OnePlus One Camera Review, Camera App & Photo Capture Samples

A phone made with perfection of design, everything else good in it, has a camera which can get the applause? Let us check!

The OnePlus One smartphone comes with a 13-megapixel camera with the Dual LED flash on the rear side. While you won’t really find the numbers to be the best when the megapixel count is at question, the 13MP snapper is kind of good in capture quality. The OnePlus One boasts a Sony Exmor IMX214 camera with the f/2.0 aperture. That’s quite something for a phone that is priced cheap. This is added up by 6 physical lenses for reducing the distortion we see in the smartphone camera captures.

We tried capturing pictures in every condition possible, using the OnePlus One phone’s camera, and found that it does what it boasts. The clarity was there in both, natural and artificial light. But not everything is good with it. OnePlus has hyped the flash by calling it the Dual-LED, and that’s not wrong because you get two LED lights throwing light on the object. But one has to notice that it is two same flash lights, and not the Two-tone flash which Apple used in the iPhone 5s. So, more light and sometimes too high.

Starting with the camera app that comes in the OnePlus One, here’s what it offers. Firstly, because the phone comes with the option to remove the onscreen buttons, you could do that before using the camera app because you get wider live preview of the picture you are going to capture.

For the camera modes, you just have to swipe down from the top and it would take you to the next mode / effect and you don’t need to go into the settings or modes for that. The interface of the app is very cool and easy to navigate, where you get to see the options directly in tabs – for the camera (picture), video and general. The size, quality can be adjusted, and the other options for the camera include Burst Mode, Slow shutter speed, touch focus duration, Auto exposure mode, Focus mode, ISO and Antibanding setting. The video capture settings include video size, slow motion video (HFR), Video and audio codec.

In the general settings, you could toggle the options such has having the power button for capturing photos like a shutter key, and using volume keys for zooming in and out.

If these settings weren’t enough, the manual toggles are directly available on the bottom of the screen, where the color adjustment, exposure adjustment, flash, front/rear camera toggle, geolocation, self timer settings are all available.

Following are the few camera samples, and we shrunk each of them from 4208 x 3120 pixels to 1200 x 889 pixels.

Captured in natural light to judge the natural color reproduction.

This is what the original picture would show on full resolution (shown in the inset in right)

Captured with 4X full zoom. The object was still shown pretty clear.

Taken purposefully with opposing colors, to learn about the exposure on Auto

Captured to show the background defocus of the camera.

A pretty natural shot with artificial light. Has some noise.

Taken in low light, with only one light on one side. There is some noise but still an appreciable capture.

Captured using the Dual LED flash. Brightens the object more than needed.

This was on natural light, captured with and without flash.

The video recording is possible for up to 4K (2160p resolution), and the quality is quite brilliant. We will be uploading the sample video capture very soon, but for the conclusion, the clarity was quite good and on zooming in while the video recording was on, there was not very much compromise in the details.

The device even has a very decent front-facing 5MP camera which is very good for those who indulge themselves into video chatting quite frequently, and of course not to forget, for the selfies which are captured quite well with it.

Final Verdict – OnePlus One Camera

The 13-megapixel camera of the OnePlus One smartphone does a very decent job of capturing photos, both in the natural and artificial light conditions, but the flash has some power more than one would usually want, especially because it is a Dual LED one with both white lights, and it’s not a Two-tone flash. Overall, it is a very decent camera.

Rating: 4/5