Yeah, in good conditions, pretty much all the top shelf phones from the past year or two can take a really good picture.... The Note 4 is certainly included in that bunch. I would chance a guess that the Note 4 has a video advantage due to OIS... and they do include a much more robust camera application. But I am a pragmatist that values results over execution, 3 months from now I won't care how I took the picture, I just care that the picture is good... I don't use a ton of those funky features that hide on those slide out menus all that much (and I can get them with a 3rd party camera app) so the Google Camera does all I ask of it 99% of the time.
Have a 6P, S7E, note 5 and note 4. 6P by far taked the clearest and littlest noise in any pocture hands down. My 6P blows the S7E camera out the water. Sure the 6P doesnt focus nearly as fast, but if lighting isnt great, the s7e camera is very washed out and things look more soft and not defined compared to the 6P
And I kind of agree with your conclusion there, by the way.... Samsung is really heavy handed when it comes to processing. Even in bright conditions, they tend to clobber the really fine details to try to amplify 'clarity'. In dark conditions, they clobber details. Here's two 100 crops of some pics I took shortly after I got my wife's S7... top is a HDR pic from the S7, bottom is an HDR+ pic from the 6P. It's a unlit room with a window off the right letting in a lot of sunlight.
Samsung is oversharpening things to give the impression of crisp details and then processing things to death a bit, to the point where details and colors are getting lost (look at the photos on the shelf). Things look a bit artificial and splotchy... jagged edged curves (look at the vase), smudged colors, etc. The 6P's shot looks far more natural, and the digital noise that is allowed to remain, to me, comes off more like what you would see with the grain on film.
Now,
on the phone, the S7's pictures look better... they appear clearer, brighter, etc. But once you get them on something bigger than a 5' screen, the story flips. I think that's what Samsung is going after, to be honest... Fool you by processing. Which is TOTALLY unnecessary since they should be able to dial back the processing quite a bit.
S7
6P
Now, that isn't to say the S7's camera is bad... the damn thing is a picture taking demon and my wife is quite pleased with it. But in terms of raw results, the 6P takes a better picture in most every condition I've tried. On the video side of things, if I can avoid the second cup of coffee, the 6P's EIS does a pretty good job of keeping things steady, but not as well as an OIS phone.
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