OnePlus 8 Pro long-term review

Camera

The OnePlus 8 Pro has the now customary quad-camera system on the back. You get the main camera, an ultra-wide, a 3x telephoto, and a "color filter" lens.

The main camera this year is the Sony IMX689, which is an upgraded model over last year's IMX586. The IMX689 is a physically larger sensor and since it has the same resolution it means larger pixel size. As with the IMX586, this is still a Quad Bayer sensor, which means you will still get 12MP images by default. The sensor is paired with a 7 element lens with an f1.78 aperture.

The ultrawide camera this year is the IMX586, which was a real power move by OnePlus. Most companies are still sticking this sensor in their main cameras but OnePlus decided to use it for its ultrawide lens. This 48MP sensor has a 120-degree field of view and an f2.2 aperture.

Next is the telephoto camera, which has been carried over from last year. Once again, we are getting a 13MP sensor of some kind with f2.44 aperture, OIS, and 3x magnification over the main sensor. That's right, it's a 13MP sensor, not 8MP as OnePlus advertises it. That's because, like last year, the 3x magnification is achieved by cropping into the 13MP image, which results in an 8MP final image.

The 13MP camera, without cropping, has about 2.2x magnification over the main camera. You can access the full width of the sensor in portrait mode, where all 13 megapixels are used.

The last camera on the OnePlus 8 Pro was originally used for infrared photography. The sensor on an infrared camera isn't necessarily special but it does feature an infrared filter, which blocks wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum while allowing near-infrared light to pass through. This light, when mixed with the existing color filters on a digital camera, can produce fascinating false colors, known as the Wood Effect.

The issue with an infrared camera is that some materials are transparent to infrared light even though they may be opaque to visible light. This can include some clothing materials, which means an infrared camera can have an unintended consequence of seeing through clothes. Needless to say, it took only a matter of time for people to discover this 'feature' and make a big kerfuffle out of it. OnePlus then swooped in and disabled the camera entirely for a while.

In its latest version, the infrared camera now does not itself take any images. Instead, it provides color information, which is then used in conjunction with the main camera to create an image with fake false colors. The effect also works only outdoors under bright light and because it is faked, it can't actually see through any materials anymore.

We'll get back to how well that works in a bit but first, let's talk about the main 48MP camera. The inclusion of a larger sensor has had a noticeable impact on image quality on the OnePlus 8 Pro compared to its predecessor. The IMX689 sensor is a full stop brighter than IMX586 for the same amount of noise level; it has roughly the same amount of noise at ISO 3200 as the IMX586 has at ISO 1600.

This has allowed OnePlus to be more aggressive with its tone-mapping algorithm, as it can now more successfully recover shadows without too much visible noise. The company also made the odd decision to go ham on the sharpening, possible to make the image seem more detailed than it is on the previous generation phones (or indeed, even the OnePlus 8 that has the older IMX586 as the main camera). However, this is just oversharpening, as the level of detail between the two sensors is nearly identical and can easily be verified by comparing the raw images from both cameras.

The image quality from the main camera on the OnePlus 8 Pro is satisfactory. On a technical level, there isn't much to complain about the images you get out of this phone. The question then is if you prefer OnePlus' particular way of rendering colors. OnePlus' color science is a mishmash of what you find on Apple and Samsung's cameras, where it tends to lean towards warmer tones with a touch of overexposure.

Main camera daylight samples

Main camera lowlight samples

Main camera Nightscape samples

OnePlus especially tends to add an excessive yellow tint to all of its images, which affects all beige-colored objects like pale stone walls but also makes foliage look yellower than green. This is not entirely to our taste and it doesn't look particularly appealing in any situation. It's also something that once you notice you can't stop seeing in almost every daylight image from a OnePlus phone from the past three years. This is something that can be edited out but removing a particular color tint is not something you can do on most mobile editors and requires a fairly powerful desktop editing software.

Another issue that's not exclusive to OnePlus is of spherical aberrations caused due to the unfortunate combination of a relatively large sensor, relatively wide aperture, and a wide focal length. As anyone with a basic understanding of photography will attest, the wider the aperture, the softer the image tends to be due to the reducing plane of focus. This is especially true for larger sensors, as they tend to have a much shallower depth of field for similar focal length and aperture than a smaller sensor. On top of that, you have a wide focal length, even on the 'standard' main lens, which means you are required to get physically close to the subject if you want a tighter shot. This results in the aforementioned unholy trinity coming together in producing some of the worst spherical aberrations we have seen over the years on smartphones.

The most sensible solution to this problem would be to have a variable aperture, either a free-flowing one or with preset steps. Samsung dabbled with this recently, only to give up on it when it was most necessary. A variable aperture will allow the camera to stop down in bright light, thereby increasing the plane of focus and causing more of the image to be in focus while also reducing aberrations in close-up shots.

OnePlus tries to combat this a bit by automatically engaging macro mode when it detects you are too close to your subject. First of all, this is annoying and should definitely have had an option to switch off, but doesn't. Second, switching to a different lens with different optical characteristics and a completely different (and worse) sensor behind it is hardly a solution. Of course, this solution also helps you to focus at all, as the main camera isn't great at focusing on close objects.

The macro functionality on the OnePlus 8 Pro is provided by the ultrawide lens. As mentioned before, this lens now has the Sony IMX586 sensor behind it, which means it is capable of producing some pretty great images. These are some of the sharpest and most detailed ultrawide images we have seen out of any smartphone camera. Of course, these cannot be as detailed as images from the main camera, simply by virtue of having a wide-angle lens attached to it. However, a good way to combat that is by always shooting in the native 48MP mode, which provides a ton of detail with no visible loss to the dynamic range as HDR is available either way.

Ultrawide daylight camera samples

Ultrawide daylight 48MP camera samples

Ultrawide lowlight camera samples

Ultrawide Nightscape camera samples

Next is the 3x telephoto, a carryover from last year's models. The images from this camera are good enough. Images are detailed and the color and contrast are consistent with the other cameras. You can punch in further up to 5x with 10x being the highest usable range. Beyond that, there are too many artifacts in the image to be usable.

Depending upon the lighting conditions, the camera can just choose to use the main sensor to zoom in digitally. However, this only goes on till 10x. Beyond 10x, the phone will always switch to the dedicated telephoto lens regardless of the amount of light present. This can be jarring sometimes as the screen can often just go black beyond 10x if you are in fairly dark conditions as the telephoto camera captures much less light with its narrow FOV, small aperture, and a small sensor.

3x telephoto camera samples

The macro mode also works well on the OnePlus 8 Pro. There is no dedicated lens for it, which is just as well as they generally tend to be appalling. Instead, we get the ultrawide camera with the IMX586 sensor acting as the macro camera here. As mentioned before, it automatically kicks in when the camera detects you are too close to a subject but you can manually enable or disable it. The image quality is also quite good and leagues ahead of phones with dedicated macro cameras.

Finally, let's talk about the controversial color filter camera. As described earlier, this camera used a lens filter to only capture light in the near-infrared region. But since the later updates, the camera now doesn't capture any images itself but rather provides color information for the main camera, which does the shooting.

There is an upside to this method. The quality of the images is far better as the images are now being taken by the main sensor. The anemic 5MP sensor being the infrared lens captured really low-quality images, which really detracted from the effect OnePlus was going for.

Infrared 'color filter' camera at launch

The downside to this method is that the color effect of an infrared filter is now approximated and not what's actually being captured. The camera uses the data from the infrared sensor and applies it to the image from the main sensor. The results can occasionally be decent but looking closely you can see that it's just a recolored image and objects can have some pretty severe haloing around them.

Infrared 'color filter' camera after patch

The effect also requires strong light to work so it doesn't work indoors at all. In fact, it's quite picky regarding the conditions where it will work. Even when it does work, the intensity of the color filter can vary between shots, so even two shows back to back can have different degrees of the filter being applied. The entire experience is pretty crummy at this point and it's clear OnePlus nerfed the entire feature into the ground to avoid any further controversies. We are willing to bet no future OnePlus phone will ever have a hardware infrared camera again, even if they do keep the fake infrared filter.

Moving on to the video side of things, there is not much to complain about here. The phone can shoot wide and ultrawide in up to 4K at 60fps. You can also zoom during the video but it's just done digitally. There's also a choice of 720p at 480fps or 1080p at 240fps, however, the video is slowed down internally and saved at 30fps. OnePlus also offers a choice of 16:9 or cropped 21:9 aspect ratios for 30 and 60fps videos.

The video quality is pretty great, as can be seen from the various samples in our main review. However, the video part of the camera app is pretty basic outside of having different resolutions and frame rates. Some pro-level functionality, such as having control over the ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, etc. would be great at this price range. OnePlus should also introduce an option to record videos in native 24fps. Lastly, an option to record videos in HDR PQ or HLG would also be nice. The 'HDR' option in the camera app is just basic tone-mapping and not true HDR video.