Best Camera Phones Under Rs. 30,000

Ten years ago, camera phones used to be a special category of phones that pushed the envelope of how good an image sensor on a phone can be – which was not pretty good, to be honest. Today, phones under Rs. 10,000 come packed with cameras that click very usable photos.

Having said that, the image quality on entry-level devices still leaves something to be desired, and if you’re willing to spend more, you get features such as phase detection autofocus, slow motion video capture, 4K video recording, and optical image stabilisation that can improve your pictures quite a bit, without spending more than Rs. 30,000.

To make this list, we focused only on phones that we’ve reviewed so that we can vouch for the image quality ourselves. We also stuck to phones released this year, because while older phones might still have great cameras, their performance in other areas would be lacking today. You can get even better cameras on phones, but you’ll have to spend a lot more. Here are five phones we’ve tested that offer the best camera quality for under Rs. 30,000.

1) Xiaomi Mi 5
Xiaomi’s Mi 5 was one of the first reasonably-priced phones to sport the newest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip. It’s got a 16-megapixel Sony IMX298 camera sensor at the back, and a 4-megapixel front camera with a big, 2 micrometer pixel size. In our tests, pictures in good lighting were “bright, colourful and fairly sharp”. The Auto HDR mode delivered good results, keeping the pictures clean and pleasant to look at. Low light shots, although not the best in class, offered satisfactory results.We were particularly happy with the 4K recording output of the camera, that was “gloriously detailed”. The front camera is also another high point of this phone, taking decent selfies even in low light. However, the camera at the time was not one of the fastest in focusing on the subject, and slo-mo videos drop the resolution to 720p.