Meizu Pro 7 Plus review: Two-Face

Dual lens blur effect

Yes, that's what Meizu is calling the bokeh effects also known as portrait mode pretty much on every other smartphone. Anyway, the Pro 7 Plus naturally supports adding bokeh effect thanks to the depth info received from the two camera sensors.

The portrait shots turned out good, though not the best we've seen - the post-processing may blur some parts of your clothes and hair.

You can use the dual lens blur not only for people, but on any object, as long as there is enough distance between it and the background.

Samples with bokeh effects

Selfies with the main camera

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus comes with one very handy feature on its back - a secondary display, which can be used as a camera viewfinder. A swipe up or down on the 2" AMOLED fires the main camera, and you can switch easily between a normal, beauty, or bokeh shot.

The selfies taken with the main camera are great and much better than what your average selfie snapper can do. The Portrait shots are not the best, as we already established, and may destroy some of your hair if it's curly or just messy, but they will do fine for social media.

Normal • Normal • Normal

Bokeh • Bokeh • Bokeh

Selfies with the selfie camera

We also tested out the 16MP front-facing camera. The images came out with rather low detail, but with high contrast, and pleasant colors. But since you can always resort to the main camera for high-quality selfies, we think the front snapper will rarely see action outside of video calls.

Meizu Pro 7 Plus 16MP selfie samples

Video recording

The Meizu Pro 7 Plus shoots videos up to 4K resolution (3840 x 2160px) at 30fps and 1080p videos at 30fps. There's no 60fps smooth motion option. The recorded audio is stereo with 128 Kbps bitrate.

The UHD videos of the Meizu Pro 7 Plus are recorded in the HEVC format, also known as H.265, a recent codec that's supposed to offer the same quality as the widely popular H.264 with lower bitrate and smaller filesizes.

The 4K videos produced by the Meizu Pro 7 Plus are captured at a bitrate of 43Mbps and have solid 30fps. They are average in detail, but offer wide dynamic range, good contrast, accurate colors and little processing artifacts. Those look great on the Pro 7 Plus' screen and when displayed on 1080p TVs, but when seen in full resolution are really nothing impressive.

The resolved detail in the 1080p videos is below average, but the contrast and colors are good. Here is a sample we've uploaded on YouTube. The 1080p videos are encoded in H.264.

You can also download a short 4K video (9s, 48MB) and another tiny 1080p sample (9s, 18MB) taken with the Meizu Pro 6 Plus.

Finally, you can use our Video Compare Tool to see how the Meizu Pro 7 Plus stacks against the Galaxy S8 and the iPhone 7 Plus when it comes to video capturing.

Nokia 8 vs. LG G6 vs. Galaxy S8 in our 2160p Video quality comparison tool