OnePlus 10 Pro long-term review

Camera

The OnePlus 10 Pro was a flagship device when it launched, and it's still one today, thus the camera system has to be fitting of that market positioning. And on paper, things sure look interesting, with Hasselblad branding, a big main sensor, a proper telephoto, and a high-res ultrawide. So how did they all fare during our time with the phone?

The main and zoom cameras are recycled from the OnePlus 9 Pro, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as neither was terrible to begin with. The tele has a bit more zoom than your average non-periscope effort at 3.3x, while the main sensor has some big pixels in there, even though they're not the biggest on the market. Now that the context is out of the way let's dive into some samples.

Daytime shots from the main camera look good, although the processing does have a propensity to give you a very sharp, saturated, contrasty image at all costs, and those costs, while not huge, aren't negligible either. Dynamic range sometimes suffers because of this, and overall the colors you're getting may have just a tad too much 'pop' for your liking even if you're not a photo purist. The oversharpening can get out of hand sometimes too, if not by a lot. Hence, these aren't bad pictures, they're good but probably could have been better given the hardware that's used. That said, you may simply love this look, and that's great.

Daytime samples from the main camera

The ultrawide camera is the novelty for this year, sporting a Samsung JN1 50 MP sensor, and it produces decent images that aren't anywhere close to amazing. There's some softness creeping in, detail levels aren't outstanding, and color matching the main camera is pretty much a pipe dream, but you are getting usable results no matter what. You just shouldn't expect this to ever match the main shooter in quality, one-to-one.

Daytime samples from the ultrawide

While this is a decent ultrawide, it's not among the best we've ever seen, and at the OnePlus 10 Pro's launch price, maybe it should have been? The lack of autofocus can be annoying, too, especially given that, as a consequence, this phone has no way of focusing on anything under about 10cm. Top-of-the-line devices should have ultrawide cameras with autofocus, we think.

Note here that we didn't use the 150-degree mode for the ultrawide during our time with the handset for this long-term review, but if you're interested in this particular gimmick that will most likely be forgotten next year, make sure to check out our normal review of the OnePlus 10 Pro where we show you some of those heavily distorted shots.

Moving on to zoomed pictures, these are generally good, with nice amounts of detail captured, good (but not overbearing) contrast, and an ever so slightly less oversharpened look compared to the main camera.

Daytime zoom samples

At night, the main camera produces perfectly competent results, with pleasant colors, good dynamic range, and reasonable detail levels. The Auto mode is best used at night when there's still some ambient lighting around. There's a weird thing going on where above a certain ambient light threshold, the Auto mode delivers significantly better shots than Night Mode, in all respects except for pumped-up brightness - Night Mode definitely gives you that, but if there's still a lot of light around, the effect ends up looking completely artificial.

Nighttime samples from the main camera

On the other hand, if you go under a certain ambient light threshold, then Night Mode's propensity to overly brighten everything comes in handy and negates its general lack of sharpness compared to Auto mode. So, unfortunately, we can't give you a clear recommendation for nighttime shooting with this phone, unlike with others, as the Auto mode is clearly preferable in better-lit conditions, and Night Mode is definitely the way to go for dimmer settings. You'll just have to play with these a lot to then gain an intuitive sense of when to switch.

Night Mode samples from the main camera

The ultrawide struggles at night with scenes that aren't well-lit, and it definitely struggles more than the best ultrawides out there, but it's still much better than those ubiquitous 8 MP ultrawide shooters on mid-range phones. When there's barely any light around, you'll get softness all over, and dark edges.

Nighttime samples from the ultrawide

Night Mode does help create better-looking shots, but they're not incredibly impressive and can come out too bright in some settings - the exact opposite of Auto mode ultrawide shots. Still, if you're lucky, you can get a few usable pictures out of the ultrawide at night, but it's once again not clear which mode you should engage to get the best chance for that. We'd say Night Mode has a slight edge for the ultrawide, but a lot of people may prefer the more natural-looking, darker Auto shots.

Night Mode samples from the ultrawide

The telephoto camera gets complicated at night too, because for some reason, this is a theme for this phone. Aside from the already mentioned shenanigans regarding Night Mode brightening things up so much that everything looks artificial, there's also the issue of whether the telephoto lens will be used to begin with.

The general logic is that it will only be engaged if there's enough ambient lighting, but again that threshold is hard to figure out initially. And it could be important because the shots that come out of the zoom camera itself, while nowhere near the quality of those from the main snapper, are still generally usable for a quick social media share. On the other hand, when a crop from the main sensor is used instead, all you get is a smudgy mess with detail missing in action. In these samples, it's pretty easy to tell which is which just by the obvious quality difference.

Nighttime zoom samples

Night Mode for zoom shots is the same - decent, if barely so, provided you're lucky enough to have had the dedicated camera used, and absolutely unusable if not.

Night Mode zoom samples

In summary, the OnePlus 10 Pro has a main camera with good hardware specs that's sometimes hindered by the processing, an ultrawide camera that's decent but probably should have been better at this price point, and a zoom camera that's very good during the daytime and not too bad at night but is barely used by the phone in low-light conditions.

Selfies are taken by a 32 MP camera that should produce 8 MP images but actually upscales those back to 32 MP for some reason. The quality is generally good during daytime, with good detail levels and dynamic range. It's not the best selfie camera we've ever encountered for sure, but it's perfectly passable, especially if you're not very much into selfies.

Selfie samples, day and night, Portrait Mode off/on

At night, things understandably take a turn towards the worse, unless you have a good amount of ambient light to shoot in. If that's the case, you'll get decent results, aided by the screen flash function, which is on by default. These are totally shareable on social media. Portrait Mode isn't always perfect in terms of subject separation, but the effect is pronounced, so if you're into a very obvious Portrait Mode shot, you'll love this.