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I've narrowed my choice down to (CPU clock speed in parens):

  • HTC One A9 (10.8GHz total)
  • Samsung S6 (14.4GHz total)
  • LG G4 (9.2GHz total)
  • Huawei P9 (17.2GHz total)
  • Huawei Nexus 6P (14.2GHz total)

My primary concern is that when I use an exp. bracketing app such as Camera FV-5, and shoot RAW, it's gonna take too long to store each exposure and the clouds will have moved too much in the meantime.

To avoid that problem, I'm thinking I should pick the one with the highest CPU clock speed. Or maybe I should pick the one with the fewest megapixels?

Note that, eyeing gsmarena.com sample low-light photos, I prefer the two Huawei phones to the other three.

If all 4 phones would take a really long time (like 5 seconds) per RAW exposure, then maybe I'll drop the "RAW" requirement and look for phones that support a higher bracketing range. E.g. my current Samsung Galaxy J7 (2017) only from -2EV to +2EV, which is too little. But that's gonna be another question.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I don't know the answer, but it is not as simple as looking at the CPU clock (and multiplying clock and cores is just wrong). Many factors will influence this, and as you have narrowed it down to 4 phones .. I suggest going to a store and trying all of them out. \$\endgroup\$
    – Flo
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 18:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ It will also depend on your app: With Open Camera, my Nexus 4 will take the whole bracket-shot first and then merge all pictures into a tone-mapped HDR - unless there are people in the picture (which would alwys be problematic), I have yet to encounter a problem with ghosting. \$\endgroup\$
    – flolilo
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 0:30
  • \$\begingroup\$ btw. according to google, bracketing is "wrong" and capturing a lot of snapshots at the same exposure settings gives more detail and allows for better registration, and this is what they do in their recent phones. dpreview.com/news/4324089912/… \$\endgroup\$
    – szulat
    Commented Feb 24, 2019 at 22:49

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The CPU speed and megapixels shouldn't mean anything, and here's why:

All of these phones are Android phones based on Linux kernel that use the RAM in the phone as a filesystem buffer cache. Unless the camera application specifically requests the Linux kernel to flush the file from the buffer cache to permanent storage, the write speed, megapixels and CPU speed don't matter at all. Modern phones may contain over gigabyte of RAM. Now, do three RAW images take a significant fraction of this RAM amount? You know the answer already!

Not only that, but since you're planning to shoot RAW, very little CPU will be required for compression. RAW is raw, after all.

It's in the app, not in the phone: you need a camera application that supports the required features.

If I was writing an exposure bracketing RAW app, I wouldn't flush the files to storage until all images have been taken.

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