To be fair, Samsung does implement this slightly better than Sony, though. Of course, there’s also the new ultra-slow-motion mode, capable of capturing 720p resolution at a frankly silly 960fps, which is fun, but if that’s your bag, check out Sony’s latest Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact phones, which have trumped Samsung Galaxy S9 phones by doing the same with its XZ2 phones at Full HD resolution. It’s crisp and highly detailed, and there’s little of the focus hunting that so badly afflicts other rivals, such as the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. It can, of course, record in 4K resolution at 60fps, but it is unable to record this fully stabilised like the iPhone X can. Overall, though, despite the slightly bizarre and inconsistent implementation of the bigger f/1.5 aperture, the Samsung Galaxy S9 has an excellent camera and, once you take into account the quality of the video, I’d say it was better than the Pixel 2. It is not, I must stress, about adding creative options such as changing the depth of field the difference between f/1.5 and f/2.4 on a camera with a sensor this small is minimal when it comes to depth of field. The narrower aperture also stops the phone from overexposing images in strong light. You have to look closely but it’s fairly clear that in f/1.5 mode shots are far softer at the top, bottom, left and right edges of the frame than they are in f/2.4. With larger apertures, you typically see a fall-off in sharpness towards the edges of the frame and that’s very much in evidence here. How about the dual aperture then? That, at least, appears to be more effective.

It seems that’s not always the case here.

I’d have thought the whole idea of using a larger aperture with more light-gathering capacity would be to reduce ISO levels and thus produce cleaner, less noisy images. In fact, in some circumstances I found that in Auto mode using the f/1.5 setting the camera would actually trigger the use of a higher ISO level than the same scene captured in Pro mode with f/2.4 selected. But this doesn’t appear to be due to the larger f/1.5 aperture.

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