If you follow my Facebook page, you will know I love taking photos and filming while out and about in Christchurch, capturing and documenting the city’s rebuild.

Even when I’m travelling overseas and on holiday, I never miss the opportunity to film, whether it’s the flash hotel or the shopping experience. 

I take my phone with me everywhere I go, just in case there’s something incredible to film. My Facebook followers are always asking me what camera I use and I get the feeling they’re expecting me to talk about some unobtainable broadcast camera used by television networks.  

But no, it’s actually my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and in my opinion, it’s the best smart phone on the market if you’re serious about producing professional video content. 

And no, I’m not getting paid to say this! 

The advancement in mobile imaging for this phone is stunning and if you know how to frame videos correctly, the quality of the video gives any television broadcast camera a run for its money.

Its portrait-style mode, previously only possible with DSLR cameras is terrific. Many phones rely on dual cameras to pull this trick off, and that includes Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8.

The Note 8’s Live Focus mode lets you apply and adjust depth-of-field effect before and after taking a photo, perfect for taking photos of friends and family.

The Note 8 includes a 12-megapixel primary camera, and a 8-megapixel front camera for taking selfies. If you love taking photos of yourself, then you’ll probably enjoy the high quality options and features to enhance your facial features.  

The camera also features optical image stabilisation, an improvement over the digital image stabilisation used in most phones, which compensates for camera shake. But if you’re holding your camera correctly, you shouldn’t need to use this feature.

To give you some perspective on the reaction I get when using this phone, whenever I’m taking photos or video with friends they often ask what phone I’m using and say it takes better photos than their phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 comes with a powerful processor, so you can run many apps at the same time without the phone slowing down. Like older models, it comes with a ‘pen’ so you can wrote notes, as you would on paper.

If you’re always using your phone, the battery will last about a day, but you can change notification settings to turn off data eating applications running in the “background”. 

Finally, if your serious about producing slick video content, but don’t want to carry around a clunky camera, then this phone is perfect.