OnePlus 3 smartphone, photo review

Posted on Oct 26, 2016

The OnePlus 3 smartphone amazed me in many ways. Since the introduction of the first model, the OnePlus One (that I’ve reviewed here),  the company focused on producing a stellar device on the budget. The first iteration was a very good product even if it suffers from some young problems (like the LCD touch problems). The second iteration last year was good but not as good as we were expecting.

With the arrive of the OnePlus 3, it seems that the company bring here with us all the best we can have inside one Android smartphone: unibody metal construction, a beautiful 5,5 Full Hd screen, top performance thanks to the Snapdragon 820 with 6 gigabytes of ram, dual Sim support and 64 Gigabyte of memory (not expandable). At the price of 399€ this device is a bargain.
The question here is how the camera of the OnePlus 3 smartphone will perform?
This summer I could do some photos to test this device during the trip to Hungary, Austria, and Croatia at the workshop of photography I held with my Italian brand Pixel Square. I want to thanks once more androidworld.it for the device and the collaboration.

OnePlus 3 photo review, build quality

The device has a beautiful design with a unibody metal construction. The front of the OnePlus 3 is covered with a Gorilla Glass 4 and on the home button, you can find the fingerprints sensor to unlock the device. I’ve found this sensor amazing fast, even maybe faster than the already great one found in the Nexus 6p and Huawei P9.
Another great feature of the OnePlus smartphones is the switch button on the side of the device. With it, you can quickly throttle on/off the sound of the notifications with three different states.
Please remember that the device uses a USB Type-C connection, so be sure to not forget this cable at home while traveling since is quite difficult at the moment to find it in normal shops and maybe with the friends traveling with you!

OnePlus 3 photo review, camera quality review

There are many things I love about this smartphone: from the build quality to the speed of the Android interface that is almost as the stock once.
The camera has some great features too: first of all, it fires very quickly with the double tap of the sleep button on the right of the device. Then the camera app of the OnePlus 3 is clean and offer an automatic mode that works very well. On the camera settings then you can find the manual mode that let you control the basic parameters of shooting like the ISO value, shutter speed, and white balance.
Another great feature -that now even Apple iOS 10 supports- is the .raw shooting. Shooting in .raw Dng with the OnePlus 3 give to you a wide range of opportunity to capture all the details and colors of the pictures and let you edit them after without losing any quality and without having any drop down of the jpg compression.

For this pictures of this OnePlus 3 photo review I’ve used this approach: I’ve set the device to shoot in .raw Dng and then I’ve installed on the OnePlus 3 the application Lightroom Mobile.
Having a Creative Cloud subscription I can then sync my .raw Dng photos shoot from the OnePlus 3 with my standard Lightroom library and edit the shoot or inside the app on the smartphone or when I’m back in the studio in front of my 27″ iMac.
I’ve found this workflow very effective since I can shoot and edit the pictures on the go or later with calm.
Lightroom mobile, with a setting, let you automatically import only the .raw Dng file that is found on the device. Then you can set a collection where this new imported photo will go.

OnePlus 3 photo review, quality of the pictures in difficult light situations

I’m more and more amazed at what this small sensor can achieve in terms of details and light recording. Here are some pictures I’ve taken in those difficult light situations and, as you can see, the lights and details are mainly preserved. Shooting in .raw Dng give this great advantages on the shadows and highlights recovery, but I’ve to say that also the jpg straight out from the camera is good thanks to a nice hdr implementation.

OnePlus 3 photo review, final conclusions

My final conclusions about this device are very positive. We have here a serious contender against the iPhone 7/7 plus and against the new Google Pixel smartphone. I hope to be able to take some photos of those devices soon and write down my opinions with some photos!