Ulefone Power Armor 13 review

A budget quad-camera on the back

The Ulefone Power Armor 13 features a rather familiar quad-camera on the back. It's budget setup, yet versatile enough to help you capture different moments. There is a 48MP primary snapper, an 8MP ultrawide shooter, a 2MP macro cam, and a 2MP depth sensor.

There is also a 16MP selfie camera at the front of the phone.

So, the primary camera uses a 48MP Samsung GM1 Quad-Bayer sensor with 0.8µm pixels that sits behind f/1.8 28mm lens - PDAF is available here. The 8MP ultrawide shooter uses S5K4H7 ISOCELL Slim sensor with 1.12µm pixels and has f/2.2 16mm lens. Finally, the duo of 2MP snappers relies on GalaxyCore GC02M2 sensors.

Finally, the front camera has a 16MP Samsung S5K3P3 sensor with Tetracell color filter and 1.0µm pixels, with f/2.2 aperture lens.

The camera app is nothing we haven't seen - you swipe to switch between modes - Night, Video, Photo, Pro, Macro and More. Portrait mode is available within More. AI is available, too, but it's a simple scene recognition thing.

On the viewfinder itself, you will find 0.6x, 1x and 2x shortcuts - the 2x is doing digital zoom, obviously.

Camera app

The Pro mode is not that pro - it offers white balance, ISO (up to 800), and exposure compensation but not shutter speed.

Photo quality

The 12MP photos from the main camera are okay for the class, though far from great. They have sharp centers but soft and distorted corners. The resolved detail is good, the contrast is okay, the dynamic range is rather high, and the noise is low. The colors are somewhat greenish and not as saturated.

Overall, the photos are okay and will do for Facebook, but pixel peepers should stay away.

Main camera, 12MP

The 2x zoom is purely digital, and the images are cropped and then upscaled to 12MP. There is nothing to talk about these.

2x zoom, 12MP

You can shoot in 48MP, but you will get an upscaled version of the default 12MP images, meaning it's useless.

Main camera, 48MP

The 8MP ultrawide photos are alright. They won't impress with detail but have good contrast, mostly accurate even if a bit washed-out colors and proficient corner straightening. If an occasion requires a panoramic photo, this camera will get it done, at least by Facebook criteria.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

The Power Armor 13 features a 2MP depth sensor, which helps the main camera when shooting portraits. And the ones we took with the phone are pretty good - the subject separation is good, the blur looks nice, while the person is quite detailed. We liked the color and contrast, too.

Portraits, 12MP

Finally, there is a 2MP macro camera with a fixed focus at about 4cm. The macro shots are not great with a lot of purple fringing and desaturated colors. If you edit a bit in post, they should do fine for Instagram, we guess.

Macro camera, 2MP

The low-light photos from the main camera are good, thanks to the gentle noise reduction, which leaves enough detail at the center. The noise is tolerable, the dynamic range is okay, but the colors are once again desaturated.

Still, those are solid samples for this class.

Main camera, 12MP

There is Night Mode that works only on the main camera, it takes about 2-3s, but it won't offer a significant improvement as it acts more like HDR. It may lower the noise a bit and restore some part of blown highlights (at the expense of others) but that's about it.

Night Mode, 12MP

The low-light photos from the ultrawide camera are barely usable - they are dark, soft and overrun by noise.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

And here are photos of our usual posters taken with the Ulefone Power Armor 13. Here's how it stacks up against the competition. Feel free to browse around and pit it against other phones from our extensive database.

Ulefone Power Armor 13 against the Ulefone Armor 9 and the Poco X3 Pro in our Photo compare tool

The Ulefone Power Armor 13 offers a 16MP f/2.2 front camera with fixed focus. It's also a Quad-Bayer sensor, which should offer 4MP images but instead, it saves 16MP photos - meaning you are always getting upscaled images.

So, the 16MP selfies are pretty good. Sure, they are not as sharp, but they do offer good colors, contrast, and dynamic range. Sometimes the white balance isn't ideal, but maybe the purple-ish t-shirt was responsible for the confusion.

Selfie camera, 16MP

You can shoot selfie portraits, too, and those turned out good - the separation is acceptable, and the blur is convincing. Not the best in the class, but we'd say about the average.

Portrait selfies, 16MP

Video capturing

The Ulefone Power Armor 13 captures videos only with its primary camera. The available resolutions are 4K@30fps, 1080@30fps and 720@30fps.

The video bitrate is 43Mbps in 4K resolution, while audio is always mono with a 128Kbps bitrate.

Both 4K and 1080p videos have modest detail, average (at best) dynamic range, and once again - a bit washed out colors. The noise is kept quite low.

The 4K footage is obviously way warmer than it should be. We are not sure if there is a lens issue or it's just the cheap lens, but only the center looks good and detailed, the rest is blurred. The video camera has potential, but its quality is far from good at this point.

There is no electronic stabilization on the Ulefone Power Armor 13.

Finally, here is the Ulefone Power Armor 13 in our video comparison database.

2160p: Ulefone Power Armor 13 against the Ulefone Armor 9 and the Poco X3 Pro in our Video compare tool