Only the Best In-Camera Quality With This JPEG Shootout

As a professional photographer, you might be the go-to person for questions about the “best camera” of the moment. The camera is a tool right? Photographers are in charge of the best photo, not of the best camera. On top of that, every few months there’s a new contender, and it takes a lot of time to figure out which one has the highest resolution, the best color, the least amount of noise in low-light, or even the look and feel of a photograph… But as soon as you shoot in raw, half of that doesn’t matter anymore. Things are about to get subjective in this video. In this comparison, the guys from TheCameraStoreTV intend to find out what the best camera is for the budding photographer wanting to shoot in JPEG.

Chris Niccolls from TheCameraStore has eight of the latest cameras fanned out in front of him:

Nikon D500, Olympus PEN-F, Panasonic G85, Fujifilm X-T2, Canon 80D, Pentax K-70, Sony a6300, and the iPhone 7 Plus.

You read that right: There’s a smartphone in there and no full frame cameras today. These are there very latest cameras equipped with APS-C and MFT lens mounts. Let’s find out how these compare to each other and the iPhone 7 Plus.

As for a setup: There’s no scientific lab testing involved. Instead, Chris Niccolls and the guys from TheCameraStore take the bodies for real-world spin, like we’ve come to appreciate of their YouTube channel.

What’s interesting in the results is that the images look wildly different if we just look at color balance alone. In one of the tests, a portrait of a ginger baby, shot on auto white balance comes out like it was shot under varying lighting setups.

All in all, this is really interesting. It goes to show that not only us photographers are subject to our perception of the world around us, but manufacturers as well.

So what’s your favorite JPEG? Tell us why you like that one, as objectively as possible.