OnePlus 9 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max Detailed Camera Comparison By TecworkZ

Hey guys it’s Sagar from Tecworkz, and in this video I am comparing the cameras on the OnePlus 9 Pro with the ones on the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Now I know iPhone 12 Pro Max costs exactly twice as much as the Oneplus 9 Pro, but you guys still asked for this video, so here it is. Last year while the OnePlus 8 Pro has greatly improved cameras, it still failed to stand head to head with the competition. This time OnePlus has partnered with Hasselblad in the hopes of improving the cameras on OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro. Will it really help OnePlus 9 Pro’s cameras stand up to the iPhone 12 Pro Max? Let’s find out. OnePlus released an update with the April security patch just as I was about to upload this video.

This update is said to bring more improvements to the camera. So I again went out and took a few more image samples to see if the new update brought any major changes or not. Now my city is under a strict curfew due to rising number of covid-19 cases, so I could not go and take lot of images, but for you guys I managed to get a few and those were enough for this video. That is the reason I had to push the video back a few days. We have well over 100 image and video samples from both these phones to look at, so this video is going to be a bit longer.

But to keep it from getting any longer, instead of going through all the camera specs, I will just leave them in this slide. You can pause the video and go through them if you want. If you want a detailed look at the camera interface on either of these phones, I suggest you check out their individual detailed camera reviews. I will leave a card to those videos on the top right corner of your screen and also link them in the description section. Before we get to the image and video samples, if you are new to the channel, please consider hitting the Subscribe button and turning on all notifications for the channel.

It is free and will take less than 5 seconds of your time. Let us start with the daytime shots. Images form both the phones look very good and detailed. OnePlus 9 Pro gets a 48 megapixel main camera and these are 12 megapixel pixel binned images from it, so they show more details compared to the 12 megapixel images form the iPhone 12 Pro max. When I looked at the images from the OnePlus 9 Pro alone, I felt they were sharp and detailed, but when we look at both these images side by side, ones from the OnePlus 9 Pro do feel a bit oversharp.

Here is the next set of images. I will again zoom in and you guys and look at these images and be the judge that wether or not the OnePlus 9 Pro is over sharpening these images. Whatever you think, let me know in the comments. Here is one of the images after the latest software update. The Update Log specified that they have improved image over sharpening of the rear camera.

But when I zoom in on this image, I still see image from the OnePlus 9 Pro over sharpening the leaves in this shot. So you be the judge of weather the new update fixed this issue or not. In efforts of making everything in the image look sharper, OnePlus 9 Pro also adds sharpening to the noise that is in its images. As a result you can clearly see much more of it when I zoom in on these shots. Whereas images from the iPhone 12 Pro Max look much cleaner.

I had shared few of these images on Twitter, and asked which one looks better. I did not disclose which image is from which phone, so it was a blind test for them. Here are the results of that poll. About 70% of the respondents liked the one from the iPhone. I did not vote in any of the polls, but if I did, I would also go with the iPhone.

Image from OnePlus seems to have slightly more contrast, and I took this images at noon on a hot summer day, and OnePlus seems to have some how managed to add cool tint to the entire shot. iPhone kept the scene looking warm as it really was. I mentioned the blue tint in OnePlus 9 Pro’s dedicated camera review as well, it was due to the inconsistency in the white balance. It seems like OnePlus was aware of this and the latest update log also says that they have improved the white balance consistency of the main camera. Here are the images that I took after the latest software update.

Do you think they have improved the white balance? I don’t know about you guys, but I still see a clear blue or cool tint in OnePlus 9 Pro’s image. It’s not just with this image. I took more images, and found the same. I took a few more images after the update, and here they are. You can see a lot of lens flair in the iPhone’s image, despite of that, it managed to captures a lot of details in this shot.

But when we zoom in on the image from the OnePlus 9 Pro, you see that it just failed to keep any part go the scene in focus. This is not the only image that this happened with, It did this with many more images. I was very hopeful that this update will being lot of improvements to the camera, and I certainly did not expect that it make it even more inconsistent. After looking at these results, I just took a few more selfies to see if they have improved after the update or not, and we will look at them later on in the video. This is another image that I shared on Twitter, and the votes were evenly matched for this one.

So which one would you have voted for? Go ahead and let me know in the comments. If it helps, here are both the images zoomed in. Actually on zooming in, iPhone’s image is showing more details in the white areas, which is again a bit of a surprise, because with a higher resolution sensor, we expect the main camera on the OnePlus 9 Pro to show more details. For this set of images, 83% of people chose the one from the iPhone. I don’t know if it came out on twitter or not, but the image from OnePlus 9 Pro looks sharp, but not detailed.

I mean all the lines in its images are sharp, there is even more contrast in its images, but the image just doesn’t look as natural as the one from the iPhone 12 Pro Max. You can again see more noise in the shot form OnePlus 9 Pro, and again it made the shot look cooler. iPhones images start looking a bit too warm when compared side by side with the ones from OnePlus. But as I have said earlier, all these images are shot in summer days, so there was in fact a warm look to the scene, like you could see in iPhones images. I have shared this image on Twitter as well, and at the time of writing this script, 55 percent of respondents preferred the image form the OnePlus 9 Pro.

I somehow managed to take 1 shot when the conditions were overcast. In this one I feel OnePlus captured accurate colours of the scene, while the iPhone seem to have added a slight green hue to the shot. Even in these overcast conditions, iPhones image is showing more details, and as you can again see, one from the OnePlus 9 Pro is just filled with noise. I feel OnePlus definitely needs to work a lot on improving their image processing pipeline. OnePlus made a big deal about partnering with Hasselblad, so they can improve the cameras on their phones.

But for this year at least, Hasselblad had no inputs in designing any of the camera hardware. Instead, they just help on the software side of things. OnePlus says that Hasselblad has helped them achieve something called Natural colour calibration. But looking at these images, I really don’t see this at work. This was a bright painting on one of the walls in Pune, and OnePlus 9 Pro just makes the colours look very dull.

If you were there when I took these images, you would have noticed that the colours are much brighter looking in real life. They looked more like what the iPhone’s image has captured. On twitter 81% of the people liked and preferred the image from iPhone. In this set of images, we again the one from iPhone looks bright and lively, whereas the one that OnePlus captured is showing dark and dull colours. I think if OnePlus spent half as much time on really tuning the camera as they spent on hyping up the Hasselblad collaboration, we would have seen much better results form it.

In this one, I think OnePlus did a much better job, and I also like the smoother bokeh to the background in its shot. So you see the camera on OnePlus 9 Pro is capable of capturing good images, but it needs to too it much more consistently. Again in this one, I like the orange colour in the foreground of the image from the OnePlus 9 pro, but at the same time it made the background a bit darker. Whereas we see even colours in the image from iPhone 12 Pro max. I know colour is a personal choose, and everyone perceives them in a different way.

So images from which of these 2 phones you like, will depend on your colour preference. Before we check out the HDR shots, there are a few things that you need to know. There is noticeable delay, or a shutter lag on the OnePlus 9 Pro. It’s not just with this phone, it’s on all their phones. I have been talking about this for at least 3 years now, and OnePlus still doesn’t seem to have fixed it.

Other thing is OnePlus 9 Pro overheats if you take lot of images or videos back to back. When I say, it overheats, not only you can feel its back getting a lot hotter, but it will even give you a message in the screen, that it is unable to take images because temperature of the phone is too high. This didn’t just happened once, it was a repeated occurrence when I was taking samples for this video. At first it got hot and have this warning just 5-7 minutes after I had started shooting wit it. With software updates, I did not get this warning as often, but it didn’t completely go away.

And even if I did not get the warning, the phone did get pretty hot after 15 minutes of taking images. Coming to the HDR shots. For this particular image, if I just gave it a quick glance, I might go with the one form the OnePlus 9 Pro because the colours of the mural look more saturated in it. But the more you look at these images, you realise that iPhones image has much more details in the darker areas, and it also managed to keep the sky looking blue, despite of the sun being in the shot. Which of these 2 shots you prefer will again come down to your colour preference.

For this HDR shot, both of them took a completely different approach. iPhone tried to preserve the highlights in the sky, which it did really well. But while doing so, it failed to bring up enough details from the shadows. Whereas the OnePlus 9 pro brought back a lot of details in the shadows, and in that attempt, it kind of left the sky over exposed. For this set of images, I like the one from the OnePlus 9 Pro, because we simply see more details in the shadows, which takes up most of the foreground in the shot.

In this one, I think both did a very good job. There were a lot of shadows in this image, and both have done a wonderful job without adding too much noise in the image. I still prefer the one form iPhone because it has preserved that warm look which the actual scene had. And if we zoom in, it also has more details in the white flowers, and the blue sky, which means it handled the brighter parts of this shot slightly better. Most of the people on Twitter, also like the one from iPhone.

For this shot, I think the OnePlus 9 Pro did a lot better. The sky in the background is not over exposed in either of the images, but if I zoom in, you can see that OnePlus brought back lot of details from the shadow on the ear cups, while it is a bit too dark and barely has any details in the image form the iPhone. Here is a shot which demanded higher dynamic range. Both the phones had HDR set to auto, and both seem to have turned it on. But we see so much more information and details in the shadows in the image form the iPhone.

Whereas Oneplus doesn’t seem to have done too much to bring back these details. And OnePlus completely messed up this shot. The sun was just outside the frame, so this situation clearly demanded the HDR mode. While both the phones were not able to recover too many details in the dark tree branches, iPhone still made the sky look blue and a lot better. Whereas the HDR mode on the OnePlus 9 Pro didn’t seem to have done anything at all.

If anything, it made the whole image look muddy and dull. We saw that OnePlus 9 Pro IS capable of taking good HDR shots, but it again need to be much more consistent. Now all these were images from the main camera from both the phones, but both of them also get a wide camera and here is what it captures compared to the primary one. Both the wide shots look good from so far, but upon zooming in, we see that the one form the OnePlus 9 Pro captured so much more details. This is because the wide camera on the OnePlus 9 Pro has a 50 megapixel sensor as opposed to the 12 megapixel one on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

There is much more contrast in the wide shot from the OnePlus. If we zoom in, there seems to be no details in the iPhone’s wide shot, what so ever, when compared side by side. Both these phones apply lens correction, so the lines in their wide shots appear straight, and not bulged. But there still seems to be some distortion towards the edges, and these edges are not as sharp as the centre of the shot. Surprisingly, iPhone seems to be handling the edges slightly better.

This time OnePlus seems to have worked a bit on matching the colour temperature and white balance between these 2 lenses. But given the slight inconsistencies from its main camera, we still see a bit different colours from it and the wide camera for the same scene. Despite of this, I still like and prefer the wide lens on the OnePlus 9 Pro. Wide lens lets you capture the same scene with a whole new perspective, and I would like to have as many details in this shots as the ones from the main camera, if not more. I think this right here, is the best wide camera on any phones that I have tested yet.

Both phones also get a telephoto lens. One on the iPhone gets a 2.5x optical zoom where as one on the OnePlus gets a 3.3x optical zoom compared to the primary camera. Both look really detailed, but despite of having a lower resolution telephoto camera than the iPhone, images from telephoto lens of the OnePlus 9 pro appear to be capturing detailed and sharper images. For some reason, both did not capture the colours of this building as it really was. It wasn’t as green as iPhone shows it, but it wasn’t as blue as OnePlus has captures as well.

Its actual colour was somewhere between both these images. Before we move on to the close up shots, here is a quick focusing speed test from both these phones. Both are quick at switching the focus form a far to near object and then back again. Shift in focus is much smoother on the iPhone, and this looks amazing while shooting videos. I also observed that OnePlus sometimes leaves the focus from the object, I mean it doesn’t latch on to the focus on the nearby object.

I took the video again, and found the same thing. As you can see, It struggled a bit to keep the focus locked on Iron Man. Despite of this, I did not find it to be an issue while taking close up shots. In most cases, I just walked up to the subject, or held it in front of the camera, and OnePlus did a great job nailing the focus. Main subject is in perfect sharp focus from both the phones, and the background is very nicely blurred out from both.

Now the OnePlus has a bigger sensor, so the plain of focus is a bit narrow on it. That is the reason you see a bit of fringing in its images if you get too close to the subject. iPhone 12 Pro Max also has a bigger main sensor, despite of that its minimum focusing distance is slightly better than OnePlus 9 Pro. I also found the main subject in focus to be a bit sharper in the image from the iPhone. You can clearly see Michel’s Nose, hair and his cup to be sharper in the closeup shot from the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

It’s not just with this shot, you can see the same thing on most of the other shots as well. It’s not a big issue, and you probably won’t even notice it unless you zoom in, or look at these images side by side. While the close up shots from both look good, I would pick the iPhone for taking mine, because of the colours it produces. If you want to get even close to your subject, you can’t do that on the iPhone, but the OnePlus 9 Pro has a macro mode, which lets you get a lot more close to the subject. These macro shots are being captured with the 50 megapixel wide camera, That’s the reason they have incredible amount of detail in them.

When you want to take macro shots, you don’t even need to manually switch to the macro mode, if you move the camera too close to the subject, it will automatically switch to the macro mode, and let you focus on much closer objects. Now I have used phones whose macro cameras can get even closer than this to the main subject, but those macro shots are not nearly as detailed as these ones. Just like with the wide shots, this might very well be the best macro camera that I have used yet. Now let’s check out the portrait mode shots. When you switch to this mode, by default both the phones head into the zoomed in portrait mode.

iPhone takes these zoomed in portraits with the 2.5x telephoto lens, but this time OnePlus just digitally zoomed in 2 times from the main camera, so the background in its zoomed in portraits is not as compressed. Overall colours and skin tones look much more natural in the portraits from iPhone. Here is a backlit zoomed in portrait shot, you guys let me know in the comments, which one did a better job. Edge detection is really good from both these phones. Whenever there is blue colour or sky in the image, OnePlus tends to saturate it much more for some reason.

Observe the skin tones in these portrait shots, iPhone keeps them looking good and natural, but for some reason OnePlus just makes the face look white. I don’t know why it does that, because most of the times, that makes the shot look over processed. Again, Just look at the face in this shot. If OnePlus kept it looking natural, this would have been such a wonderful portrait shot. Now in these portrait shots, OnePlus showed a better dynamic range with the brighter parts of the background.

But it added a green tint to my skin which messed up this shot. In this portrait shot, again OnePlus showed a much better dynamic range. Look at the sky in the background, iPhone seems to have completely blown it up. But OnePlus did that weird exposure thing with the face again. I don’t know about you guys, but I love to take portrait shots with my phone.

I feel it is the easiest way to make your smartphones images look like they were click with a DSLR camera. And while portrait’s from OnePlus 9 Pro might look decent if we look at them alone, looking them side by side with the ones from iPhone 12 Pro Max, I don’t think I would ever be comfortable picking the 9 Pro for portraits. Not unless it stops making the skin look all white and pale. Many people don’t know this, but with most phones you can take portraits of objects as well. Normally all phones do better with edge detection while taking portraits of objects, but for some reason, OnePlus 9 Pro doesn’t seem to agree with me.

It struggles a lot while detecting edges of objects. When I first got the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it had a really tough time separating a glass filled with water from its background, but over the time it has got much better. I see the OnePlus 9 Pro struggling the same way, and I hope it also gets better with updates. In some of the shots after a few attempts it detects the edges accurately. If you saw my dedicated camera review of the OnePlus 9 Pro, you know this is one of those shots, where it took quite a few attempts to get the edge detection right.

But in the end, it did a better job than the iPhone. Here are a couple of more portraits of objects. While taking these shots in low light, LiDAR sensor on the iPhone 12 Pro max helps it achieve better edge detection, and its image is also much detailed and clean, whereas the one from 9 Pro has lot of noise, and very little detail in it. With that, let us now move on to the indoor, artificial and lower light images. Right from the first indoor image, OnePlus is again trying to cool the shot down.

The lights in this lift lobby are warm, as you see them in the image form the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Other than that both the phones seem to have captured a lot of details. Both of them have a wide aperture and optical image stabilisation on the main camera, which makes these images look so good. There was a lot of light here, so even the wide shot turn out to be detailed. Other than the different colours and white balance, both of them take very good images in indoor and artificial lighting conditions.

Pick the one whose colours look better to you and you won’t be disappointed with the details, at least in these lighting conditions. As the light gets lower, images form the iPhone 12 Pro Max, appears brighter of the two. I think the wider aperture and sensor shift image stabilisation is helping it capture more light. We can see the same thing in this image, and as I zoom in, iPhone’s image also seem to have captured more details. Now here, flowers look a lot softer in the image from OnePlus, whereas they are sharper in the one from iPhone, and it also shows so much more details in the white petals.

It was getting even darker, so this point forward I captured all images in the night mode on both the phones. Even with the night mode turned on, iPhone ended up capturing brighter sharper and more detailed images with less noise than the OnePlus 9 Pro. Both the phones don’t take too long to capture night mode shots, which is nice, because no one wants to stand still for 5 seconds for the night mode shot to look good. Both these phones suffer from lens flair, if the light hits them at a particular angle. Everyone hated it on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and it seems a little worse on the OnePlus 9 Pro.

To get rid of this, you can tilt your phone in the opposite direction of the light source or just place your hand between the lens and the light source, and that takes care of the flair in most cases. I found that every now and then in lower light, OnePlus fails to set the focus properly. We can see it in this image, and earlier we saw it in this image as well. In couple of low light shots, OnePlus is actually capturing accurate colours and the iPhone is not. This is one of those shots, and we saw this in the shot where I reduced the lens flair with my hand as well.

But after a few good shots, OnePlus is back to its original form, of capturing cooler colours. Not only iPhone is capturing better colours, its images also have less noise and more details. With it’s flagship level pricing, OnePlus has entered the big boys league now, and it can’t afford to be sloppy in lower light. That being said, I might still argue that if you look at the images from OnePlus 9 Pro alone, they are still looking pretty good, but with all the hype that OnePlus had going before and even after the launch of this phone, I expected it to perform even better. Here are images from the wide cameras on both the phones.

iPhone is still the one capturing the colours as they were, but this time its images are filled with noise, and there are very little detail in them. Wide shot from the OnePlus 9 Pro on the other hand is slightly more detailed, and has less noise. This should come as no surprise, because the wide lens on the 9 Pro has a 50 megapixel sensor behind it. In the very next shot, we see similar details from both the phones, but now the OnePlus 9 pro is capturing noticeably more noise. So again, OnePlus 9 Pro could use consistency in these situations as well.

Here are a few more low light shots from the main and wide camera on both these phones. You can just have a look at them. Colours are again accurate in the low light indoor images from the iPhone 12 Pro Max. That brings us to the front facing cameras.16 megapixel selfie camera on the OnePlus 9 pro has slightly more details in them. Just like with the images form the rear camera, skin tones look much better and pleasing in the selfies from the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

In this selfie, you can see how the Oneplus 9 pro overexposed part of my forehead. And in this next one, you can see it again messed up and over exposed my skin, whereas the iPhone did a good job with all the selfies. Both phones do well in terms of edge detection when it comes to taking portrait selfies. iPhone is again showing natural looking colours and skin tones, and OnePlus is still showing better dynamic range when the background is bright, just like while taking portraits with the rear camera. At times both struggle a bit with ears and some strands of hair, and they can definitely use some improvements via software updates.

Every now and then, OnePlus will mess up with the shot, so just be aware of it. You might not notice this by looking at the viewfinder, so its always a good idea to review the shots on OnePlus 9 Pro after you take them. Someone commented my OnePlus 9 Pro’s dedicated video that the dynamic range in selfies is hugely improved after the latest update. So after updating the phone to the Oxygen OS 11.2.4.4 I took a few selfies in bright light, and here are how they looked. Can we really call this an improvement? Yes, I know that these are very harsh lighting conditions, but here is how the iPhone’s selfie camera managed the same conditions both in normal and portrait selfie mode.

So at least on my OnePlus 9 Pro, I barely see any improvements with the latest update. I am in the common area of my building so I am going to have to do this with my mask on. Here is a video from the front facing camera of the iPhone 12 Pro max and the OnePlus 9 Pro. You can see how both this phones handle the overall colours of the scene, exposure and stabilisation when I am, walking around with them. Just by looking at the viewfinder, I can see that the iPhone’s selfie camera has a wider field of view.

You guys can also let me know in the comments, which of these 2 is picking my voice better. OnePlus 9 Pro can shoot 8K 30fps videos with it main and wide cameras, which is amazing. These videos look very good when shot in ample light. iPhone doesn’t have the option of shooting 8K videos. Both phones can take 4K 60fps videos.

You can play these videos as they are, or you can slow then down in post. Sometimes while shooting videos, OnePlus loosed the focus, and elements in the video are much softer. The recent software update did not fix it, so I am hoping OnePlus is aware about it and working on a fix. OnePlus 9 Pro can also shoot 4K 120fps videos. And these videos look amazing.

These videos are not slowed down in camera, and they play back at normal speed. If you want to slow them down, you will have to do it in your video editing software. All videos from the main camera on both phones get optical image stabilisation. OnePlus uses optical image stabilisation and iPhone uses sensor shift image stabilisation, results form both look really good. OnePlus gets nightscape mode to help it take better videos at night.

But as you can see from this sample, all it is doing is increasing the ISO which also results increasing the noise in the shot, and it doesn’t look good. So I prefer taking night time videos without the NightScape mode. Here is how the low light 4k 30fps video from both the phones look like. Both can shoot 240fps slow motion videos at 1080p resolution, and here is how it looks. OnePlus can also shoot at 480fps but the resolution has to be dropped down to 720p.

So video resolution and frame rate options wise, OnePlus 9 pro is ahead of the iPhone 12 Pro Max. But the videos still look smoother, and better from the iPhone. If oneplus could fix the focusing issue, I would say 9 Pro can give tough completion to the iPhone in terms of videos. I take a lot of images because it is a way of capturing your memories, and when I look back at them after a few years I want to be reminded of exactly how everything was. If I capture a warm sunny day, I want it to look like it was warm and sunny.

I don’t want a camera which alters the colours and makes the image look cooler. Because that might not bring out the same memories and feelings when I look back at the cooler images after a few years. That’s the reason I would pick the iPhone to take my images out of these 2. Well that, and the fact that its images show better colours, have more details, less noise, its portrait mode shots look more natural, and its night mode images are also more detailed with better colours. And most importantly, because it is consistent.

Even after the latest software update, I don’t feel that the OnePlus 9 Pro is there yet. And If I am being honest, I see very little difference (if any), in the images before and after this update. OnePlus has done it in the past as well, instead of really improving the cameras, they spend more time hyping the new update and claims that it improves the cameras, but in reality the update brings very little changes, and barely fixes the issues that were there. OnePlus 9 Pro does have a lot better wide camera, and the Macro mode, I would give them that. In the past, I mentioned the issues with OnePlus cameras, but I haven’t been too harsh on them when it comes to these comparisons, but at a starting price of Rs.64,999 this 9 Pro is not exactly cheap. And we can no longer let its flaws go unnoticed.

Ya, OnePlus and their loyal fanbase (which by the way is becoming smaller and smaller due to the increase in prices) could say they will push out more updates and fix these issues. But if past is any indication, they won’t do much. Just writing improved camera performance in the update log of every update, doesn’t magically make the camera better. I would like to say this again, OnePlus 9 Pro has a very good set of cameras, and every now and then, it shows that it can take good images. But it needs to be much more consistent in all lighting conditions, for us to rely on it being the only camera we carry.

You might not agree with me or you might have a few other thoughts. Whatever they are let me know in the comments. That is it for this video guys, please hit the like button if you enjoyed this video, and subscribe to the channel for more quality tech videos like this. You can also check out some of the other videos from this channel. This has been Sagar and I will catch you guys in the next video.

Source : TecworkZ