[Samsung Galaxy S8+ Guides, News, & Discussion] henrybravo:
Thanks. No offense but comparison pics that other people post are meaningless to me for several reasons.

A few days ago I was doing comparison photos between my S8+, my Nexus 6P and my brother's Pixel. I specifically was testing with scenes that had significant exposure differences within the same shot. For example, inside a normally lit room with an outside window near the left side of the frame and an open door into a darker room near the right side of the frame.

Something I quickly discovered with my S8+ is that I had to put the camera in manual HDR mode for it to work as well as auto HDR mode on the 6P/Pixel (which both use Google's HDR post-processing algorithm). I haven't owned a Samsung phone in a few generations so I don't know if this is normal for Samsung cameras these days. In scenes with significant exposure differences within the same frame, Samsung's version of auto HDR will often overemphasize on brightening the darker parts and doesn't doesn't tone down the overly bright parts very well, which causes the brighter portions to be overexposed. I see this effect in your shots. Putting the Samsung into manual HDR mode forces it to deal with toning down the brighter parts of the shot which greatly improves the overall shot in a lot of situations. Judging by your shots, I think manual HDR could have made a big difference, but I wasn't there to test it myself, so I'm forced to question if all of your photos would have come out better if your phone had been in my hands. Yes, it sucks you can't leave the S8 in Auto HDR mode and just let the camera figure it out, but it is what it is. Leaving the S8 in manual HDR mode permanently is probably acceptable (it has been so far for me) as there is no processing speed hit and things like burst mode and the flash still work.

Auto HDR on the 6P/Pixel versus auto HDR on the Samsung? Google wins in many situations.

Auto HDR on the 6P/Pixel versus manual HDR on the Samsung? Much closer call. Close enough to not let the camera alone be a deciding factor on whether or not to buy the S8.

The picture where you say the "houses on the left look washed out" on the Samsung, I wasn't there in person to look at the scene myself with my own eyes. It's quite possible the houses looked brighter that way in real life, and the XL darkened them a bit. Or it's possible the XL nailed it correctly. I don't know because I wasn't there. Which photo is "better"? The grass has a yellowish tint in the XL but is a more natural looking green in the S8. Which color was it really in person? I wasn't there in real life to judge for myself, so I can't judge which camera is "better" by simply looking at your photos. Could using manual HDR mode on the S8 have made a difference with the exposure of those houses? And the comparison shots are not framed the same either, so there's that discrepancy. There is a lot more sky in your S8 photo, so the overall frame exposure is not the same, so each camera isn't working with the same source info.

Your lens flare comparison is meaningless. Once again the pictures are not framed the same. Lens flare is highly dependent on the angle of the lens in relation to the light source (just ask JJ Abrams ;)). The XL lens was significantly higher up than the S8 lens, you can tell this just by looking at the angle of the Goodman A/C logo. Both of your shots had lens flare, so both cameras sucked in this regard. The XL is way worse in the far lower left part of the shot, but the S8 has more curvy lens flare overall. Manual HDR mode could have darkened the S8 photo to make it look better but I wasn't in control. I guarantee you that I could walk around and cherry pick some situations where one camera beats the other in regards to lens flare, so I don't even know why you bothered going down the lens flare route.

From my own personal experience, the manual HDR mode on the S8 would probably make the flower bed picture better, as it's good at taming down slightly overexposed things. But as you said, "just a hair too bright and saturated", with that "hair" being something you would never notice without a direct side-by-side comparison and I still don't know how it looked in real life. The overexposed clouds in your very last shot is another prime example of manual HDR probably fixing that issue.