OnePlus 9 Pro: The TRUTH About the Hasselblad Cameras By Mark Spurrell

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the OnePlus 9 pro early and unless you've been living under a rock, or you're, just not actively involved in the tech space. You probably already know that the cameras on the 9 pro were developed in collaboration with Hasselblad, a Swedish medium format, camera manufacturer that produces some pretty expensive and world-renowned cameras. The thing is: there's been some controversy over whether this collaboration has amounted to anything. So today, what we're going to do is get to the bottom of it by playing a little of a game that I'm calling bad or bad we're going to be taking an in-depth look at a bunch of different photos and videos that I've taken with the 9 pro so far in all different kinds of categories, from architectural to portrait, mode to 4k, slo-mo and 8k video, and then I'm going to give the cameras a rating of bad, meaning good or bad meaning bad. I didn't say it was a good naming scheme, but we're rolling with it. The first category that we're going to start with is the outdoor photography category from all the testing.

I've seen so far, this is where the true strength of the nine pro lies. If you give these cameras plenty of light, they will consistently succeed over and over and over again and will produce some of the best images that I've seen coming from a smartphone camera. The new Sony, mix 766 ultrawide camerae on the 9 pro, is crazy, sharp at 50 megapixels and is ideal for shooting architecture, since it has a built-in distortion correcting lens, but it's not just the ultrawide that does well here the main 48 megapixel camera and even the 8 megapixel telephoto performs admirably. All three cameras are mostly consistent with white balance and exposure when capturing the same subject, although I have found that the main camera can be just thrown off a little towards the blue side of things, every now and again, the only problems with outdoor photography appear when you lose the light, and in that case it's mostly a consistency issue. I took three of these photos with the telephoto camera within seconds, apart from each other at sunrise, and all three of them have distinctly different white balances.

It's like the camera couldn't decide if the sky should be yellow, green or blue other than that, though, outdoor photography is undeniably fantastic. With these cameras and I'm giving this category a solid bad next up is portrait mode. Here's where I started to notice how impressive the coloring is with these new cameras. This is probably one of my favorite shots that I've taken with the 9 pro everything is perfectly exposed right across the frame from the white snow on the left to the darker rocks in the foreground. There are a couple of minor edge detection errors along the rocks here and a little underneath her arm on the left as well, but that's being very picky.

The skin tones in all of these pictures are bang on, and I don't think I could have gotten a better picture. Color wise from my expensive mirrorless cameras. OnePlus is clearly reaping the benefits of the Hasselblad collaboration. In this particular scenario, the 16 megapixel front-facing camera isn't quite as impressive as it sometimes struggles with autofocus and has the same edge detection errors, but they're far from bad. The only time I'd say that the cameras were doing a mediocre job is when you're taking photos inside or when you start to lose the light outside you're, probably seeing a bit of a trend here, for example, have a look at this photo.

The exposure here is okay, but the camera seems to have completely crushed the detail out of my hair in post-processing. The thing is that detail is still there. It's retained in the shadows. This tells us two things. A error is easily correctable in the edit and b.

It's not the hardware's fault. It's the software either way. Portrait mode for the most part does very well just try and keep it out of the darkness for the best results. I'm going to give this a cautionary, bad good, but not perfect. The third category is indoor photography and here's where things start to get a bit muddy.

If you've got plenty of window light around sure the cameras can perform excellently. Look how cute and regal my cat looks here by the window. The problem is most of the time when you're taking photos inside you don't have the best lighting conditions and that's where you start to see the downfall of the nine pros camera system. The camera starts to miss nailing the autofocus, leading to some blurry photos. The white balance starts to shift incorrectly and generally, the camera loses its ability to be consistent, like we saw in the outdoor photos, but again this seems to primarily be a software issue.

White balance, correction, contrast, adjustment and exposure. Compensation is all things that are handled by the phone's software, not by the camera's hardware. This is actually good news. It means that OnePlus can continue to improve the cameras over time through software updates, like I mentioned before, so, unfortunately, I'm going to have to give the OnePlus 9 pro its first bad here. If OnePlus can fix the consistency issues, it could turn into a bad, but for now it's definitely bad.

Okay. Now, let's dive into my favorite category slo-mo video, the main sensor on this phone is capable of 4k 120 fps, video recording, and it looks absolutely incredible. It's the sharpest, slow motion that I've seen come out of a phone camera and I love shooting with it. It's not perfect, there's no stabilization when shooting in this mode, so some shots can be a little shaky, even when slowed down to play at 24 or 30 fps, but it's still just so much fun to shoot with. The only thing I can't wrap my head around is the fact that you can't shoot the 4k 120 from the slow motion tab, there's only 1080p, 240, fps or 720p at 480, which means you won't be able to view the 4k slow motion until you slow it down yourself on your desktop computer.

Nevertheless, 4k slow motion is definitely bad, no doubt about it. Then there's the regular 4k and 8k video. While I don't really think that we're quite ready for the huge file sizes and sheer processing power required to even play back 8k video, let alone edit it there's some merit to having the camera that can shoot it. Even if it's just for bragging rights. The footage has a crazy amount of sharpness in the 8k 30fps mode, and it's a noticeable improvement over the regular 4k footage.

Again, architecture is my favorite thing to shoot in 8k, especially since you can use either the main camera or the ultra-wide to shoot with it. The 4k modes are a little less sharp, but they're also a lot more versatile with the ability to shoot in 30, 60 or 120 fps, with the smooth video stabilization present in both the 30 and 60fps modes. Overall, I do like the video from these cameras. They're, nice and stable for the most part, and the colors are mostly true to life without too much over saturation when shooting outdoors. It does share the same inconsistency problems in video as it does with photography in low light, though, when I was shooting at sunrise the other day.

Sometimes the autofocus would just hunt a little before it would lock onto something, or it would do something that I find particularly annoying. It would consistently shift the exposure up and down to try and compensate for both the bright sky and the dark ground either way. If you're shooting, with an ample amount of light, the video is most certainly bad. If not it's kind of bad, which seems to be a bit of a running theme with these cameras. Doesn't it? But what about the dedicated night mode called nights cape? Does that improve the consistency in low light at all? Well, her, kinda, sometimes it'll do a great job of brightening, the scene to the point where the cameras can see better than I can with my naked eye, and these photos do end up looking pretty great other times.

It won't know whether to expose for the bright lights at night or the dark sky, and you'll end up with a less than ideal shot. Sometimes you won't get the shot at all, because you'll hit the shutter button and think you got the shot when in reality, you just created a nightmare of a photo. You also can't use the night mode to take a photo from the front-facing camera, which ends up looking about as good as you'd expect. You can use nights cape with the ultrawide, which ends up looking pretty cool, but the ultrawide has less wide of an aperture. So photos will turn out a little noisier overall, so nights cape not great, and I'm kinda leaning bad on this one OnePlus collaboration with Hasselblad seems to have paid off in some areas and definitely not in others, if you're still interested in the 9 pro.

You might want to watch this video, where I show the full unboxing experience and talk about my first impressions of the phone or just go ahead and order one, I'm not going to stop you. I've got a link down in the description down below where you can buy one yourself thanks for watching and as always have a great day.

Source : Mark Spurrell