Prior to the announcement and release of their latest flagship OnePlus ran a competition of sorts on their website. It was a blind test asking users to pick which of the 4 smartphone camera shots we preferred for various scenarios. At the time we were a bit sceptical that the OnePlus 6 could match it with the best but hoped for the best — the results are in and it seems our hopes were matched by the results.
Via the OnePlus India forums the various results have been announced and while they are not tests the likes of which DxOMark perform they are basically whether the phones take a photo which is pleasing to the eye. All photos were taken under full automatic settings out-of-the-box given that this is what a vast majority of users use for their photography.
The first scenario was the Portrait low light photo. For this image the OnePlus 6 was the winner with 46% of voters (and we do not know how many but given it is an Indian website with 1.5 million registered users we can be fairly sure it is a not insignificant amount) choosing it as the best low light portrait image. According the OnePlus their new “Smart Capture” software selects which feature to use to optimise the photo for maximum clarity and combined with Advanced HDR brings out shadows and “enhances lighting” to produce some very decent results. The breakdown can be seen in the pie chart below:
The second scenario was of an architecture image. We take a lot of images of buildings so this is important for a smartphone camera to excel at.
Here the OnePlus 6 came in runner up to the iPhone X, although all four phones produced similar numbers. If only there was a way to determine which you voted for as I know for sure that I did NOT vote for the Samsung in this category and am surprised that it scored as high as it did.
Low light photography was scenario 3 with the Google Pixel 2 coming out on top, followed very closely by the OnePlus 6. The 19% larger sensor in the OnePlus 6 as well as OIS accounts for the scores the OnePlus 6 received here. Interestingly the iPhone X and Galaxy S9 were well in the rear with the results in this one.
Scenario four was a normal light portrait mode and here the OnePlus 6 came in third with 25 percent of the vote. The Galaxy S9 was on top with 29% so it was a close one this scenario.
Many of us were waiting to hear how good (or bad) the camera is in the OnePlus 6 and this bodes very well for it being a great camera. While the results are impressive it would probably be best to wait for real world tests from users who are unbiased. It would definitely be interesting to see it up against the Huawei P20 Pro and the HTC U12+ as they are the two best smartphone cameras on the market at the moment — hopefully we can make this happen in the not too distant future.
As we have been saying for a bit here at Ausdroid, if you buy a flagship phone in 2018 you will in all likelihood get a very good camera. While some are obviously better than others, by themselves the photos are more than okay so it is fairly safe to say that if you buy a flagship phone you will end up being very happy with the camera.
How can the validity of the shots be verified, it may be the same as when they cheated on multi score benchmarks in 2017.
Sorry but nothing less than an independent test would convince me of the camera quality and certainly not a competition by oneplus.