Our camera shootout between the new iPhone 8 and the two-year-old iPhone 6s reveals you don't really need to upgrade
Conclusion
After a few weeks with the iPhone 8, I was sufficiently impressed with its camera. In several situations, it easily outperformed my 6s and produced several great photos that I posted online or sent to friends.
But in other situations, I actually liked the 6s camera better. Its photos looked cooler in tone, in most well-lit situations it performed just fine, and while I'm not much of a selfie-taker, the 6s takes great ones.
Despite the iPhone 6s being "dated" by now — it was released in September 2015 — it's still a great phone with a great camera. So if taking nice photos is your main concern, save $700 and stick with the 6s.
And, of course, I had to take a selfie. The iPhone 8 has a 7-megapixel FaceTime camera versus iPhone 6s' 5-megapixel one, but here, I felt the two cameras performed very similarly. There are slight color differences — the wall behind me has a bluish tint, my lips look pinker, my eyes look greener, and my hair looks darker. But I think I'd choose the photo taken by the 6s for one reason: The 8's tendency to take warmer photos makes my skin look pinker than it actually is.
As time went on, I started to notice that the iPhone 8 really shines with food photography. Food looked richer and more appealing in iPhone 8 photos, and I was more likely to share those pictures with friends and family or on Instagram. The 8 also handled bright light better than the 6s — if you look at the blueberry cheesecake in the back, it looks less blown-out on the 8 than on the 6s.
Here's a landscape shot of my parents' backyard snapped on a rainy afternoon. While the colors on the photo taken by the 8 look just slightly richer and more vibrant, I wasn't a fan of overall the sharpening effect on the photo. Here, the 6s photo looks just fine to me.
But that same warmth that I enjoyed on the pizza photo looks odd here. iPhone photos have always tended to be a bit "cooler" in tone, so seeing this almost sepia-tinged image was jarring. The photo taken on the 6s looks better to me, and more true-to-life. The 8's tendency to take "warmer" photos was something I noticed consistently over the course of my tests, and it was typically more noticeable in low-light photos.
I probably eat pizza — and photograph it — more often than most people, so this was an important test. While both photos make the pizza look delicious, I found myself leaning toward the photo taken by the 8. The colors are warmer, making the pizza look more enticing. Again, I found the iPhone 8's camera to be slightly sharper.
Here I was testing both color capture and mixed lighting. Once again, you can see how poorly the 6s performs in low light compared to the 8 — the photo is grainy, and nothing in the photo is very sharp. But the 8's photo almost goes too far in the other direction. My skin looks patchy and everything is almost too vibrant. Overall, the colors in the photo taken by the 6s look nicer.
Here's a good test of how the phones handle color. I noticed over the course of my tests that in bright, natural light, the photos looked virtually the same in terms of color. Here, both cameras did a great job focusing on the subject while blurring the background, and the colors are vibrant. But if you look closer, the photo taken on the 8 is just a bit sharper.
Here's a bouquet of (faux) flowers that I photographed in a dim room. The 6s had a hard time focusing, and the photo is noisy, meaning it looks grainy. The photo taken with the iPhone 8, however, is much brighter. The camera did a nice job auto-focusing on the yellow flower while blurring out everything in the background, known as a bokeh effect.
When comparing the specs of the two phones, I noticed a few major differences between the two.
Both phones sport a 12-megapixel rear camera, auto-HDR, have exposure controls, and have a 5X digital zoom.
But the iPhone 6s has an f/2.2 aperture while the iPhone 8 has an f/1.8 aperture. This means the iPhone 8's camera is able to let in more light, making for better shots in low light and sharper images overall.
The iPhone 8 also has optical image stabilization (OIS), a six-element lens (compared to the iPhone 6s' five-element lens), wide color capture, and a quad-LED True Tone flash with slow sync.
I primarily focused on testing the phone's abilities in low light, since that was the biggest change from the iPhone 6s.
