iPhone 6S vs iPhone 6: the in-depth test

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Camera and camera samples

Let's kick off with the rear-facing camera. You'd expect that with 12MP on offer pictures would appear sharp, clean and full of more color.

However, there's an issue that all camera manufacturers come up against: packing in more pixels makes it harder to capture bright and clean photos.

HTC tried to go the other way and use a 4MP sensor (dubbed UltraPixel) with the aim of capturing better, brighter and cleaner pictures, but it couldn't convince the public that fewer megapixels were a good thing.

It feels a bit like Apple's bowed to the pressure to bring a higher number sensor to the 6S, and the odd thing is it really doesn't perform any differently to the 8MP one on the iPhone 6.

Odd for a couple of reasons: firstly, why bother if the results are going to be virtually similar? You can see in the following samples that there's very little difference between the two.

Secondly, it's impressive that Apple has actually managed to improve low light performance in the 12MP sensor on the iPhone 6S. If you look at the rabbit picture, you can see the new sensor is slightly ahead in information absorbed, and that's something we didn't expect.

The front facing 'selfie' camera is just simply a cut above. The Retina flash, which boosts the screen to three times its normal brightness to illuminate your face, works pretty well and gives you options for photos where there were none before.