OnePlus 7T Review – Part 2

In our first part of this review the weather was pretty terrible, so I unboxed the OnePlus 7T in the car. During that video I mentioned the camera, so today it’s a deeper look into this.

It’s quite a clever setup actually. The main camera that you’ll be using most of the time is a Sony IMX586 lens which has 48 megapixels and an f/1.6 aperture. If you choose to zoom in, it’ll switch to the 12 megapixel telephoto lens with a nice digital blend between the two lens. Likewise, if you want to zoom out a bit and perhaps get more stuff in your shot, it’ll switch to the ultra-wide angle 16 megapixel lens with a bit of digital magic in-between.

The ultra-wide lens has a 117 degree field of view and you can you can take up-close macro shots too. It’ll also do clever things thanks to Google Lens – it’ll look up words, add events to your calendar and will find clothes and furniture you might like based on outfits you’re snapping.

Here’s a look at how all that works in the camera app itself..

It’ll do some very decent night photos too – not on the telephoto lens but on the ultra-wide and the normal lens it looks great. It works by grabbing lots of frames in to produce a better photo with a wider dynamic range. Brighter, clearer and more vivid.

Here’s some example shots taken during that video above. Click each one for the higher resolution image

This shot was taken on the 48 megaxpixel lens

Zoom out and you get the ultra wide-angle lens. You get more in, but it drops to 16 megapixels. Good for big landscapes, but a lower resolution.

And here’s the telephoto shot – 2X zoom

Here’s an up-close shot.

I took some more macro up-close shots – one of my keyboard in the dark. Lovely these, they came out really well..

I took a selfie with the front lens, which is a 16 megapixel Sony lens which is fixed focus. The rear lenses will do group and portrait Bokeh shots, but the selfie shooter doesn’t. It’ll do face unlock though, HDR and face retouching too.

Don’t ask…

Below, some of the shots I’ve taken on the camera with comments. Some nice Autumnal colours here. On a couple of shots I purposefully shot directly towards the sun – just to see how it would handle that. It performed brilliantly.

OK, so optical zoom is a big tick. Macro shots are good and that 48 megapixel shooter is performing admirably. What about low-light shots? Well, you saw one or two above but what about some properly dark photos?

This phone has a number of modes, including a Pro setting if you want to take full control of all the settings. There’s slow-mo, panorama, time-lapse, portrait and time delays etc. However, I wanted to have a look at the heavily-promoted “Nightscape” mode.

This, I’ll confess, works best with the 48 megapixel (normal) lens. Sure, OnePlus will tell you it’s available on the wide-angle lens too – and it is – but believe me, it doesn’t work as well. I decided to go and stand in the garden late in the evening to take some shots in the dark. The proper dark. Hardly any light anywhere – how would things turn out? Well, a spoiler for you – that 48 megapixel lens in particular works extremely well in the dark, even without the Nightscape mode turned on.

Check this out…

I showed the examples in the video there, but here’s the full resolution shots…

Here’s the 48 megapixel camera taking a shot in complete darkness. I mean blackness. Nothing. I’m literally in a field but it still gets the reflextion of streetlights in the distance

Here’s with Nightscape on. To be honest this is a slightly unfair test as the phone had virtually nothing to work with. The resulting shot is a bit like a waterwork but it was completely and utterly dark out there, so to see clouds and the rest of the sky was amazing – I certainly couldn’t see anything with the naked eye!

The wide-angle lens stuggles without any proper lighting. Here’s a normal shot..

…and here’s the wide-angle lens with Nightscape on.

With some lighting though, the wide-angle lens performs a bit better. Here’s without Nightscape..

And here it is again with Nightscape on. Looks nice this, but you need some sort of backlight, even if it’s a streetlight.

Where the camera performs best in the dark is with that 48 megapixel lens then. Trust me, for the most part, even without Nightscape on, that 48 megapixel lens is fantastic.

Now, I’ve pushed this. I’ve perhaps done a few things that you wouldn’t normally do. Standing in a completely pitch-black field, shiverring cold and generally not holding the phone as still as I should’ve – all stuff you might not do. For the most part though, when you’re taking shots in low-light conditions, you never need that flash. Just snap away and you’ll get shots like this…