Gadgetory

never settle that's the motto but at 399 dollars shouldn't we expect a few compromises when compared to more expensive flagship phones I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket nap and here's our real camera review of the one plus three buckle up folks we have a lot of ground to cover and I'm gonna move pretty quick first a little housekeeping the 16 megapixel camera on the one plus three is utilizing a slightly smaller one over two point eight inch image sensor with an F 2.0 aperture and a hybrid hardware plus software image stabilization system this Sony sensor has one point one two micron pixels and uses phase detect autofocus reproduce this review at UHD resolution to preserve video quality though image crops will be used periodically to show fine detail starting off with exposure and saturation this phone largely uses spot metering so it adjusts the brightness of your photos based on where you tap to focus this is my favorite way of ensuring that your shots come out exposed for what you thought was important in direct sun the one plus three is really good at exposing for your subject don't like many phones I still find that photos produced lean just a touch bright maybe a quarter to a third stop brighter than they might need to be blues and greens or vibrant and I pleasing those skies can sometimes be a touch blown out starting to veer a slightly more aqua color especially when looking at brighter subjects near your horizon and there is a very fine grain pattern to uniform colors but it's not particularly noticeable unless pixel peeping and pixel peeping is bad so just don't do that happily this JPEG rendering rains in Browns and earthy colors preventing rusts from looking too orange and delivering just the right balance of accuracy against the warmer southern california afternoon light here yellows fare well thanks to the spot metering though this is an aggressively saturated image we at least aren't clipping these highlights reds are always difficult for our cameras to expose for properly and I found a perfect patch of Bougainville blossoms to showcase this there are actually two distinctly different patches of blossoms here these higher flowers are closer to pink and then mixed in in the lower batch of blossoms here there are flowers that are closer to red but this camera in trying to create a juicy final photo has kind of mashed them all up into a sizzling magenta this issue is not unique to the 1+3 but I happen to find a great subject to demonstrate this problem looking at the raw file you can see clearer differences between the two batches of flowers and white subjects and bright light are extremely difficult to expose for but here again spot metering at least takes the edge off most of the clipped highlights we might see from lesser camera systems though we know this isn't likely a top-of-the-line sensor from Sony it still displays solid dynamic range purposely over exposing a shot by three stops were able to get back almost three stops worth of information from the scene though in underexposed areas especially at night we're only able to brighten up about a stop maybe a stop and a half where noise is already an issue before we even try to brighten the shot up more about those noise issues later on in this video quick look at file sizes JPEGs are between three and eight megabytes per exposure while RAW files weigh in at 31 megabytes per shot every time you hit the shutter you could be eating up to 40 megabytes of storage now there's no memory card slot to offload files but thankfully you'll start out with 64 gigabytes of storage built in and just a quick look at software this camera app is really clean and simple a big shutter button takes your shot or starts your video a slide in from the left will walk you through your major modes like photos videos panorama in slow motion the manual mode is well featured with focus shutter and ISO controls you can adjust white balance but I don't like this part of the layout every other mode this dial delivers granular adjustments but on white balance you really only have four major options and there's no way to set a specific Kelvin adjustment in between these major settings also while I genuinely do like the overall app layout it is a bummer that the shutter will always encroach on your sixteen by nine shots there's this slice of your viewfinder permanently blocked when shooting video for example back to some photos macro shots suffer slightly from a smaller sensor and a longer minimum focusing distance you can scooch up to around three inches away from your lens which is on the better end of mid-pack though falls behind phones like the galaxy s7 and LG g5 the sensor size means the depth of field blur falls somewhere in between the busier backgrounds you might see on an iPhone and the smoother blur from Samsung this year oneplus is not the best but it's far from the worst most noticeable at those macro distances but we do still land playful little bouquet balls when light filters through leaves and looking at autofocus the phase detection system here does its job reliably well a smooth action pulls into your subject though there is a tendency to overshoot a little and wobble back but it's accurate and easy to use again not the fastest but we rarely encountered any misfires outside of busy macro situations which are difficult for many phones looking at white balance the oneplus 3 on its own landed to touch on the warm side during bright summer California Sun but output feels appropriate given the lighting conditions occasionally this is an issue when your subject has warmer colors yellows and Red's but I was happy to see that shaded shots avoided the trap of using too cold of a white balance to compensate have you been watching these reviews I've often complained about HDR high dynamic range on Android phones basically being a shadow brightening mode and the oneplus 3 does little to disavow me of that notion the HDR mode here does a great job of pulling detail out of darker areas of your shot but will also brighten up the bright areas of your photos great HDR photos will pull info out of both your highlights and shadows and the 1+3 just joins all the other Android phones out there which only nail half of that equation but for fun features panorama stitching is pretty great we're seeing some jagged edges on these power lines but they at least have the right overall shape and the phone does a terrific job of handling exposure while panning through the scene no small feat considering how drastic lighting can change when you pivot 180 degrees and yeah there is an 8 megapixel selfie camera onboard I can't say I see any remarkable differences here between the oneplus and other flagship selfie cameras so well done there ok back to the main camera and let's look at some low-light photos the combo of smaller sensor and higher resolution means we're in for some noisier shots throughout all of these night photos we're losing out on quite a bit of detail because of this ISO grain as long as you can supply some light it helps take the edge off but the sides of the buildings here have quite a bit of noise going on less light means we'll see even more grain as we check out our creepy tunnel though I'm glad to see a minimum of distracting colored lens flares or chromatic aberrations the 1+3 nails are creepy gate great dark exposure and the white balance is pretty close to the actual gross yellow lighting you would see here in real life and on our walkway we see great color accuracy between these two not quite the same shade of white bulbs though the hotspots under each light are eating up a bit more of the wall and that detail isn't well recovered when looking at the raw file now looking at a flower lit by a porch light the camera lands a great exposure of an orange and red flower lit by a yellow light though detail all around is very soft and pushing this camera to its absolute limits in almost no light this is a terrible exposure but the camera was able to find focus joining Samsung and most phones with laser assisted autofocus as the few that will lock onto a subject like this now there is a setting on the phone which takes multiple shots and in software will reduce noise it works well for stationary subjects but won't be affixed for all situations and it's a separate option to toggle opposite HDR it's up to the user to remember when and where this mode is appropriate now your photos will turn out less noisy but again we are still going to be blurring a little bit of detail to get that smoother looking image at some point software just can't fight the physics of having more pixels on a smaller sensor looking at the manual controls we can have a little fun with some long exposures we get up to a 30 second shutter which even on a light traffic night was a bit too much but it's really easy to dial in what you need to lend a cool streaking tail light shot okay moving to video the one plus three delivers mid-pack video quality with somewhere around 40 megabit per second file sizes exposure and saturation performance here is nearly identical to what we saw though we lack any kind of manual mode for video instead only getting basic exposure compensation which is at least better than nothing there is a quirk to the focus and exposure system here though when focusing stills the camera will reset your focus and exposure after a couple seconds that's frustrating enough when trying to set up for a still photo but the same holds true while shooting video tapping the screen will set focus and exposure and a couple seconds later it gets reset the user has to remember to tap and hold on the screen to lock the focus and exposure which is actually kind of a pain and with something even I would often forget to do after days of shooting on this camera also though we save a respectable file size it's very common to see compression artifact ting in uniform sections of video this camera kind of wigged out on the California hills in the background of the shot and it's really common to see pixelation in blue sky and around clouds talking about video we can get a better look at image stabilization while shooting UHD video there's only hardware optical stabilization in use it does a reasonable job of smoothing out footballs though we should all be used to a bit of jell-o as the lens wobbles to correct for movement there were a number of shots though that while trying to hold as still as I could I still saw a lot of wiggle in the camera output there is no 60 frame per second 1080p mode that I could find but dropping to HD auto magically added software stabilization to the mix and this hybrid stabilization is pretty effective it won't produce the Steadicam like float we can create from Apple's camera system but it also doesn't suffer that shifty stuttery look that LG's dual stabilization can create zoom performance is also better than mid-pack the 1+3 nicely balances reach against blowing the image up it's a lower quality to be sure but having a little extra resolution to play with helps here in preserving some image integrity audio capture is also unimpressive these microphones are easily overloaded and the noise reduction filtering is completely ham-fisted destroying the sound if there's any constant hum or background audio looking at an exposure test moving from dark to bright and back these transitions aren't the most pleasant we don't see that blooming effect we might on an Apple or Samsung but the adjustments are quick and efficient maybe a touch abrupt but this camera rarely over corrects we do lose focus a couple times in making the spin and this camera really does not seem to like lateral pans but white balance also stays on point with only subtle adjustments through the scene again we're happy to see that the fun features like slow-motion are handled well here too this isn't the highest quality image when looking at individual frames but we get a nicely smoothed out slow 720p video the gripe here is for folks who like to edit as these videos were saved with the slow-motion effect baked in no speed ramping or audio info for you so let's wrap this up this video is long enough already where does that leave us with the camera on the oneplus 3 getting back to our initial question about marketing slogans and never settling at a three hundred and ninety nine dollar price of course we have to settle in a few areas talking about the camera on this phone means we kind of need to split the discussion up into two factions looking at just the price this is one of the best performers we've played with around $400 it's simply excellent hardware and software at this tier looking at overall performance it completely shames phones like the Xperia X we recently reviewed and it goes toe-to-toe with the iPhone se winning as many battles as it loses it's genuinely a fun and mostly frustration-free camera to use and we're really happy with this shooter when looking at the competition near this price many folks will try to compare this against proper flagship phones though and honestly it just can't quite unseat more expensive options but to be sure there are diminishing returns when coughing up another $200 or more for a phone but there are still returns to be had maybe it's better low-light performance or softer background blur maybe faster focus speeds better audio or more robust video controls but there are plenty of cameras with options that can best the shooter on the one plus three you just have to pay more for that better performance one plus as a company has been distancing itself from the old flagship killer moniker it used to use and rightfully so is this thing can't quite kill flagships but we're happy to report that for many people the oneplus 3 doesn't need to kill flagships since it's an above average performer at a mid-pack price as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full review of the oneplus 3 coming soon and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now i'm juan carlos bag now some gadget guy on twitter and instagram and i will catch you all on the next review