Gadgetory

we're holding work outside today a pocket now is the folks at Oppo sent over an f1 for us to play with now the killer feature on this phone is the 16 megapixel front facing camera and they build this as being the selfie expert the folks at Oppo were pretty adamant that we compare this against another flagship phone in the United States ecosystem and they seemed really excited about pairing this up against the iPhone 6s so with all of the design omage that we see Capo paying both to the software and hardware of the f1 plus they're pretty confident that their front facing camera solution is going to bully the front-facing FaceTime camera on the iPhone 6s so while I'm at this park in getting rained on we're going to give these two front-facing shooters a little bit of a comparison see which one survives our front facing camera battle it's an uncharacteristically rainy day in Southern California it's a really kind of a fun way to test front-facing cameras for our selfies and stuff because we don't often have middle of the day gray storm cloudy soft lighting kinds of conditions it's doing wonders for my complexion right now but III guess I should really say I've never been a fan of selfies of these front-facing cameras on our phones I've always looked at them as pieces of hardware born out of necessity for those situations where we might want to engage with something like a video call makes perfect sense we would want a camera on the front of our phone we can all acknowledge that more resolution does not mean better camera quality but I am happy to see that on the Oppo f1 even though we've got more than three times the number of pixels in this front-facing shooter over the iPhone 6s that it doesn't seem to have overly negatively affected indoor and low light performance especially compared to the like a1 lamp test in my office both phones seem to expose roughly about the same and both teams seem to handle hand movement roughly about the same although I have to say that these these sort of front-facing screen flash solutions not really enough illumination to make sure that you're getting crisper selfies and you're getting faster shutter speeds so especially for those situations you're trying to take a photo of you and a friend at an in a dimly lit restaurant you you really just need more light our phone screens as bright as they can get really aren't going to tackle that job for us for the iPhone 6s being a flagship device there are a few disappointments when we start looking at this front facing camera first of all I can't find any settings see we can bump up that video quality that we're looking at a 720p maximum video resolution with a 5 megapixel image sensor we should be able to crawl up to something like quad HD video like we find on samsung devices it's a really high quality video that you can produce from a galaxy s7 or a galaxy note5 also it's just a for a company that gets audio so right on their headphone playback apples recording a video is still supremely it's it's really disappointing to see that we still only capture a mono audio signal on our video now it's a very high quality mono don't get me wrong it's got excellent noise reduction filtering and you're you get a pretty decent amount of dynamic range on these microphones but it's still just mono so yeah the f1 it's going to allow you to save 1080p video from that front-facing shooter fortunately the phone doesn't seem to be powerful enough to match the type of image processing and higher resolution video capabilities that we might see on other devices but it's still going to handily be the iPhone for just the number of pixels on the screen and also it is saving a stereo track now to be perfectly fair I actually think that the noise reduction and wind filtering capabilities on the iPhone are a little bit nicer but you still get a better sense of the stereo environment around you from the Oppo especially when you're watching some of these videos back on and you're using headphones I'm going to say those two settings the Oppo and the iPhone 6's battle to a tie but I will give it to Apple that at least for still photos for those still selfies and we're capturing that full 5 megapixel resolution that they're image processing is still top notch it's still the most consistent image processing I think I've seen across any smartphone in the ecosystem and they still maintain HDR settings for your selfie photos now unfortunately I'm shooting in conditions where it's going to be really difficult to see significant differences meeting lean normal photos in HDR but HDR processing on the iPhone even from the selfie camera is still probably best-in-class and I couldn't find any settings like that commiserate any similar settings on the Oppo which is a little disappointing for having an amazing an amazingly high resolution on that front image front image sensor there are a bunch of situations where you're trying to take a photo from that front-facing camera and lighting conditions are not ideal like you're trying to take a picture of yourself at sunset and you're backlit well you're just going to be a silhouette if you want the really pretty colors of the sunset behind you but if you focus on your face and you expose for your face and it's going to blow out all of those really pretty colors it's going to wash out the scene it's not going to look very nice HDR is one solution for balancing the subject and the background yeah I gotta say I was a little disappointed to see that once we engaged video on the Oppo f1 that it's cropping the frame in so I was really hoping well maybe we're going to see some kind of software image stabilization on the output from this video but that doesn't seem to be the case this seems to be just as shaky and just as twitchy and right now just so that I can kind of stabilize this a little bit I am using a little stick with the smartphone cradle on it just so that I can keep one hand free have a better grip on the phone especially because it's raining out here and this one is getting kind of soaked but at least we can say I cop oh really does know their target consumer for this that person who's really going to fill their phone full of selfies this phone does come with 64 gigabytes of built-in storage so right off the bat you know not having to buy a memory card for the equivalent of $400 u.s. somewhere in that ballpark I think you're getting a sizeable bucket to throw all of your front-facing camera photos and videos into it's just kind of ridiculous to me to think you know this thing has a higher resolution sensor on the front of it than it does on the back of it now I try not to get overly snobby about a lot of the things on our smartphones but I ranked camera quality pretty high so in the past I've been known to mock or derive the quality of the photos and videos we get from front-facing shooters but we can't deny that this there's been an explosion a whole car industry of direct to audience conversations like vlogging where you have instant access to people sharing their thoughts or communicating ideas and it can be really compelling and engaging content so you know it makes sense that we would want to focus on improving that front-facing camera quality beyond just what we what is necessary for things like FaceTime calls Skype calls video calls things like that I don't know I don't know that the oppo is really changing my mind on front-facing cameras and there have been plenty of times throughout even just this little interaction walking around this park where I really just wanted to flip back to the room rear mounted camera even though it's lower resolution how that would affect purchasing decision overall when you're looking at Android versus iOS when you're looking at Oppo versus Apple that if the selfies are so important to you or that's that's such a killer app or a killer feature for you then yeah then the Oppo makes a very compelling argument for why you should pick it over the iPhone 6s okay so we should probably wrap this up this videos long enough already but we're looking at front-facing cameras and which one of these two phones wins I don't know that I can declare a clear winner I the Oppo is going to provide us with much higher resolution Stills and a noticeably higher resolution video but Apple color processing and the audio improvements for noise reduction and wind filtering should not be ignored for myself personally and this is totally subjective I'd probably side with the Oppo just for a little extra flexibility when it comes to cropping images zooming in on the the photos and videos that I'm shooting but that's not some kind of clear endorsement nor is it any kind of runaway victory for the f1 plus and you don't know I could be shooting this video right now and some other kind of smartphone as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more fun comparisons like these and to hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next comparison