Galaxy S10+ vs iPhone XS Max vs OnePlus 7 Pro vs Huawei P30 Pro: Zoom comparison

To see what the advantages and disadvantages of these higher magnification lenses are, we decided to see how some of the most popular flagship phones right now fare against each other with a short zoom comparison. From the four contenders we chose, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and iPhone XS Max have 2x tele-cameras, the OnePlus 7 Pro comes with 3x optical zoom (although some argue that's not entirely true) and the Huawei P30 Pro takes it up a notch with its 5x tele-camera. 

To let every phone in the lineup shine, we took pictures at 2x, 3x, 5x and 10x zoom. To give each phone two opportunities to do its best, we have two 2x scenes, two 3x and one with 5x and 10x each. We'll give each photo a score from 1 to 10 and the total sum of the scores from the six scenes will give us the winner in this comparison. To keep things simpler, we won't be focusing on exposure, color reproduction and so on as much as we'll be looking at things related to the zoom: loss of detail, noise, sharpness.

The Galaxy S10+ noticeably outperforms the competition in this scene. While in the crop the colored letters aren't very smooth, overall it has kept the details in the shirt and face without almost any artifacts. The background looks pretty good as well.

The iPhone comes second, but not by much. The straight lines are visibly pixelated and the skin of the face is very noisy.

The OnePlus is very close to the iPhone but there are some more issues with its picture. The contrast and sharpening are too much and when you look up close, you see all kinds of imperfections.

Despite the beauty mode on the P30 Pro being turned off, there is some major smoothening going on. The shirt looks like it's been ironed and the skin is straight-up airbrushed. Even from afar it doesn't look good at all.

With the P30 Pro there's a lot of smoothening going on and overall the picture is not great. It outperforms the OnePlus in some regards but falls behind in others, so we think it deserves the same score. 

We're not grading this last set of photos to avoid skewing the results in favor of the P30 Pro, but we thought it would be interesting to show another example with objects even further away in the distance. The building you see in the 100% crops is about 1.5 miles away from where we stood. The advantage goes to the Huawei's flagship once again, but the OnePlus 7 Pro manages to squeeze out a lot from its 3x zoom camera. But now, let's take a look at the overall scores!

A somewhat surprising result, but the consistency of the Galaxy S10+ throughout the stages gave it the edge in this competition, beating the OnePlus 7 Pro by a mere half a point. It seems optics alone aren't enough to give you great results, you also need good software to iron out the kinks. Speaking of optics, while we saw some great performance from the P30 Pro at long distances, we also saw some really poor shots from up close, for which there is no excuse when it comes to flagships. And then there is the iPhone XS Max. Zoom is definitely not its strong suit. Disappointing results from the most expensive phone in the lineup. 

Some might argue that since this is a zoom comparison then the P30 Pro should definitely be king. And we saw that is indeed the case for the higher zoom levels. However, during daily use, such long-distance shots are quite a rare occurrence, unless you're really into that kind of stuff. And whenever you do take a 5x or 10x photo, chances are it will be more for the novelty of it rather than creating a photographic masterpiece. So for most people, it makes sense to go for the phone with the best overall performing camera, which in this case is that of the Galaxy S10+.