Widely respected experts say the iPhone 6 Plus is the ‘gold standard’ for smartphone cameras

Does the iPhone 6 Plus bend too easily in your pocket? The jury’s still out but it seems that the iPhone 6 Plus and the iPhone 6 both deliver when it comes to picture quality.Per CNET, the widely respected experts at DxO Labs have run extensive tests on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus cameras and have found that both devices deliver the best camera quality of any smartphones on the market.

In its official rankings, DxO Labs said that the new iPhones have set the “gold standard for smartphone image quality,” as both devices “have very good, generally reliable auto-exposure in a wide range of lighting conditions, and they have both fast and accurate autofocus.” What’s more, DxO says that “output from the 8-megapixel stills improves the high level of detail in both outdoor and indoor lighting. In low light, noise reduction is handled well with images revealing fine-grained luminance noise.”

The wide acclaim that the new iPhones’ cameras have received really shows the limits of relying on top-line specs to decide which camera is best. While the new Apple models both have 8-megapixel cameras, that hasn’t stopped them from performing better in many users’ tests than cameras that are listed as having 13 megapixels or higher.

Be sure to check out DxO’s full rankings of all smartphone cameras in the chart below. As you can see, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony’s Xperia Z2 and Z3 cameras also performed very well in the firm’s tests.