The arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S21 in January seemed to suggest that zoom would be the next big battleground for the best camera phones – but the impending OnePlus 9 series clearly has other ideas.
The next major launch of the Android phone of the year, which will be unveiled on March 23, was built around OnePlus’ new three-year partnership with Hasselblad. This will make the OnePlus 9 series benefit from the ‘Natural Color Calibration’ processing that, according to the company, will be part of “our biggest leap in mobile photography so far”.
But this partnership with Hasselblad, as promising as it may seem, is not the most exciting thing about the new flagship phones – and the OnePlus 9 Pro, in particular. Instead, we are much more excited about the many possibilities of the Sony IMX789 Pro’d sensor, which was designed especially for the phone.
The IMX789 and the wide camera’s IMX677 sensor may not sound as exciting as the promises about color science or Hasselblad’s heritage. But they do have some powerful potential for photos and videos that will almost certainly be more important to the camera than the partnership with Hasselblad. And we just need to look back at Huawei to find out why.
Brand wagon
There is no doubt that Hasselblad is a great name to put on a phone’s camera. The company, which now belongs to the drone manufacturer DJI, is the large leather chair that children cannot sit on.
The cheapest camera that Hasselblad manufactures costs thousands of dollars and its ‘lens shade’ – a piece of plastic used to reduce lens flare – costs more than the real lenses that we recommend to DSLR buyers for the first time.
But was it the long-term partnership with Leica optical power that made Huawei the most dynamic camera phone designer of 2018 and 2019? No, it was Huawei’s ambitious use of Sony sensors, ISP (Image Signal Processor) pipelines and some groundbreaking work in a multi-exposure night mode that all other phone manufacturers have emulated.
In a similar sense, the Sony IMX789 is likely to unlock a number of features that will almost certainly take OnePlus phone cameras to a new level of performance. These features include 12-bit raw, the ability to record 4K / 120p video, omnidirectional autofocus (don’t be afraid, we’ll explain later) and DOL-HDR ‘digital overlay’, which is a new approach to HDR (High Dynamic Range) creation images that we are particularly eager to see in action.
Rangefinder
This DOL-HDR feature is a new approach to HDR video and photography and can be one of the key things unlocked by the Sony IMX789 sensor in the OnePlus 9 Pro.
This technique has been around for years in car cameras and security cameras, but it is a relatively new concept for phone cameras.
What’s different about that? The standard approach when making an HDR image is to record two or more images in sequence. There is a brilliant one to capture the details of the shadows, a dark one to visualize the highlights and, usually, a handful in the middle. This image data is grouped into a single JPEG, and suddenly, you have a phone camera that can take great pictures even when shooting directly into the sun.
However, this can present problems, as there is naturally a slight delay between these exposures – this is what causes the ghost of HDR. It’s usually not very noticeable on today’s high-end phones, but it limits the amount of HDR footage you can actually do with, for example, the constant movement of leaves on a tree as they blow in the wind.
The cool thing about DOL-HDR is that it discards this strategy in favor of capturing two sets of information; a short and longer exposure (effectively) at the same time.
It may not be a complete panacea for HDR videos. A normal camera constructs its image with a line of pixels from the sensor in one line and, using the DOL-HDR, the two exposures take place per line when reading the sensor. This, we assume, would slightly worsen the ‘rolling shutter’ effect on the video. But it can result in much more legitimate HDR videos.
The proliferation of HDR content that is just SDR video that has been subjected to a relatively crude up-scaler algorithm should make us a little suspicious of how some high dynamic range modes really are ‘HDR’. The OnePlus 9 Pro solution is very promising and we are looking forward to testing it.
Raw material
But DOL-HDR is far from the only exciting photographic trick that will be released by the OnePlus 9 Pro’s sensor – perhaps equally promising is the ability to produce raw 12-bit files.
A small caveat: we are entering a territory where the spec sheet exceeds what we can, or should, reasonably expect from a telephone sensor. Still, the numbers are certainly impressive.
The OnePlus 8 Pro, for example, can take 10-bit raw photos, which means 1,024 gradations of color per color channel. This represents 1.07 billion possible color tones in total. The 12-bit raw option, in turn, increases finessing to 4,096 gradations per channel, to 68 billion potential color tones.
This is an area where Hasselblad’s influence could really have a significant effect. The company does not make the sensor and will not manufacture the lenses for the OnePlus 9 Pro, but it will likely work in consultation with OnePlus in areas such as color science. OnePlus CEO Pete Lai suggested this when we spoke to him recently.
The OnePlus was already a good starting point for this, as the color of the OnePlus 8 Pro is arguably much more natural than Samsung’s home style. But it looks like the next generation wants to take that to the next level.
Video games
The sensor signals from the Sony IMX789 are also promising for video.
For starters, the OnePlus 9 Pro is likely to be one of the first phones to offer 120fps in slow motion at 4K resolution. This feature was first seen on phones on the Sony Xperia 5 II, and that OnePlus is entering it relatively early is probably a legal side effect of OnePlus working with Sony on the ‘custom’ IMX789.
Sony often reserves new features for sensors that end up only on its own Xperia models. In the past, your telephone team has hindered the opportunity, spoiling these heads with rudimentary image processing.
But the OnePlus 9 Pro is ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra here, whose maximum 4K capture rate is 60fps.
There are also signs that the OnePlus 9 Pro may be doing something interesting with 8K video. Most cameras have 4: 3 aspect sensors, but the Sony IMX789 is a 16:11 chip, which means it has a slightly more ‘widescreen’ format.
Why is it important? This means that OnePlus 9 Pro may need to apply only about 10% crop to use the native pixel resolution of its primary sensor to capture 8K video. If it has, as stated, a 48 MP sensor, the resolution is likely to be 8,352 x 5,742 or 8,368 x 5,753 pixels – map that to the 7,680 x 4,320 8K resolution and you get that relatively modest 10% crop.
This is quite different from the Samsung Galaxy S21, which uses its 1.1x 64MP camera and a very healthy crop for the same purpose. Of course, the new flagship of OnePlus can, like the Galaxy S21, use its secondary camera to capture the main 8K video. This would make sense if, as with most 48 MP sensors, the IMX789 was actually made from the ground to behave more like a 12 MP sensor, using a Quad Bayer array.
But we also know that the wide camera of the OnePlus 9 series is the 50MP IMX766. Apparently, it’s a Quad Bayer sensor too, which means that these chips are really designed for levels of detail from 12 to 12.5 megapixels, not the 33 megapixel detail of a professional 8K camera.
Anyway, let’s be honest – the OnePlus 9 Pro is a phone. Quad Bayer or not, we’re not going to get as much detail from the OnePlus 9 8K video. But it certainly looks like the results may be among the most attractive we’ve seen on a smartphone.
Eyes everywhere
There is one last potential trick up the sleeve of the OnePlus 9 Pro – it will also have ‘omnidirectional AF’. This may seem confusing, but there is no mystery here – the feature has already been used on phones like the Oppo Find X2 Pro and Huawei P40 Pro.
This is, again, an application of something that Sony has worked on its latest sensors, which have a 2×2 OCL (On-Chip Lens) pixel design.
In a standard 48MP Quad Bayer sensor designed for 12MP photos, the subpixels are organized into small blocks of four. Four red, four blue sub-pixels and two sets of four green sub-pixels form a pixel in the final image. Each of these sub-pixels also has its own micro lens, but the 2×2 OCL setting uses one lens for each color block of four sub-pixels, for better light capture and native sensitivity.
Add this to the all-pixel phase detection AF and you have a system that can detect focus in all directions and do it faster in low light conditions than a more traditional Quad Bayer design.
The proof is in the photos
OnePlus phone launches are like wedding parties held six weeks after the actual event. By the time they happen, OnePlus has spent weeks displaying photos of the ring and the honeymoon on Instagram.
It’s a similar story with the OnePlus 9 series – we already know about the partnership with Hasselblad, while the Sony IMX789 sensor will definitely be part of the check box for the Pro version of the rear cameras.
But it is the possibilities of the latter that make us more excited – the name Hasselblad can be so heavy that it can break the glass of the phone, but this personalized sensor, as we have seen, certainly has a lot of potential. We are very excited to see if it can match that billing when it launches on March 23rd.