I’ve already named my favorite camera phone of 2024, and the crown went to the fantastic Xiaomi 14 Ultra. The versatile Photography Kit makes it really special, and it has even replaced my DSLR several times when taking photos published on Digital Trends.
However, what about my worst camera phone of 2024? It turns out this was a much harder question to answer, but in the end, there could only be one.
So many phones have decent cameras
I’ve used and reviewed dozens of smartphones this year, so surely finding one or two that didn’t have a stellar camera should be no problem, right? Well, sort of. The problem is that even average phones have at least one perfectly acceptable camera on the back — almost regardless of their price.
Let’s take the CMF Phone 1 as an example. At the time of writing, it’s on offer for 170 British pounds, or about $215, making it one of the cheapest phones I’ve used in 2024. The phone will have undoubtedly been built to a price point, and the cost of the camera components will have been more important than whether it takes good photos or not. Yet, the camera is decent. No, it’s not feature-packed, but if you just want to take general photos, it won’t disappoint.
The Redmi 13 Pro Plus is another good example of why it’s hard to choose a really terrible camera this year. The main 200-megapixel camera takes very good photos, and I was impressed by its use of color, but the rest of the three-camera setup was much worse. The 8MP wide-angle camera has been a scourge on phones for a while, and on the Redmi Note 13 Pro, it is accompanied by a useless 2MP macro camera, meaning everything aside from the main camera is an utter waste.
Some phones really do disappoint
The CMF Phone 1 and Redmi 13 Pro Plus don’t have bad cameras; they just have either bad elements or lack much versatility. These aren’t crimes and simply just represent the lower end of the market. The Nuu B30 Pro suffers in the same way, as does the Tecno Pova 6 Pro. Now that we’ve talked about average-at-best cameras, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of choosing the worst camera of 2024.
It’s almost too obvious to choose the Nokia 3210. No one in their right mind would expect its 2MP fixed-focus camera to take anything but bad photos, and sure enough, it really did take terrible photos. It’s not sold as a camera phone to rival the Google Pixel 9 and instead promises to help you cure your smartphone addiction. One surefire way to do this is with a rubbish camera, so the Nokia 3210 is well on its way to make you never want to pick it up again.
It’s a similar situation with the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro, which is a gaming phone and not a camera phone. However, Asus works hard to make the camera appear to be more than an afterthought, and with the ROG Phone 8 Pro, it took a positive step forward. However, after changing the main camera sensor for the most recent model, quality took a hit. It’s a shame, especially as it’s not a cheap phone, but I don’t think anyone will be buying the ROG Phone 9 Pro specifically for the camera anyway.
The big losers
That’s a lot of phones with cameras that aren’t very good, but they aren’t the worst of the year. In fact, they’re not even close. There were three devices that immediately came to mind when I thought about bad cameras this year, but there’s still only one clear winner.
I didn’t use the Moto G 5G 2024, and the camera certainly didn’t impress Digital Trends’ Christine Romero-Chan, but seeing as I didn’t actually use it, it only gets a (dis)honorable mention here. Instead, my runner-up is a wild card, as technically, it’s not really a phone. I’m talking about the Rabbit R1.
The AI gadget hasn’t won many plaudits since its release, earning a single star in our review, but it does have a camera that you can use for visual search and other AI features, and it saves the snapshot each time in the Rabbit Hole online inventory for you to look back on in days to come. Unfortunately, the 8MP camera takes bad photos, and even though I had fun converting them over into AI-reimagined images, there’s something incredibly disappointing about the decision to equip the R1 with such an underwhelming camera when a better camera could have given it at least one redeeming feature.
Which leaves us with the “winner.” The worst camera phone I’ve used in 2024 is the Punkt MC02, and none of the others even come close to it. It’s a phone so bad I couldn’t review it. There’s a 64MP main camera and another stupid 8MP wide-angle camera on the back, and the photos it took were all awful.
But it’s not just the picture quality that made the Punkt MC02 the year’s worst — it’s everything around it. The camera app was poorly designed, buggy, and seemingly unfinished, making the act of using it at all quite painful, and you had to pay $750 and potentially a monthly subscription after a year of ownership for the hateful thing.
Is it still as bad?
- 1. Punkt MC02
- 2. Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max
I want to be fair in my judgment of the Punkt MC02, so I took it out of the box, started it up, applied any updates, and went out to take a few photos with both it and the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
The camera app hasn’t improved. You still need to select and deselect the main and wide-angle cameras under the More menu, and it stays in the same mode until you switch from one to the other. There is still no option to add grid lines for shot composition. The zoom slider is haphazardly designed, slow, and unreliable to operate, and it takes a beat too long to actually take a photo after pressing the shutter release. It’s like Punkt made no effort at all with the camera app and certainly hasn’t addressed anything I noticed when I first used the phone eight months ago.
- 1. Punkt MC02
- 2. Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max
How about the photos? Are there any big changes? No. They are dire. The amount of noise in almost all the photos I took is shocking; there are masses of smoothing, bad edge enhancement, and a sad lack of detail. In lowish indoor light, the results are woeful. See the photo of the cat for evidence of how it struggles not just with dim indoor light, but also with focus. The fact that the $200 CMF Phone 1 has a considerably better, much more usable, and definitely more consumer-friendly camera than the $750 Punkt MC02 is another reason that the latter was the obvious choice for the year’s worst award.
The good news is the Punkt MC02 is very much an outlier, and as I hope it is clear, choosing a phone with an all-around disappointing camera is actually quite hard these days. Provided you don’t buy the Punkt, the Nokia 3210, or the Moto G — and if you do, I’ll assume you clearly have no interest in the cameras — the main camera, at the very least, should be perfectly usable on the majority of phones, in most everyday situations.
We should be happy that this is the situation at the end of 2024, rather than angry at any of the phones mentioned here.
