With the best budget camera phones, you can get a premium photography experience for a bargain price. While we’re all familiar with flagship phones and their high price tags, the truth is that you don’t need to spend a huge amount to get a respectable camera. Looking in the mid-range and budget ends of the market, you can find some real gems that still deliver top-notch photo and video quality.
Looking at the specs of the phones we’ve listed here, one thing that might surprise you is how often you see features that seem to belong on more expensive devices. Multicamera arrays, 200MP pixel counts, and phase-detection autofocus; all these things can be found for less than £500. Alongside manufacturers like Honor and Xiaomi that focus on the budget market, a good strategy is to look at older versions of popular flagships. Go back a few generations in Samsung’s Galaxy S series, for example, and you’ll still get a great phone, but for much less money than when it was released.
In this guide, we’ve included both new budget and mid-range models, and older flagships that represent a real bargain. We’ve reviewed them all, so you can be confident we’re only recommending those we have spent time with. One point to note is that all these
