Realme 5 review

A quad-camera on the cheap

The Realme 5 and 5 Pro are the company's first devices with quad-camera setups. What's quite interesting is that Realme never made a triple camera phone - it jumped straight to four. And the dual cameras it made previously were simple main + depth sensor. So, this is a giant step forward.

The arrangement is odd as the markings on the glass are misleading. First (top to bottom) is the ultrawide snapper, then the primary one, the depth camera is next, and last is the macro shooter.

The main camera uses a 12MP sensor by Sony - IMX 386 - it has 1.25µm pixels and sits behind f/1.8 lens. Phase detection autofocus is available for the main snapper.

The 119-degree ultrawide-angle camera is new for Realme, and it's the same as on the Realme 5 Pro. The snapper has an 8MP sensor with an f/2.2 aperture. There is automatic distortion correction applied when necessary.

Then there's the 2MP macro camera (the pixels on the sensor are quite large, 1.75µm). Its lens can focus from as close as 4cm away so that you can get close to your subjects. Note that the macro and the ultrawide cameras can't record video.

Realme calls the 2MP fourth unit the "Portrait camera," rather than just a depth sensor. It certainly helps with the bokeh rendering, but allegedly, it's also used to enhance the contrast of the final photo.

The selfie shooter is a 13MP Samsung ISOCELL S5K3L6 sensor behind f/2.0 lens. There is no autofocus.

The camera app offers AI scene recognition - you'll see a small icon when a scene is successfully recognized, and the software will tweak all settings accordingly. Food, snow, pets, sunsets, grass, among other scenes, are detected mostly correctly.

The app has three major modes - Photo, Portrait, and Video - and you can swipe between those. The Chroma Boost toggle is on the opposite end of the viewfinder, accompanied by the ultrawide switch, HDR and flash settings. Chroma Boost is an advanced HDR mode, which stacks a couple of images and offers even further improvements in the dynamic range in specific scenes.

There is also a hamburger menu with a few more shooting modes - Nightscape, Ultra macro, Expert (manual settings), Pano, Time-lapse, and Slow-mo. There is also a zoom toggle switching between 1X, 2X, and 5X, but it does only digital zooming - there is no telephoto lens on the Realme 5.

Oddly, 2X is also available on the ultrawide camera, too, but if you expected it would switch to the regular snapper - you'd be wrong. It just crops and upscales from the ultrawide shot for all that's worth.

In the Expert mode you get to tweak exposure (ISO in the 100-6400 range and shutter speed in the 1/8000s-16s range), white balance (by light temperature, but no presets), manual focus (in arbitrary 0 to 1 units with 0 being close focus and 1 being infinity) and exposure compensation (-2EV to +2EV in 1/6EV increments).

Camera UI

Image quality

The 12MP images from the main camera turned out sharp, though definitely not the sharpest we've seen. The photos are rich in detail at the center, though the corners came out soft and the foliage isn't ideal as the algorithm smears some of the fine detail. Moire fringes can be noticed in some busy scenes, too.

The noise levels are mostly low, the colors - true to life, and the dynamic range is wide, so we rarely used the HDR option.

But while we went in nitpicking mode for this Realme 5 camera - let's not forget the budget class and price. And for what you are paying we'd say the Realme does an excellent job and produces pleasant photos, very much usable for social networks and in full resolution.

Realme 5 12MP photos

There's the Chroma boost toggle that enhances saturation slightly and makes for livelier shots. If you want your colors to pop but not over the top - you may want to try it. It also works as HDR, so you may want to get some clipped highlights restored.

Realme 5 12MP photos with Chroma Boost

Zoom toggles are available on the Realme 5 - 2X and 5X - but quite expectedly they do a simple digital zoom as the phone lacks a telephoto shooter.

2x zoom • 2x zoom • 2x zoom • 5x zoom

Moving on to the 119-degree ultrawide camera that lets you either fit significantly more of the scene into the frame or get close and create a dramatic perspective. It should also apply distortion correction automatically.

Unfortunately, the resolved detail is unimpressive, and the dynamic range is limited even when the Auto HDR was triggered. On a positive note - the distortion correction did work as advertised, and the noise is kept low.

Realme 5 8MP ultrawide photos

We took a couple of macro samples from the dedicated 2MP macro camera. You can get in really close to the subject, but the detail isn't that great. We aren't far from the results you can achieve if you crop the center portion of the main camera.

Realme 5 2MP macro photos

Now, let's see what happens when the light is low, and we start again with the primary camera. Its 12MP photos turned out soft, noisy, and lacking in detail. On a positive note - colors stayed accurate, and the exposure is rather good.

Realme 5 12MP low-light photos

The Chroma boost mode at night won't give you much more detail, but it will pop the colors of your image. By the way, you can use the Chroma boost mode in combination with most of the other modes available on the Realme 5 but Nightscape.

Realme 5 12MP low-light photos with Chroma Boost

The zoom toggles are available in low-light, of course, but the images are expectedly bad.

Realme 5 12MP zoomed low-light photos

The Nightscape mode is present on the Realme 5, and it is quite impressive for such an affordable device. It is the same pseudo long exposure night mode you'd find on many other smartphones and takes about 2-3 seconds to take a picture, but also requires a couple of seconds to process and save it. The waiting is worth it - there is a good amount of detail, a noticeable boost in the shadows and the dark skies, and the saved photo is much more evenly exposed than the regular one.

It's worth noting that the Nightscape mode crops the frame a bit and that's why the samples below are 8MP instead of 12MP.

Realme 5 8MP Nightscape photos

Shooting with the 8MP ultrawide camera at night should only be done in extreme cases - you get underexposed shots with plenty of noise and little detail.

Realme 5 8MP ultrawide low-light photos

Nightscape can be used to help the ultrawide snapper a bit, but results are still rather mediocre, and shooting takes forever - about 8-10s with processing and saving. Even in extreme cases, we doubt anybody would be using the ultrawide camera at night.

Realme 5 8MP ultrawide Nightscape photos

Once you're done with the real world samples, head over to our Photo compare tool to see how the Realme 5 stacks up against other phones.

12MP: Realme 5 against the Realme 5 Pro and the Realme X in our Photo compare tool

Portraits

The Realme 5 shoots portraits with its main 12MP snapper and with the help of the 2MP so-called portrait camera. Realme says this tiny camera is not just a depth sensor but is also used to enhance the contrast of the said portraits. Well, let's see.

Indeed, the Realme 5 takes excellent portraits with competent subject detection and very convincing background blur. Even a messy haircut wasn't enough to throw it off the rails, so we rate these shots as outstanding.

Note that when the light is not optimal, the detail on people drops dramatically.

Realme 5 12MP portrait shots

Selfies

The Realme 5 has the same 13MP f/2.0 selfie camera as the Realme 3, and the focus stays fixed. On the software side, there are all sorts of beatification enhancement options like skin smoothing and eye enlargement and face thinning, and whatnot.

The snapper does a very decent job. Despite the average dynamic range (there is an excellent HDR mode for that though), there is really not much to complain about. There is more than enough detail, the colors are nice, and the images are plenty enough.

It's worth noting that in even moderately dimmer conditions there's a noticeable drop in sharpness at the pixel level, likely caused by aggressive noise reduction.

Realme 5 13MP selfies

The selfie cam also offers the simulated bokeh, just like many other Oppo and Realme selfie snappers. It saves the images in 8MP, but other than that it does a pretty fine job shooting portraits for them social networks.

Realme 5 8MP portrait selfies

Video recording

The Realme 5 captures videos only with its main camera. It records video up to 4K at 30fps, and there's 1080p at 30fps. No 60fps option is available. You do get the option to choose between the h.264 and h.265 codecs though.

There is electronic stabilization available, it is always-on, but it works only on 1080p videos.

Just like on its previous models, Realme is generous with the bit rates it uses to encode videos. 4K footage gets 50Mbps while 1080p/30fps is allocated a similarly above-average 20Mbps when using the h.264 codec. Same goes for audio - its bitrate is 320kbps, and it's a stereo stream.

The 4K picture is rich in detail, the colors are spot-on, the noise is low, and the dynamic range is very good. The trees and grass are smeared on occasion just like on the photos, but it's not as pronounced. These are among the better 4K videos we've seen, especially from a phone that cheap. But because of the high video bitrate, the storage footprint is rather big - a 35sec video is about 200MB.

Moving on to 1080p videos - the clips are simply excellent with a great amount of detail, lively colors, and excellent contrast. The dynamic range is impressive, too.

Finally, we shot a 2X video at 1080p resolution and turned to be a great digital zoom and will do just fine for when you need to shoot closer.

Here's a glimpse of how the Realme 5 compares to rivals in our Video compare tool.

2160p: Realme 5 against the Realme 5 Pro and the Realme X in our Video compare tool