After a 5 month wait I finally got my Robin last week and I am overall very happy with the phone. There were lots of reviews coming out last month, none of them too impressed with Robin’s camera performance. So, I decided to conduct one myself to really so how well it competes with some of the popular smartphones out there.

There are already plenty of un-boxing videos and expert reviews out there. I would particularly suggest to check out the one at TechnoBufallo as it pretty much echoes my thoughts. However, there was one thing that I missed in all the in-depth reviews of Robin – image-by-image comparison with some of the common smartphones out there. That’s why I decided instead of doing yet another review with impressions and technical specifications to carry-out such a test myself. Read on to see the results and I hope you will find it useful. It was definitely interesting for me personally to see how it will perform when put against some of the competition.

Testing

As I am not some big blogging or news website I don’t have the latest flagships at my disposal, therefore I kindly asked some of my friends to lend me their smartphones for a day.

Devices

  • NextBit Robin
  • Nokia Lumia 930
  • iPhone 6
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
  • Canon PowerShot SX220 HS

These are all 1-2 year old flagship phones but I think that’s more suitable then comparing Robin to the latest Galaxy, iPhone or Lumia as they all cost double the money. However, if anyone is willing to lend me their’s for a day I will gladly to another test :)

Yes, that’s right I included my trusty but ageing PowerShot camera as well because I thought it would be a good idea to compare smartphones to your average point-and-shoot camera as I was curious how far has smartphone photography come in terms of image and video quality.

Method

In this article I will not list any phone or camera technical specifications as other websites have that well covered. Also, at the end of the day figures don’t really say much about the image quality. Therefore I will only compare images side-by-side and my comments about each.

Even though all of the tested devices offer a manual mode, I tested them in full-auto mode as that’s how majority of users shoot their photos. The only manual input from me was taping on screen to define the main focus point of the image, again ensuring consistency across devices.

For landscape shots I have taken each photo from the same spot, doing my best to get the centre of the photo at the same spot. This allows for a good comparison of how wide/narrow angle each camera lens is.

For macro shots I moved closer or further from an object, trying to match the exact framing of the photo.

To make the 100% crop comparison most accurate I scaled all the photos to the same size as iPhone 6 image as it produces the smallest resolution files. I believe this is better for comparison purpose as once you upload your photos to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other online gallery all images get sized to the same resolution regardless of the source image.

As many users use their smartphones for video recording I made a few 10 second clips with each of devices as well to show how Robin fares in video department as well. I uploaded those to YouTube and embedded them into this article for your convenience.

For your reference I also included the full-size resolution images which you can download if you wish to do so.

Content

Now with the boring stuff out of the way, I can finally start with the (hopefully) cool part of my article. You can either jump straight to each of the photo comparison by clicking on one of the thumbnails below or use the next / previous buttons to go through one at a time.

Posted on 7 March 2016 by