questions. The useful thing is working out which of those two questions describes the way you use the phone already in your pocket.
What the blind test is built to ask
The format is public. A set of phones shoots the same scene, the images are stripped of anything that identifies them, and they go head to head in pairs on his voting site. You pick the one you prefer, with no idea what took it. The ranking comes out of an Elo score, the same arithmetic behind chess ratings, so a phone climbs by winning individual matchups rather than by collecting marks from a judge.
In the edition whose results he published in January 2024, that meant twenty phones and, by his own post announcing the numbers, more than twenty million votes, split across standard, low light and portrait. The mechanics are worth understanding before arguing with any ranking, and the format has more edges than it looks.
Read the question back and it is narrower than the headline it produces: which single frame do strangers prefer, at a glance, on their own screens. That is not the same question as which camera is better.
Ask that, and Pixels win
In that edition the overall top three were all Google: Pixel 7a first, Pixel 8 Pro second, Pixel Fold third. The Elo ratings 9to5Google published from those results put first and second about five points apart, so read the order as a near-tie wearing a podium. The winner was still the cheapest of the three and the only one that was not a flagship, which is the part worth keeping.
The flat version of the claim also needs one correction, because it matters. In that same edition the iPhone 15 Pro won the low light category outright, ahead of the Pixel 8 Pro. What no iPhone has done is take the thing overall.
What an award can see that a vote cannot
The award is one person who has carried each of those phones for months, judging a package instead of a frame: stills, video, how fast the app opens and locks focus, how often the picture you meant to take is the picture you got, whether any of that holds up across a year rather than one good afternoon. Coverage of the 2024 awards put the reason plainly: writing them up, 9to5Mac quoted him giving the iPhone the category for the whole package, professional video especially, rather than for any one sensor. That is measuring something other than what the votes measured.
Video is the clearest part of the gap. A blind vote on stills cannot measure it at all, and video is what most phones are doing at the moments that count: a school concert, a birthday, a dog doing something exactly once. A camera can lose every still matchup and still be the one you want in your hand right then.
The award is not a permanent seat
It moves, too. Coverage of the 2025 edition of the awards reported the camera prize going to Oppo’s Find X9 Pro, with the iPhone 17 Pro as runner-up on the strength of its video. So the pattern is not that Apple always wins the award. It is that the two methods measure different things, and only one of them has ever landed on Apple as an overall answer.
Which one describes your phone
If what you mostly do is take stills and send them, the blind results are the closer match to your life. Strangers judging one photo at a time did not end up preferring the expensive phones, and a mid-range Pixel beat everything on the board. Whatever you are carrying is probably nearer the top than the marketing around it implies.
If you shoot video, or you need the shot to land the first time with something moving, the award method is the one tracking your experience, and no volume of blind voting will tell you about it. Notice that these are not rival scoreboards so much as different definitions of the word best, which is itself a question with no single answer.
And if what you are really asking is whether to replace the phone you already have: neither result answers that. Both compare this year’s phones against each other in one year, not against the two-year-old camera in your pocket. Nobody publishes that test, because nobody would watch it.
The argument underneath all of this is what the words best camera are even supposed to mean, and taking that phrase apart is the piece to read before trusting any ranking, including these two. If the method interests you more than the results, how the blind test is actually run covers the pairs, the Elo scoring and the things the format cannot see at all.
Last updated September 22, 2026