Realme 7 Pro review

It's a familiar mid-range camera quartet

The Realme 7 Pro features a quad-camera on its back - one that has been quite common across the recent mid-range smartphones. It packs a 64MP primary snapper, an 8MP ultrawide shooter, followed by a 2MP macro cam and a 2MP depth sensor.

The Realme 6 Pro had a 12MP telephoto camera for 2x optical zoom instead of depth sensor and it's a bit of a letdown not to find the same snapper on the newer 7 Pro model. We guess the OLED budget ate that, too.

The Realme 7 Pro packs a 64MP primary camera with Sony IMX 682 Quad-Bayer sensor with f/1.8 lens, 0.8µm pixels, and PDAF. This camera shoots by default in 16MP. Night Mode and optional AI Dazzle Color are available.

Second is the ultrawide snapper with an 8MP Hynix HK846 sensor behind f/2.3 lens and 1.125µm pixels. Night Mode and AI Dazzle Color are available, too.

The macro camera is 2MP OmniVision OV02B sensor with f/2.4 aperture, 1.75µm pixels, but lacks autofocus. Finally, there is a 2MP GalaxyCore GC02K0 depth sensor.

The selfie camera has a 32MP OmniVision OV32A1Q Quad-Bayer sensor that sits behind an f/2.5 lens. The focus is fixed.

The camera app is the familiar Oppo/Realme one with a few tweaks here for the latest version. There are fewer menus - most of the modes are now on the main rolodex, which is good. It offers AI Dazzle Color (also known as Chroma Boost) - it's like an advanced HDR mode, which may stack several images to offers even further improvements in the dynamic range, but the most prominent "improvement" is the higher color saturation. Sometimes - too high.

In the Expert mode you get to tweak exposure (ISO in the 100-6400 range and shutter speed in the 1/8000s-32s range, 2s for the ultrawide), 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).

You do get to shoot on the main and ultrawide cams in this Expert mode but switching them is handled in a truly bizarre way. You get the familiar 1x-2x-5x selector, but that doesn't operate the actual cameras - it's a digital zoom from whichever camera you've picked from the tree selector on the opposite end of the viewfinder. Indeed, the trees switch cameras and once you select a module from there, no focusing distance considerations will auto-switch it - that's good.

Camera UI

Photo quality

The main camera shoots pleasant 16MP photos - the resolved detail is adequate, the white balance - spot on and the colors - true to life. We can also praise the high dynamic range and the excellent contrast. There is some noise visible here and there, but it doesn't get in the way.

The image processing is having a tough time in areas of high intricacy - look at the building's blinds on the fourth photo and the grass, but other than that it produces natural-looking foliage and doesn't go overboard with the sharpening.

Main camera, 16MP

While the colors stay true to real life, some may find them a bit anemic at times. That's where AI Dazzle Color comes to help - it will improve the color saturation and may brighten some shadows at the expense of a bit lower contrast.

Main camera AI Dazzle Color, 16MP

Shooting at the maximum 64MP resolution is very much and this will show you some extra detail, mostly in foliage. They will also look sharper if you downsize them to 16MP.

Even so, there's a major price to be paid in terms of noise - full-res shots have a lot of it, they do take a while to shoot, and eat up between 15 and 40 MB of space. We'd stick to the 16MP default mode.

Main camera, 64MP

The 2x switch on the viewfinder provides digital zoom over the main camera and it's a rather good one. Thanks to the high-res 64MP sensor, the algorithm can do some magic and give you 2x zoomed photo of higher than expected quality. You can still tell it's a digital zoom, but perhaps not right away.

The Realme 6 Pro had a dedicated 12MP tele camera and these 16MP zoomed photos can't make up for its omission on the 7 Pro. But maybe if you downsize them to 8MP then they could be a good match to other budget 8MP tele snappers we've seen. And it's something, right?

Main camera 2x zoom, 16MP

And while we are still on the main camera, the Realme 7 Pro also shoots portraits with its 64MP snapper with the help of the 2MP depth sensor. The ones we took turned up with proficient subject detection, convincing background blur, and excellent contrast. We think everyone will be happy with the portrait photos taken with this Realme.

Main camera - portraits, 16MP

The 8MP snapper with the ultrawide lens does a good job - the detail is okay for such ultrawide purposes, the white balance is accurate, and the colors are often a match to the real ones.

The ultrawide photos are free of noise, which is great. The dynamic range is average at best though, even when the Auto HDR gets involved. But the dynamic is rarely adequate with these types of shooters anyway.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

Realme 7 Pro also has a 2MP macro camera, and we snapped a couple of photos. You should be very close to the subject though, precisely 4cm way, and still, the detail isn't that great, and the photos are quite dull.

Macro camera, 2MP

The night photos from the main 64MP camera are okay, but nothing spectacular for this budget class. There is enough detail, and the pictures aren't blurry. The noise reduction is smart enough not to smears a ton of fine detail, which is nice.

The colors are warmer than they should be, the contrast isn't great, and the exposure is pretty dark even if the camera seems to be shooting at insanely high ISO. We probably shouldn't trust those exifs though - they report incorrect focal length, so why not incorrect ISO as well, right?

Main camera, 16MP

We recommend using Night mode in the dark. At the expense of some fine detail and narrower field of view (the photos are cropped to 12MP), you will get much brighter photos. You can easily notice the Night Mode restores many highlights, it exposes some detail in the shadows, too. The colors are better as well - lively instead of washed out.

As we said, the stronger noise reduction (than on the regular photos) wipes out fine detail, but we still prefer the Night Mode pictures. They look great on the phone's screen and in lower resolution on social media platforms.

Main camera Night Mode, 16MP

The 8MP ultrawide photos are poor in detail, noisy, and the exposures are quite dark.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

The Night Mode works on the ultrawide camera and it does a good job in improving the photos at the price of standing still for about 3 to 4 seconds. The images are brighter and have higher dynamic range, there is more captured detail, too. The colors and contrast improve as well and, in the end, if an ultrawide photo is a must - so is the Night Mode.

Ultrawide camera Night Mode, 8MP

There is Tripod option of the Night Mode, which triggers a 20 seconds shooting with the main camera and it yields great photos. Those are brilliantly balanced, with excellent color retention, there are stars in the skies, and no highlights were blown in the process. The car tails were removed instead of blurred on the images, which is another thing we like about the algorithm. If you have a tripod and want to take an amazing photo at night, this is the way to go.

You can also shoot in Tripod Night Mode with the ultrawide camera. It takes 10 seconds and the photo isn't as impressive as the one from the main shooter - in fact, we don't think it's worth it over the regular Ultrawide Night Mode.

Tripod Night Mode Main camera • Tripod Night Mode Ultrawide camera

Once you're done with the real world samples, head over to our Photo compare tool to see how the Realme 7 Pro stacks up against other phones.

Realme 7 Pro against the Poco X3 NFC and the Realme 6 Pro in our Photo compare tool

Selfies

The main selfie camera on Realme 7 Pro has a 32MP Quad-Bayer sensor behind f/2.5 lens. The focus is fixed. The image quality of the selfies is good. The resolved detail is average, but everything else is excellent - contrast, colors, dynamic.

The unsatisfactory resolved detail is because the 32MP sensor is of the Quad Bayer kind. We won't ever get tired of saying that we would have been very satisfied with the 8MP snaps out of this 32MP sensor.

Selfie camera, 32MP

The 8MP selfie portraits are very detailed with proficient separation, nice blur, and lively colors. There is no HDR in portrait mode, though.

Selfie portraits, 8MP

Video quality

The Realme 7 Pro captures videos with its main camera and ultrawide snappers. The main camera records video up to 4K at 30fps and there's 1080p at both 30fps and 60fps. The ultrawide shooter is limited to 1080p@30fps video capturing.

You get the option to choose between the h.264 and h.265 codecs.

The Realme 7 Pro is very 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. The audio bitrate is 320kbps, and the sound is stereo.

Unfortunately, the 4K videos are poor in detail and with very limited dynamic range. On a positive note - the white balance and the colors were accurate.

The 1080p footage from the ultrawide camera is average in detail, but with better dynamic range and contrast. The colors are warmer than they should have been, though.

There's no mention of video stabilization in the menus or the viewfinder but Realme mentions EIS within the phone specs. We found that the electronic stabilization works in everything but the 60fps mode.

Here's a glimpse of how the Realme 7 Pro compares to rivals in our Video compare tool.

2160p: Realme 7 Pro against the Poco X3 NFC and the Realme 6 Pro in our Video compare tool