The One Plus 3 smartphone amazed me in many way. Since the introduction of the first model, the One Plus One (that I’ve reviewed here), the company focused on producing a stellar device on budget. The first iteration was a very good product even if it suffer 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 One Plus 3, it seams 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 gigabyte of ram, dual Sim support and 64 Gigabyte of memory (not expandable). At the price of 399€ this bevice is a bargain.
The question here is how the camera of the One Plus 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 by Pixel Square. I want to thanks once more androidworld.it for the device and the collaboration.
One Plus 3 photo review, build quality
The device has a beautiful design with an unibody metal construction. The front of the One Plus 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 One Plus 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 use an USB Type-C connection, so be sure to not forget this cable at home while travelling since is quite difficult at the moment to found it in normal shops and maybe with the friends travelling with you!
The left switch with three different states for your notifications
USB Type-C connection
One Plus 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 One Plus 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 parametrs 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 One Plus 3 give to you a wide range of opportunity to capture all the details and colors of the picuters and let you edit them after without loosing any quality and without having any drop down of the jpg compression.
The manual mode lets you set the shutter speed to get some movement in your photos
For the pictures of this One Plus 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 One Plus 3 the application Lightroom Mobile.
Having a Creative Cloud abonament I can sync my .raw dng photos shoot from the One Plus 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 it found on the device. Then you can set a collection where this new imported photo will go.
One Plus 3 photo review, quality of the pictures in difficult light situations
I’m more and more amazed about 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 are good thanks to a nice hdr implementation.
One Plus 3 photo review, final conclusions
My final conclusions about this device are very positive. We have here a serious contender agains the iPhone 7/7 plus and against the new Google Pixel smartphone. I hope to be able to take some photos with those device soon and write down my opinions with some photos!
One Plus 3 photo review,original .raw file download
I’ve prepared a .zip package with full resolution .raw dng file captured with the One Plus 3 smartphone so you can give a deep look at the file.
Link: download One Plus 3 original .raw file (.zip archive)
About the Author
Alessandro Michelazzi is a professional portrait and lifestyle photographer based in Florence, Italy. You can find out more about him on his website, follow his work on Instagram and Facebook or reach out to him through Twitter. This article was also published here and shared with permission.
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