Camera Can Improve With Updates? - OnePlus 7 Pro Questions & Answers

Two months into owning the OnePlus 7 Pro, and several updates later, I have come to the conclusion that the camera on this phone is incredibly bad. Most photos taken indoors with decent lighting are so soft, they look like paintings. The details on videos are so bad, everything looks ugly. I have tried Gcam but it still doesn’t come close to my S9 Plus, heck even my iPhone 7 Plus. The only thing it’s got going is the wide angle.
Can software updates really help the situation or is hardware the problem here? I wonder how much money DxOMark made from this company.

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Camera Quality

Hi everyone,
So I've been looking at the mate 8 as my next purchase, and Some reviews state the camera quality isn't good due to software/firmware issues. Other reviews state the camera quality is really good. I was wondering what owners opinions are? If it does have exposure and focus issues, are they sorted if you use a different camera app? I don't know if different apps can alter issues that might be related to firmware?
Thanks
Ian
I wouldn't consider myself a power user but I'm very happy with the camera so far. I would mostly be taking pictures of friends and family etc and quality is just fine for me
I'm the same, mainly I'll be taking pictures of the family and scenery, that kinda thing. I'm not what you'd call a professional photographer by any means. But it is said the best camera you have is the one on you at the time, so I just want to make sure it's a relatively good one
Thanks
Ian
Camera was bad with the first update
But with latest update it became better
But if you are seeking for great camera go for lg or sam
If you wanna a power horse phablet go for mate 8
That's the thing, I've had both Samsung and LG phones before, and while the cameras were good I wasn't keen on the phones themselves. I've had a G3, a Note 4, an S6 and a Oneplus One. I was half considering a Oneplus 2, but only because of the price. £249 is cheap for a high spec phone. I'm not keen on the nexus line of phones either. I know they are popular, and you probably think I'm mad. But they are just a bog standard android phone. If I'm paying more than £400 for a phone I want it to do more than the straight forward stuff, straight out the box. Other wise id just get an iPhone. Half the stuff on the Mate 8 I'll probably never use I admit, but the fact its there is what I like. Does that make sense?
Has anybody tried a different camera app from the play store to see if that improves the pictures, or isn't it as simple as that? I'm not sure how apps, firmware, API's and hardware all tie in together, so I apologise in advance if that was a stupid question.
Thanks
Ian
The camera is a so and so in my eyes. It's ok, but very soft, in daytime but I wouldn't pick it to take pictures of kids indoor. Right now the best all around camera I have is the Nexus 6P, mostly because it will do really good indoors and most of my pics are indoors. I read that there will be a upgrade for the camera after 162 firmwarewize. Otherwise, it's a really good phone. Apps doesn't do better than stock camera.
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The camera is fine. It's not the best camera out there in terms of image quality when you zoom in on the pictures but it does the job. It has good colors and good exposure. It's fun to shoot with. I think quality should be able to be fixed with software update. I find that some indoor night shots almost have the same amount of detail as some of the ones shoot in daylight. The processing seems to heavy creating artefacts in images taken even in daylight.
The Mate 8 is pretty much the perfect phone in every way except the camera is not top notch. Excellent screen that is more clear and has better contrast than the screen on my iPhone 6S Plus. The battery life is the best you can get on any phone now. The build quality is fantastic. Audio quality in headphones is top notch, best I've every heard in any phone the dynamic range and clarity is amazing. Even better than my Meizu Pro 5 that has an internal DAC and amplifiers in it. It is super fast and has a very smooth and responsive UI.
Thank you for your input. You guys have confirmed the fact that the mate 8 will be my next phone just got to wait for it to come into stock again now!
Thanks
Ian
http://forum.xda-developers.com/mate-8/general/post-camera-picture-t3303629
next time just use ForumSearch

When will the mobile manufacturers use good camera sensors?

The Latest weeks I have study alot of pictures taken with Samsung S8 Plus, Huawei Mate 9, Nexus 6P, Oneplus 3T and 5, Nexus 5X, Iphone 7 Plus, HTC U11 and U Ultra,...
And NO, they arent any good at all. Why?
When you just zoom in the picture you notice how much afterwork that is done by the software, noise reduction, sharpness, contrast... Everything look so artificiell.
Skin tones in faces always have some kind of unnatural hue.
You realize how bad it is after looking on the DNG raw files, which is the pure picture file without the software work.
From which phone doesn't matter, if you compare Nexus 6P to and older phone, they are almost the same. The picture quality is silly bad. It is noise all over the pictures, even in daylight.
Instead of do so much work on camera software to fix the problems, why not take more time on making larger sensors and a way to apply them in a good way so they dont take to much space in the phones.
Looking at photo samples from oldies like Nokia N82, 808 I releazie that to could have been a lot more progress in camera development in mobiles.
I really hope in near future that that manufactures takes a huge step forward with some new
invention, because the cameras in the cellphones are way too overhyped. The cameras could be so much better.

Pixel 2 vs One Plus 5t : Camera

I know the pixel is better, but I want to understand the difference.
Up until a few weeks ago I had a Nexus 5x. I loved it, especially the camera!
However the Nexus 5x died, and I replaced it with a brand new OnePlus 5t. The screen is amazing, it's runs pretty much stock Android, and the battery life was astounding. But I returned it after 2 days because the camera wasn't even as good as my Nexus 5x.
In bright daylight the OnePlus 5t takes lovely pictures, but in every other scenario it's pretty rubbish (in my opinion).
I mainly use my camera by just whipping it out of my pocket, pointing, and shooting. The Nexus excelled at this. The OnePlus 5t gave me shots with lots of motion blur, lots of noise, and they weren't exposed properly. Most of the photos I took were unusable.
So, the OnePlus 5t went back and I got a Pixel 2. It's a smaller screen and a way worse battery life, but it's by far the best point-and-shoot camera phone I've had, even better than the Nexus 5x. To be honest it's not that much better than the Nexus 5x, but the fact it has OIS does make a big difference to some shots. I love it.
So, if you mainly take photos of things that don't move (landscapes and still life) and can stand really still when you take a photo, the OnePlus 5t will take lovely photos.
If you take photos of people/things that move, or anything indoors, then Pixel 2 (or a second-hand Nexus 5x!) will serve you way better.
Hope that helps!
richhhh said:
Up until a few weeks ago I had a Nexus 5x. I loved it, especially the camera!
However the Nexus 5x died, and I replaced it with a brand new OnePlus 5t. The screen is amazing, it's runs pretty much stock Android, and the battery life was astounding. But I returned it after 2 days because the camera wasn't even as good as my Nexus 5x.
In bright daylight the OnePlus 5t takes lovely pictures, but in every other scenario it's pretty rubbish (in my opinion).
I mainly use my camera by just whipping it out of my pocket, pointing, and shooting. The Nexus excelled at this. The OnePlus 5t gave me shots with lots of motion blur, lots of noise, and they weren't exposed properly. Most of the photos I took were unusable.
So, the OnePlus 5t went back and I got a Pixel 2. It's a smaller screen and a way worse battery life, but it's by far the best point-and-shoot camera phone I've had, even better than the Nexus 5x. To be honest it's not that much better than the Nexus 5x, but the fact it has OIS does make a big difference to some shots. I love it.
So, if you mainly take photos of things that don't move (landscapes and still life) and can stand really still when you take a photo, the OnePlus 5t will take lovely photos.
If you take photos of people/things that move, or anything indoors, then Pixel 2 (or a second-hand Nexus 5x!) will serve you way better.
Hope that helps!
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Wow, I never thought the camera was worse than the last generation smartphone. And you are saying if there is no real light the camera is not good, right?
JosephECorson said:
Wow, I never thought the camera was worse than the last generation smartphone. And you are saying if there is no real light the camera is not good, right?
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The 5T is using the same sensor as the 3T, so the technology is maybe 1 year newer than the 5X. Against which it's a significantly smaller sensor (less light) with more pixels (so more noise). So it's not totally shocking if the 5X camera does perform better.
Anyway, a big part of phone camera performance is the processing rather than the sensor (which Google have certainly been concentrating on in the last couple of years). And at the time of the 5T's release theirs was, well, not good. Look at this image from GSMArena's review, click on the zoom button, and when you've finished admiring the total lack of texture in the leaves and branches take a look at the grass between the fallen leaves and the house. It's many years since I've seen any camera do that type of watercolour smearing in a daylight photo, and I hope for their customers' sake that OnePlus have been doing something about this.
(It's not a one-off either: they published a set of preview photos before their review, and some of those were comically bad. You could have used them as a teaching aid to show students how not to do image processing).
JosephECorson said:
Wow, I never thought the camera was worse than the last generation smartphone. And you are saying if there is no real light the camera is not good, right?
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Click to collapse
That was my experience, yes. It was bad in low light and bad with any movement (of either your hands holding the camera or of a subject in the frame)
I've found a lot of camera reviews for phone cameras don't take into account real-world usage. They're all set up in studios, or taking photos of a random building, or a flower, and then another flower, or a posed portrait where the subject is dead still. All very 'traditional' photography setups looking more at the colour reproduction and exposure.
Very few (non that I've actually found!) take into account how it performs as something people pull out of their pocket to capture an unposed, often badly lit, fleeting moment. If they did, most would likely find the OnePlus 5t churns out a blurry mess, and the Pixel 2 (while far from perfect and still no competition for an actual small point-and-shoot camera) does just fine.
---------- Post added at 01:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:53 PM ----------
Large Hadron said:
Anyway, a big part of phone camera performance is the processing rather than the sensor (which Google have certainly been concentrating on in the last couple of years).
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I 100% agree with that too.
And yes, you can get the Google Camera port for other phones these days which brings their incredible HDR+ processing to other phones, and I did actually try it on the OnePlus 5t (it improved visual quality and processing, but didn't help with any of the inherent problems).
But you have to manually keep that ported/hacked app updated, and it might not be very stable, or not save the actual file sometimes.
Whereas on the Pixel/Nexus it's built in by default and 'just works', and works very well in a lot of situations, which is all you can hope for
richhhh said:
So, if you mainly take photos of things that don't move (landscapes and still life) and can stand really still when you take a photo, the OnePlus 5t will take lovely photos.
If you take photos of people/things that move, or anything indoors, then Pixel 2 (or a second-hand Nexus 5x!) will serve you way better.
Hope that helps!
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Click to collapse
Agree with this 100%. I had the OP5T for 10 days and tried every setting I could think of and a variety of apps/apks to improve the quality but in the end there was always some compromise.
Almost all of the photos I take are of my children and the quality was particularly poor (in my opinion) if the conditions weren't perfect (lighting, kids standing perfectly still, my hands perfectly stable etc.). If you need a phone camera to 'capture the moment' by just pointing and shooting then you may be very disappointed by the 5T
Large Hadron said:
It's many years since I've seen any camera do that type of watercolour smearing in a daylight photo, and I hope for their customers' sake that OnePlus have been doing something about this.
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Click to collapse
And the 5T sometimes did this 'watercolour smearing' to the skin on my children's faces which was the last straw for me. In many cases my older Xiaomi mi5 was taking better pictures.
So I sent it back and bought the Pixel 2 and the difference is night & day. I'm really trying to take a bad picture with the Pixel 2 but keep failing

Camera performs worse after Emui 9.0.0 upgrade (BKL-L09)

Hello,
A few weeks ago I've upgraded to EMUI 9.0.0.
The camera with EMUI 8 performed incredibly good, except for a few crashes when making extra long exposure shots.
Since the EMUI 9 upgrade I recognized several issues and drawbacks compared to EMUI 8.
1. To get the same nice colors and lights, I need to enable "AI", but at the same time this makes the camera much slowlier with shooting. Which makes it unusable for quick snapshots of moving targets.
2. Once in AI mode the picture resolution cannot be changed anymore. It only allows for full resolution. I loved the 18:9 format.
3. OIS seems to work way worse (or not at all) in AI mode. Maybe this is correlated to the previous topic, that full resolution is chosen automatically in AI mode. Having a final pic of full resolution I think it would leave no margins for OIS. For sure with EMUI 9 it is much harder to get clear shots.
4. Panorama mode: Pictures are almost impossible to get them sharp and several times the panorama shot was not able to be stopped/completed. Instead the app had to be closed and the panorama repeated.
Did anyone else experience similar behavior and/or has a solution to it? I'm already thinking about downgrading to EMUI 8 as for the bad performance of the camera app.
Thanks for any inputs!
IKR. I am experiencing the same thing. Quality of photos has reduced a lot and face unlock is slower.
I made similar observations concerning reduced photo quality over the course of updates for my Huawei Mate 9. It took me several downgrade attempts with different firmware releases to get it back to the photo quality it delivered when it was new.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=75034023&postcount=242
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=78311258&postcount=46
One could be forgiven for thinking that they do it intentionally to push their new models.
I have heard others complain.
I don't think the quality changed on mine
C675 b190.
Here's a picture of my week old kittens
Looks good to me.. But then I don't expect professional quality from a cell phone.
They make specific cameras for that.
This is so sweet. I love taking photos of my 6 years old tomcat Louis too. But I have to be quick, he is always sceptical about it ;-
Though your sample looks really cute it should definitely be sharper. Your phone is capable of taking photographs with amazing technical quality, in good lightning conditions often regardless of its firmware, but then again your sample picture could have suffered from the forums compression during upload.
itsjustmeagain said:
This is so sweet. I love taking photos of my 6 years old tomcat Louis too. But I have to be quick, he is always sceptical about it ;-
Though your sample looks really cute it should definitely be sharper. Your phone is capable of taking photographs with amazing technical quality, in good lightning conditions often regardless of its firmware, but then again your sample picture could have suffered from the forums compression during upload.
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Facebook does the same.. All my photos.. Even with quick shot.. Volume shutter.. Pictures come out good.
Night shots.. Yeah they suck
Not being.. Ya know
But Asians putting out bad cameras?
Got to be trolling.
Anyway, I decided not to update my Honor View 10 anymore to avoid the risk of quality degradation as I experienced with my Mate 9.
Btw. It is interesting seeing a phone camera perform without the bells an wistles of the vendor software optimizations. Just try any other camera app.

Upgrading from OP5 to get a better camera?

I currently use an OP5 which i am pretty happy about (great performance, fast charging and no bloat), except for the rear camera (using stock camera app). It sometimes mess up skin tones creating a water pastel kind of effect and i find its low light performance questionable. I mostly take pictures of my kids, and it is frustrating when this happen since usually its not a posed photo where you can just try again.
I am considering upgrading to the OP7 Pro, but i am really confused about the camera performance. DxoMark has it scoring very high (using a different firmware?), and many reviewers also rank it among the best, while several others complain about horrible performance.
So, what i want to ask is:
1. Is the OP7 Pro camera a significant upgrade over the OP5?
2. Has the new firmware been released, and has it addressed the photo quality concerns?
3. Is the OP7 Pro rear camera on par with P30 Pro and S10+ ignoring zoom capabilities?
The camera is okay, I'd say it's better than my lg g6, so it should be an upgrade over the op5. It has the potential to be just as good as my s9+ camera, and sometimes it is just as good, sometimes it's just not.
Personally I'd say if camera performance is more important to you than price, unlockability, or bloat, go with the s10. If you want something that feels like a better op5 go with the op7p, but the camera will most likely not be able to compete with the s10. I'd also say avoid the p30 pro because I don't think you should spend $700-800 on something that will only get updates for a few more months.
Camera performance for me is fine, I never really use my camera, when I do I'm not trying to take artsy shots, and every time I take a picture its good enough to get my point across.
It's definitely an upgrade over the op5i had and it's an upgrade over my op6 camera as well.
I upgraded from OP5 to OP7Pro and honestly, it is a big upgrade. After tweaking the gCam stuff for a while, while there are times that the stock camera has better results, the gCam team have done an outstanding job pushing the camera hardware to their fullest.
The display alone is worth it. Complete eye candy.
explosivequack said:
Personally I'd say if camera performance is more important to you than price, unlockability, or bloat, go with the s10. If you want something that feels like a better op5 go with the op7p, but the camera will most likely not be able to compete with the s10. I'd also say avoid the p30 pro because I don't think you should spend $700-800 on something that will only get updates for a few more months.
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I really dislike the Samsung software, it is significantly more expensive and it has a front-camera in the display (i prefer a pop-up because i only rarely take selfies and because i prefer fingerprint unlock), so it would have to a significant difference in camera performance.
Why will the P30 Pro only get updates for a few more months? I had considered it, but disliked paying more for a somewhat slower device.
ziphnor said:
I really dislike the Samsung software, it is significantly more expensive and it has a front-camera in the display (i prefer a pop-up because i only rarely take selfies and because i prefer fingerprint unlock), so it would have to a significant difference in camera performance.
Why will the P30 Pro only get updates for a few more months? I had considered it, but disliked paying more for a somewhat slower device.
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samsungs one ui is a lot better than it used to be, the front camera on the s10+ is probably significantly better than the front camera of the op7p because it doesn't focus. Back camera probably won't be as significant as the front.
The United States has stuff going on where companies can't do business with huawei, including google. They have a 90 day thing going on so for 90 days Huawei will continue to get updates, but if the trade ban isn't reversed in 90 days Huawei will only be allowed to use aosp, and not use any of googles goodness.
The camera can be inconsistent. But the hardware is up there with the best and can come out with comparable results. Just still some software and processing to be tweaked
Stock is horrible. It destroys fine detail with poor post processing and forget about wide angle or panorama shots. Gcam helps a lot with detail but colours aren't great.
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May be an unpopular opinion but if your main concern is camera, the Pixel 3a might be worth looking at.
I only say 3a to also save some money. The Pixel 3 XL could be an option too, if you are willing to pay more. I just couldn't stand the notch and some performance issues that were reported by others as well.
As for the 7 Pro, the camera definitely isn't the strong point of this device, but I'm sure it does a better job than the 5. Even if software hasn't improved much, the hardware upgrade should be good enough to get better quality pictures compared to the OP5.

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