OnePlus Nord CE4 hands-on review
Display
The Nord CE4 has a 6.7-inch, 2412 x 1080 px resolution AMOLED display. The display can refresh up to 120Hz with a 240Hz touch sampling rate and 2160Hz PWM dimming. It supports full coverage of the sRGB and P3 color spaces, 10-bit color depth, and supports HDR10 and HDR10+ standards.
In terms of color performance, the display on the Nord CE4 does not impress, and that's down to the calibration. The default Vivid profile has oversaturated colors and cool-blue white tones. You'd expect both to be sorted by the Natural profile but all it does is clamp the color gamut to sRGB while the white balance remains too cool. Worst of all, the color temperature slider cannot make the display warm enough to hit D65 white point even at its warmest setting.
Peak brightness for the display is also lackluster. You can get by doing basic things like messaging or navigation but when taking pictures it can be hard to see much detail in your images as the display simply doesn't get bright enough.
The brightness issue also affects HDR performance. Never mind the lackluster color accuracy but instead of simply clipping highlights that are out of its limits, the phone instead compresses the entire dynamic range of the content to fit within its mediocre brightness range. This means even lower luminance levels such as 100 nits and 400 nits are duller than they should be and makes the entire image dull and indistinguishable from non-HDR content.
Moving on to refresh rate, there have been fewer things to complain about since OnePlus added the ability to set a custom refresh rate for apps on the device. You can set most (but not all) apps to either 60Hz, 90Hz, or 120Hz. This works fine in most cases but not for games.
Display settings
When trying games we know to support high refresh rates, it didn't seem to matter what setting was manually chosen on the phone as all games we tried were limited to a maximum of 60fps. The display can still ramp up to 120Hz if you set it so but it doesn't matter if the game is still rendering at a locked 60fps.
Also, sometimes apps don't actually work at the refresh rate of your choice after they are installed. You may find some apps still refreshing at 60Hz even if set to 120Hz and you have to manually toggle back and forth a few times before they start working correctly.
Overall, the display on the Nord CE4 is fine for most use cases but the lack of good color calibration, limited peak brightness, poor HDR performance, and no high refresh rate gaming hold it back.
Charging
The Nord CE4 has a sizable 5500mAh battery with 100W fast charging. OnePlus claims 29 minutes for a full charge, which was replicated exactly in our testing. The phone also reached 69% charging in just 15 minutes. These are incredible results for any phone but especially one at this price point.
Charging speed
- in 15 min
- in 30 min
- Time to full charge (from 0%)
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Audio
The Nord CE4 has a pair of stereo speakers. At lower volumes, the sound is a bit thin and lacking in low frequencies but sounds clear and natural. At about 70% volume, the sound gets extremely cluttered and muddy when playing music but is fine for spoken content like podcasts and YouTube videos.
The phone lacks Dolby Atmos or Dirac processing. Instead, it has Oppo's OReality Audio, which has presets for Movie, Gaming, and Music that have varying levels of spatialization. The Music preset also enables a 10-band equalizer. This is similar to what you get with Atmos except for the part where you cannot decode content encoded with the Atmos codec.
The headphone audio works well, both in wired and wireless mode, provided you bring your own adapter for wired audio (passive adapters are supported). Wireless audio gets all the modern codecs such as LDAC, LHDC, and aptX Adaptive.
Reader comments
- DJ
- 09 Sep 2024
- 3JZ
Is it good phone for INR 21500? I am getting this price for 256gb variant.
- PM1
- 21 Aug 2024
- 7kk
It isn't, you have a faulty phone Or setting of camera should be checked.
- PM1
- 21 Aug 2024
- 7kk
A good set good camera and a good battery life. Costs Re 25K on Amazon in India🇮🇳