Just last week I put the iPhone 17 Pro Max vs Galaxy S25 Ultra through a 7-round face-off to determine which of these best phone contenders is the superior pick overall. While I captured a dozen or so photos with them both, I really wanted to more definitively say which is really the best camera phone around.
Both phones have everything you’d want in a camera phone, as the iPhone 17 Pro Max features a 48MP triple camera setup. The biggest changes include its new 18MP Center Stage front camera and 48MP telephoto shooter with 4x optical zoom. I’m still on the fence about the telephoto because it trades in the 5x optical zoom range of the previous models for a slightly shorter 4x optical one, but it’s now a higher resolution 48MP sensor that can achieve a 8x "optical quality" zoom.
