DXO Mark score the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, ties for top billing with the Huawei P30 Pro

While we don’t rely solely on benchmarks to determine “how good a device is” the DxOMark benchmark is widely regarded as an excellent indicator of camera quality. Today the team over at DxOMark dropped their review of the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G camera, and it’s tied for first place.

With the cameras in the Samsung S10+ getting lukewarm reviews it’s nice to see the S10 5G shaping up to be top of the pile. The S10 5G features a Quad Rear Camera set up with a 12 MP f/1.5-2.4 sensor, 12 MP f/2.4 telephoto sensor, 16 MP f/2.2 ultrawide sensor, and a Time of Flight sensor, this seems to have been a winning combination.

What is most interesting to note is that, except for the TOF sensor, the camera array used in the Galaxy S10 5G is exactly the same as used in the lower-scoring Galaxy S10+. How has Samsung achieved a higher score with the same equipment?

In short, by using it differently. For starters, the default video recording mode is now 4K, which improves texture, noise and artifact scores in video, bringing it up to 100. It’s worth noting that the additional TOF sensor isn’t used in DXOMark’s video scores.

The reason DXOMark gave out a higher score for still photography is quite interesting. Samsung changed the primary lens used for bokeh-enhanced portraits from the wide-angle lens to the telephoto lens. This reduce distortion especially for short focal length portraits where the wide-angle lens and its more spherical glass can cause issues, drawing in too much of the background and changing the proportion of the subject.

With just these few tricks, Samsung has managed to score a higher rating than the same hardware in a different phone. Curiously, there are some aspects where Samsung’s S10 range doesn’t perform so well – e.g. zoom or low light – but this doesn’t seem to have affected DXOMark’s score too highly.

Overall DxOMark seems to have been impressed with the camera performance rating it the same as the Huawei P30 Pro in its overall ratings, that said the P30 Pro did score slightly higher on still images and slightly lower on video. After seeing these results we’d be more than interested in getting out hands on a Galaxy S10 5G to test out ourselves.