Motorola One Macro review

Camera

The Motorola One Macro has a triple camera system on the back, consisting of a 13MP main camera, 2MP macro camera and a 2MP depth sensor for portrait mode. The camera can also record 1080p video.

The camera application is simple but also quite functional. At the bottom of the viewfinder is an option to switch between photo and video mode. You can also find a button here to view all of your modes, which include many more options including eponymous macro mode, portrait mode, and panorama. There are also a few additional creative modes, like spot color, which lets you pick one color in the frame and every other color gets removed, and cutout, which makes a cutout of a portrait and making the background black.

Camera app and settings

Above the viewfinder are toggles for HDR, flash, timer, and manual modes. There's also the active photo mode, which captures a small video clip before a shot is taken. The manual mode gives control over focus, white balance, ISO, and exposure. The countdown timer is also only found in manual mode and not in auto. There's no option to save images in raw format.

The image quality from the main 13MP camera is decent but not great. The colors look natural and the white balance is quite accurate. The level of detail in the images is mediocre. There is a fair bit of noise in the images, especially in the shadows and the dynamic range by default isn't great. Fortunately, the HDR mode makes up for that and should really be left permanently on.

Camera samples

More daylight photos:

Motorola One Macro 13MP camera samples

In low light, the image quality isn't good. Images are soft, lack detail and noisy. The focusing also suffers in the dark and we missed focus on several of the shots we took. The phone also lacks a night mode of any sort.

Motorola One Macro 13MP low-light samples

Now coming to the main feature of the phone, the macro lens. Right off the bat you can see the resolution is going to be a problem. At 2MP, you aren't capturing a lot of detail and while being close to the subject helps, you're not really seeing a ton more detail than cropping the 13MP image.

Macro samples

More macro samples:

Motorola One Macro 2MP macro samples

The problem with the macro lens is that the images are also not great quality. The images are quite noisy and the lack of any kind of stabilization means they often come out blurry. This is usually the result of getting the phone that close to the subject to take the picture, which often blocks out a lot of light from hitting the subject. Professional macro lenses often have a light attached to them for this reason. You could turn on the flash but it's to the right side of the macro lens while shooting and at that distance the light isn't enough to cover the entire frame, leaving you with just brightly lit right side of the frame and dark left side.

Here's how the primary camera on the Moto One Macro stacks against the rest of the competition in a more controlled environment.

Motorola One Macro against the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 and the Realme 5 in our Photo compare tool

The 8MP selfie camera shoots good enough photos for the class. The last image is taken in Portrait mode, and is quite nice, too.

Motorola One Macro 8MP selfies

Finally, the phone can also capture 1080p video, which is of reasonably good quality. Only issues with the video are the focusing, which tends to pulse constantly, and the crop when the digital stabilization is enabled, which is quite severe.

Once you are done with the real-life scenarios, take a look at our video compare tool to see how it competes against other phones.

1080p: Motorola One Macro against the Samsung Galaxy A30 and Honor 9X in our Video compare tool