- Hi, I'm Parris, and I just purchased
my one plus five phone, based in some measure
on how amazing this new camera is supposed to be.
It has two lenses, looks kind of similar
to what's in the latest iPhone,
which many people argue is the best camera
you can get on a cell phone right now.
So I was very excited about this.
But after the one plus five started shipping,
some people have been saying
the camera's really not that great,
it's not working the way that they explained that it would.
But I wanted to find out,
how is this two camera technology supposed to work,
and how does it actually work in this phone?
♫ Epic review guys
- Here are the new cameras in the new location
on the back of the one plus five.
They moved it from around here up to here.
I've already taken a number of pictures
with my finger in front of the lens
so I don't really care for having the lens in the corner.
The one closest to the edge here
is the standard, no magnification lens.
The lens closer to the center, as many people understood it
before the phones started shipping,
has a built in optical lens magnification.
We were thinking of two x,
which meant pictures you took using this lens,
the object would appear twice as large,
but there would be no loss of detail.
Now my one plus three phone will allow me
to zoom in and make objects appear large.
And when I take the picture, they're big on the screen.
Probably the phone you have will do that as well.
But that's not optical zoom.
Optical zoom is where you move the distance
between the lenses that are involved
in focusing and capturing the light for the picture.
And you get a magnification just like
when you're using binoculars or looking through a telescope.
My one plus three and probably your phone, they cheat.
What they do, is they take the regular picture
and then they just crop it.
They zoom in on one part of that picture.
So what's necessary for optical zoom to work?
Now this has a 20 x true optical zoom,
which means I can zoom in enough
to make a little thing across the street
actually fill the whole screen.
And when I take a picture of it,
it'll still be sharp and clear.
You've got to move the lenses apart
in proportion to how much zoom you want.
You want 20 x of zoom,
you got to move those lenses a fair bit apart.
Imagine trying to fit this kind of thing into a phone.
Now, one plus had convinced me before I bought the phone
that this second lens was going to have
two x optical magnification,
which gives you that nice sharp two x image.
Since then, it appears
it's not actually a two x magnification.
This is from what I've been able to read online
from the company.
Sound like it might be a 1.65 x magnification
with the remainder from 1.65 to two being
made up by some algorithms.
But what it all comes down to, I think,
is that's digital zoom the rest of the way.
So assuming it really is just 1.65 x magnification,
Why would one plus do that and figure,
well, we'll just round it up to two,
knowing how people get into stats and details and specs
on electronics, it was going to turn into a mess.
But just because the camera isn't exactly
what a lot of people expected,
does that mean it's not a good camera?
That it doesn't take good pictures?
That that zoom lens really isn't functional?
I'll show you some pictures I've taken.
Let's find out.
Well, I've had another week with the one plus five
and taken a trip up to Seattle.
So I've had a chance to take lots of pictures
under different conditions
as well as some video clips,
so I'll be showing you those now.
I did want to mention that the only way
you can tell which lens is being used
other than putting your finger in front of one at a time,
is once you've taken the picture,
you have to go into the properties of the picture
and you can look at the aperture of the lens
and the actual dimensions of the photo.
Because there's a different sensor with each lens.
So when you see the 1.7 f stop aperture,
that's the standard camera.
And the 2.6 f stop aperture, that's the zoom.
I so wish they had made it so you could manually choose
which one to use when you're taking a picture,
but the phone decides.
So the camera looks at the scene.
I don't know if it's through the standard lens,
and decides if there's enough light,
or maybe it looks through both
and decides which one would take the better picture.
And it uses that one.
There is a pro mode to this,
and I'll show you some of the features
that are enabled with that.
But choosing which lens is used is not one of them.
(guitar music)
Sorry if you feel like you're watching
my vacation slideshow, because you kind of are,
but I put some nice background music in there for you.
I borrowed that from my world in four k channel.
That's from a video I made called springtime in Texas,
which was my attempt to be really artistic.
Now in the days of film cameras,
I had a fairly nice 35 millimeter camera
with some different lenses
and I was pretty good at adjusting f stop,
shutter speed, speed of the film,
to get pretty good pictures.
I'm a little rusty on it now,
but let me show you the pro mode here
that let's you do the same kind of thing
if you know exactly the look you want.
Pro mode on the one plus five
is actually called pro mode.
And there are several options here.
You get the histogram here, which I'm not that familiar with
but I know it shows you the light in different temperatures
so you can get a sense of the color warmth in a picture.
We have the ISO here, which you can dial in.
White balance, see the change.
Next up is shutter speed.
If you take it at a very fast 1/8000 of a second,
you're not going to have much light coming in the lens.
And you can set it for as long as, that's a 30 second,
probably about a 50 second, one minute exposure.
This is focus, this is nice to have
because sometimes, especially when you're trying
to take a picture of something up close,
the camera keeps going back and forth
searching, seeking for the proper focus but it can't find it
but I know it when I see it.
By the way, this line flashing in the middle
is a horizontal line.
You can have that taken off, there's an option for that.
But there's the focus.
And exposure compensation, plus one, plus two,
minus one, minus two, if you have a bright background,
then a subject in the front, you want to get more detail on
you can adjust it like so.
Once you go to the trouble of adjusting the settings
for a particular shot,
if you need to go take some other pictures
and you come back,
you don't want to have to reset everything again,
you can save this as a preset to come right back to.
You can also set it to save the raw picture files.
This is so they won't be compressed into a jpeg.
You could actually take the raw file,
load it into photoshop,
and do all of your own adjusting.
And though I'm not going to get into it in this video,
there is a portrait mode,
which uses a depth of field effect.
I thought it was actually done with the lenses,
but I was disappointed to learn that it's just done
through the camera figuring out the subject of the photo
and then basically blurring out everything behind it.
Which is, I think, the same way
that the latest iPhone does it.
But people seem to be crazy over those results
and even if you're in normal photo mode,
they make it so easy to get to that
by just sliding in this direction.
There are more features to explore with this camera,
but I don't want to turn this into a marathon video
so I'll just cover a last couple things
and show you a few more photos.
If you have particular questions about the camera
as a still camera, as a video camera, the slow motion
or other features, get in touch with me
through the comments down below this video.
If there's a lot of interest
in seeing how it works in some particular way,
I can do another video.
Or I can post something on twitter about that.
To close out the video, I'm going to show you two pictures
taken inside my computer case.
You can't quite see it here,
but I have a lighted fan, I have memory sticks that glow
and a light on the water cooler.
I'm going to take the exact same shot
with the one plus five and my old one plus three.
You can see the difference between those two.
And now I'll close out the video
with some macro formal shots
taken on my one plus five.
(guitar music)