OnePlus made its leap into the top strata with its 2019 flagship – OnePlus 7 Pro. However, one area it struggles to score the flagship grade is its cameras. Though high-end on paper and more often than not impressive, they still lack the finesse of the biggies. Now, we have come across the fact that the telephoto lens is not capable of delivering 3x zoom as claimed.
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In reality, they are found to magnify up to 2.2x levels only, not 3x optical as touted by the brand. Instead, the lens crops 13MP photos down to 8MP to reach the 3x zoom level. This was first discovered by a Reddit user.
OnePlus touts their 3x optical zoom telephoto lens offers a 78mm focal length. However, the cropped down 8MP with a zoom level of 2.2x also brings down the effective focal length to 57mm. When the edges are cropped for the zoomed output, the field of view changes.
In our testing, we found that the 3X Zoom camera works well, but details take a hit when you zoom in. The telephoto lens is used for depth-sensing in portrait shots. However, the camera tends to zoom in a bit much on the subject and we had to align our position accordingly.
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This is not the first time the company has been caught cheating on the camera front. Something similar happened when OnePlus 5 was advertised to zoom in 2x level, when in fact the phone was able to zoom in 1.6x level only. Back then, however, OnePlus had claimed 2x “lossless” zoom, which was a bit misleading. This year, the company has used “optical” zoom in marketing materials, which is plain dishonest.
In a statement given to Android Police, OnePlus says that the crop applied doesn’t lead to any loss of details. OnePlus doesn’t back its 3X optical zoom claim, though.
OnePlus official statement:
The OnePlus 7 Pro has 3x zoom with no digital zoom or loss of detail. The telephoto camera serves two main purposes: 3x zoom and portrait mode photography. It will switch the field of view depending on the camera mode. With 3x zoom, the telephoto camera delivers the advertised lossless 8 megapixels images. Portrait mode utilizes all 13 megapixels from the sensor in the telephoto camera.
OnePlus 7 Pro Cameras
OnePlus 7 Pro features a primary 48MP (f/1.6) camera with 8MP 3x Zoom (f/2.4) telephoto sensor and 16MP 117° (f/2.2) ultra-wide sensor. For the front cameras, OnePlus uses a pop-up module that houses a 16Mp selfie camera. This launches quickly in 0.53 seconds and in case you drop the phone accidentally, the pop-up would retract back into the body automatically.
