Lying on the beach in Antigua, I stared up into the night sky, dazzled by the stars. A normal person would just sit back and enjoy the show; but I'm not normal, so I took out my two phones, the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the still very new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and started taking photos. What I discovered surprised me, and it might surprise you, too.
To understand how Samsung and Apple approach night photography, you have to start with how they handle smartphone photography in general. Both bring the best sensors and lenses to the party, but they also apply significant amounts of algorithmic image processing (aka computational photography) to make the best of what are relatively tiny lenses in devices not solely built for the job of photography.
