The OnePlus 6 Review: Among The Best Of 2018

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

For the night time shots, I wanted to change it up a bit and chose to take the photos at sun-down, which resulted with still some light in the sky. These conditions are more challenging for the phones as they need to decide on the right exposure and possibly HDR processing.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ]
[ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ]
[ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

The OnePlus 6 on paper is at a disadvantage here as its f/1.7 lens and 1.22µm pixel pitch shouldn’t be able to keep up with the 1.4µm and larger aperture phones.

This first shot is evident of that as although it still manages a respectable result, it lacks the shadow detail of other phones. Using some manual exposure compensation to brighten up the scene would have been beneficial to the OP6.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ] - [ Mate 10 ]
[ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ] - [ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

This road crossing was one of the rare scenes where the OP6 wans’t really consistent with its shots and gave three consecutive different results. All three shots have the same exposure and ISO settings so the difference in brightness seems to be purely due to the resulting processing, with the third shot being the most natural and the first two having varying degrees of HDR processing flattening out the image to bring out the shadows.

Overall the shots of the OP6 here are still quite good, although it lacks the natural background shadow detail of other phones. It’s still able to maintain the natural spotlight of the street lamp, and more importantly, it got the white colour temperature of the light a lot more correct than other phones.

In terms of detail if feels like the OP6 is employing sharpening and artificial contrast. The third sample is by far the best here as it also has less visible noise artefacts.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

In this second scene the OP6 was more consistent and all the captured shots looked the same. Again it’s doing “OK” in terms of results, competing well in terms of sharpness but just doesn’t have the dynamic range to capture as much shadows in the scene.

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

Going to darker scenarios here at the playground, one aspect where the OP6 does very well is capturing the accurate white colour temperature of the lamps, while for example the S9 and G7 and Pixel 2 got it really wrong.

While again lacking in terms of some of the shadows, the details captured are actually quite good and the OP6 manages to compete with the S9 in terms of textures, only the V30 does better. Of course the P20Pro wins out in terms of dynamic range in its pixel binning 10MP mode, even though its night mode shot is more representative of the real light distribution.

Extreme Low Light

[ OnePlus 6 ]
[ G7 ] - [ G6 ] - [ V30 ] - [ Mi MIX 2S ] - [ Pixel 2 XL ]
[ Mate 10 ] - [ P20 ] - [ P20 Pro ]
[ S8 ] - [ S9+ ] - [ iPhone X ]

Finally in the last extreme low light shot the OnePlus 6 just didn’t fare well. It just didn’t have sufficient light capture capabilities to get a reasonable shot. Here OnePlus could have introduced a pixel binning feature such as on the LG G7 and V30 in order to trade off resolution for light sensitivity.

Overall in low-light shots, the OnePlus 6 just doesn’t have the raw hardware required to perform quite as well as other phones. The results are still extremely competitive and by no means a deal-breaker, it’s just that by now we’d see some kind of usage of that secondary camera module. Unfortunately that’s not the case for the OP6.

OxygenOS 5.1.9 Camera Update

One larger disclaimer I have to make is that the camera evaluation was done on the 5.1.8 firmware before the 5.1.9 version came out which promised “improved camera quality”.

[ Dim Light 1 ] - [ Dim Light 2 ] - [ Flowers ] - [ Daylight  ]

I did some limited A/B testing on my review device and it seems the camera changes are limited to low-light scenarios. In the daylight scenes the differences were minute if at all present.

In the low-light shots however there’s been a markable behaviour change as the new firmware seems to prefer to longer exposure and ISO settings. The surprising here is that this doesn’t result in a brighter picture in the above shots, but rather very much the opposite as the phone produced a darker and actually more representative reproduction of the scene. What was actually gained was more dynamic range. In terms of detail retention however I feel there’s been a notable regression.

Unfortunately re-doing the whole camera evaluation takes a lot of time and we’ll have to revisit the update in more detail in a future review with another round across all phones.