Apple's iPhone 18 Pro has taken second place in DXOMARK's smartphone camera rankings with an overall score of 172, three points behind the HUAWEI Pura 80 Ultra's 175 — a top spot the Huawei flagship has now defended since August 2025. The result puts Apple's latest ₱94,990 flagship ahead of every other phone the independent camera-testing lab has measured, but still short of the crown.
The scores
DXOMARK's full review breaks the 172 down like this:
| Category | Score |
|---|
| Overall camera | 172 (2nd overall) |
| Photo | 171 |
| Video | 176 |
| Bokeh | 175 |
| Ultra-wide | 152 |
| Telephoto | 143 |
The 176 video score is the standout — Notebookcheck notes it is the highest video number DXOMARK lists for any phone. The iPhone 18 Pro also ranks second in the ultra-premium tier, DXOMARK's bracket for phones above $800 (around ₱50,400).
Where the iPhone 18 Pro wins
DXOMARK's testers singled out low-light photography as best-in-class, with strong detail, accurate exposure, and controlled noise in difficult lighting. The new variable aperture — which physically adjusts from f/1.48 to f/4.0 — earned praise for making group portraits sharper, since a narrower aperture keeps more faces in focus, and for giving photographers manual control that fixed-lens phones cannot match.
Video is the other pillar: effective stabilization while moving, smooth 60fps capture, and a well-balanced trade-off between preserving texture and suppressing noise.
Where it falls short
The telephoto camera is the clearest weakness. Its 143 sub-score trails the best zoom systems by a wide margin — Notebookcheck points to the OPPO Find X9 Ultra's 173 telephoto score as the benchmark. Testers also flagged occasional color casts and white-balance shifts, visible lens flare in some scenes, face exposure that struggles against backlight, and a noticeable brightness difference between what you see in photo mode versus video mode.
None of these are unusual complaints for an iPhone — zoom has lagged Chinese flagships for several generations — but they are the specific gaps keeping Apple three points off the top.
A four-point jump over the iPhone 17 Pro
The generational progress is real. Last year's iPhone 17 Pro scored 168 in the same test, so the 18 Pro's 172 is a four-point improvement — meaningful by DXOMARK standards, where the entire top ten is usually separated by fewer than ten points. The 17 Pro has since slid to sixth place as newer flagships arrived. The main camera is doing much of the lifting: its 181 sub-score is the strongest single number in Apple's breakdown, which is consistent with where Apple spent its hardware budget this generation — the variable-aperture main lens — rather than on the unchanged telephoto.
What this means for Philippine buyers
The iPhone 18 Pro launched in the Philippines at ₱94,990, so a second-place camera finish is a fair question of value: the phone DXOMARK rates higher, HUAWEI's Pura 80 Ultra, comes from a brand whose recent flagships ship without Google services — a real trade-off for Filipino users tied to Google apps, GCash, and banking apps that can behave unpredictably outside the Play Store ecosystem. For buyers deciding within Apple's lineup, the takeaway is simpler: the 18 Pro's camera is a measurable step up from last year, strongest exactly where most people shoot — video, portraits, and dim restaurants — and weakest at long zoom, which matters mainly if you shoot concerts or wildlife from a distance.
DXOMARK scores are one lab's structured testing, not the final word on photography, and the three-point gap at the top is small in practice. But as a ranking of the cameras Filipinos can actually walk into a store and buy, the top two spots now belong to Huawei and Apple — with the rest of the field, for the moment, looking up at both.
