DXOMARK, the international leader in the evaluation of the quality of smartphone image/camera, audio, screen and battery products, as well as other consumer electronics products, today announces the update of its smartphone testing benchmarks and scoring system, with the aim of bringing its scientific evaluation system closer to users, in line with technological trends. Under the updated benchmarking and scoring system, all current scores will be updated from 21 September 2022, French time.
The new DXOMARK benchmarks are designed to be closer to the user and are based on real-life use cases. At the same time, DXOMARK continues to keep pace with technological developments, evaluating the latest technology in devices, regardless of whether it is already being used on a large scale. In order to make the scientific results and technical content more readable and accessible to the general public, all DXOMARK scores are based on real-life benchmarks and include tests on the daily use of the devices in different scenarios and environments.
In order to make the scoring system more transparent and consistent, the scoring criteria and benchmark formulas for each benchmark, including image/selfie, audio, screen and battery, are now publicly available, and a geometric average is also used to reward more balanced performance. With this update, DXOMARK hopes to further inform every user of the professionalism and transparency behind the scoring.
Frédéric Guichard, CEO of DXOMARK, said: “Technology innovation is on a fast track worldwide, and the smartphone industry, which is emblematic of this, is never slowing down and is constantly embracing new scenarios, technological breakthroughs and user experience-driven trends. The smartphone industry has never slowed down. In this process, only technologies that are truly meaningful to users can better empower them, provide benchmarks for manufacturers and help the industry to innovate and develop. In this context, DXOMARK will continue to update our benchmarks to assess the quality of devices that are truly relevant to users, measure real-life scenarios and analyze new trends in technology to realize our vision of promoting meaningful and useful technology for end users.”
Newly upgraded test benchmarks: one step closer to the user
The smartphone image, screen, audio, battery and selfie benchmarks and the new scoring system have been developed and upgraded by DXOMARK’s team of engineers over the course of a year.
The image benchmarks have been updated to focus on the user, adding user-relevant use cases for common scenarios such as group photos of friends and family and low-light shots. In addition, DXOMARK has further improved the test methodology by extending the zoom scoring to include a range of focal lengths in both photo and video zoom tests, further enriching the zoom test scenarios. New lab settings have been added, enabling real-life scenes to be reproduced in the lab and testing HDR modes for portraits and moving objects. New AI-driven metrics have been added, with the ability to perform noise and texture AI metrics for photographs and videos on real-life scenes/objects. In addition, the new test benchmark uses international focus groups to better reflect user preferences and assess the camera’s low-light performance.
Updates to the audio test benchmark focus on user pain points. Two new tests, audio zoom and wind noise have been added to the recording section. In addition, more objective tests have been added to increase the proportion of the audio test signal in the total score. Custom audio test tracks are now available for perceptual analysis and the new playlists are not only representative of daily user usage, but also further improve the accuracy of DXOMARK audio assessments.
First public disclosure of scoring criteria: a more transparent and unified technical interpretation to keep users and technology up to date
This is also the first time that DXOMARK has made its scoring algorithm structure publicly available. All test benchmarks are based on consumer usage scenarios, and the weighting of the scores is determined by scientific research on consumer mobile phone usage. In addition to the benchmark updates, the algorithm for all DXOMARK scores will change from an arithmetic average to a geometric average to emphasize the balanced performance of devices, with models optimized for specific use cases struggling to achieve high scores. Based on the latest test benchmarks and scoring algorithms, the existing DXOMARK scores for smartphone devices will also change accordingly.
The DXOMARK rankings have also undergone some changes due to updated test benchmarks, the inclusion of new usage scenarios and improvements to the test methodology.
Here are the latest top 10 smartphones.
