Begun, the camera shutter wars have. Ever since Samsung and Google debuted the Galaxy Nexus' zero shutter lag feature, handset makers have been cranking up their camera apps. Sony's Xperia S is a 12MP monster camera with a fast shutter, but the real speed demon here is the HTC One X. In the video below, the only area the One X loses is in not having a dedicated camera button. As a side note, manufacturers, why don't your phones with amazing cameras have dedicated camera buttons?

[EMBED_YT]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWHONyHvBYI

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As you can see in the first tests, the Xperia S beats the HTC One X in the sleep mode test because it can wake directly to the camera app via the dedicated camera button. That one caveat aside, though, the HTC One X trounced both the Galaxy Nexus and the Xperia S in shutter speed tests. All three phones were tested by starting at the home screen and ending with a snapped photo, and the HTC One X won every time that "fiddly fingers" weren't involved.

The Burst Mode test, however, is just the One X showing off. In Burst Mode, the One X can snap up to 4 frames per second, up to a total of 99 photos. Neither the Xperia S nor the Galaxy Nexus come with a built-in burst mode, so both devices have to simply take a series of photos quickly. While both phones were able to snap quite a few photos in a short amount of time, they were unfocused and crappy. This makes the One X pretty tough to beat in terms of speed.

All that being said, though, none of these devices have bad cameras. The Xperia S carries a 12MP shooter, which blows away the number of pixels crammed into either of the other two phones' 8MP sensor (though sensor quality is another argument entirely). Thankfully, the Xperia S also comes with 32GB of on board storage to carry all those giant photos. And, needless to say, the Galaxy Nexus is stock Android 4.0. That's worth a few milliseconds of waiting for a photo to many. However, if you need the camera you have with you to be the fastest it can be, you might want to take a long look at the HTC One X.