The arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S21 in January suggests that zoom would be the next big battlefield for the best camera phones – but the upcoming OnePlus 9 series clearly has other ideas.
The next big Android phone launch of the year, which will be announced on March 23, is rather built around OnePlus’ new three-year partnership with Hasselblad. Through this, the OnePlus 9 series will benefit from the processing of ‘Natural Color Calibration’ which according to the company will be part of ‘our biggest leap forward in mobile photography yet’.
But this Hasselblad partnership, as promising as it sounds, is not the most exciting thing about the new flagship phones – and especially the OnePlus 9 Pro. Instead, we’re much more buzzing about the many possibilities of the Pro’d Sony IMX789 sensor, designed specifically for the phone.
The IMX789, and the wide camera’s IMX677 sensor, may not sound as exciting as promises of color science or the Hasselblad legacy. But it does offer a powerful potential for both photos and videos that will almost certainly be more important to the camera than the Hasselblad partnership. And we just need to look back at Huawei for why.
Mark who
There is no doubt that Hasselblad is an excellent name to put on a phone camera. The company, now owned by drone-maker DJI, is the big chair the children are not allowed to sit on.
The cheapest camera Hasselblad makes costs thousands of dollars and the ‘lens screen’ – a piece of plastic used to reduce lens flare – costs more than the actual lenses we recommend for first time DSLR buyers.
But was it the long-term partnership with the Leica optical power station 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 a groundbreaking work on a night mode with more exposure that every other phone maker has since followed.
In a similar vein, the Sony IMX789 is likely to unlock a range of features that will almost certainly elevate OnePlus cameras to a new level of performance. These features include 12-bit raw, the ability to shoot 4K / 120p video, omni-directional autofocus (fear not, we’ll explain later) and ‘digital overlap’ DOL-HDR, which is a new touch on HDR (High Dynamic Range)) sculpture that we especially look forward to seeing in action.
Reach
The DOL HDR feature is a new approach to HDR video and photography, and may be one of the key things unlocked by the Sony IMX789 sensor on the OnePlus 9 Pro.
This technique has been around for years within cameras and security cameras, but it is a relatively new concept for phone cameras.
What is different about it? The standard approach for creating an HDR image is to take two or more images in sequence. There’s a bright one to capture shadow detail, a dark one to visualize the highlights, and usually a bunch in between. This image data is collected in a single JPEG, and suddenly you have a phone camera that can take beautiful photos, even when shooting directly in the sun.
However, this can cause problems, as there is of course a slight delay between these exposures – this is what causes HDR ghosting. This is usually not noticeable in today’s higher-end phones, but it limits how much HDR recording you can actually do with, for example, the constant movement of the leaves of a tree as it blows in the wind.
The coolest thing about DOL-HDR is that it throws this strategy away in favor of capturing two sets of information; a short and long exposure at (effectively) the same time.
This may not be a complete panacea for HDR video. A normal camera constructs its image one line of sensor pixels on a line, and using DOL-HDR, the two exposures occur per line during sensor reading. We assume that the ‘roll shutter’ effect in video worsens a bit. But it can lead to a much more legitimate HDR video.
The distribution of HDR content that is just an SDR video posted by a relatively coarse upscaling algorithm should make us all a little suspicious about how ‘HDR’ some modes with a high dynamic range are. The solution of the OnePlus 9 Pro is very promising what we are looking forward to.
Raw materials
But DOL-HDR is by far the only exciting photographic trick unleashed by the sensor of the OnePlus 9 Pro – perhaps the ability to output 12-bit raw files is just as promising.
A small caveat: we are on our way to the area where the specification sheet exceeds what we can or can reasonably expect from a phone sensor. Still, the numbers are definitely impressive.
For example, the OnePlus 8 Pro can take 10-bit raw photos, which means 1,024 gradations of color per color channel. That’s a total of 1.07 billion color tones. The option to raw 12-bit increases the fineness to 4,096 gradations per channel for 68 billion potential color tones.
This is one area in which the influence of Hasselblad can actually have a significant effect. The company does not manufacture the sensor and will not manufacture the OnePlus 9 Pro lenses, 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.
OnePlus was already a good starting point for this, as the color of the OnePlus 8 Pro is undoubtedly much more natural than Samsung’s home style. But it sounds like the next generation wants to increase it.
Video Games
The signs of the Sony IMX789 sensor are equally promising for video.
For starters, the OnePlus 9 Pro is probably one of the first phones to offer 120 fps slo-mo with 4K resolution. This feature was first seen in phones in the Sony Xperia 5 II, and the fact that OnePlus penetrated it relatively early on is probably a neat side effect of OnePlus working with Sony on the ‘custom’ IMX789.
Sony often retains new features for sensors that end up only in its own Xperia models. His phone net has messed up the occasion in the past and spoiled this lead with a crude image processing.
But the OnePlus 9 Pro features the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra here, whose maximum 4K recording speed is 60 fps.
There are also signs that the OnePlus 9 Pro could do something interesting with 8K video. Most cameras have 4: 3 image sensors, but the Sony IMX789 is a 16:11 disc, which means it has a bit more ‘widescreen’.
Why is this important? This means that the OnePlus 9 Pro may only need to apply about a 10% crop to use the original pixel resolution of its main sensor to record 8K video. If it has a 48MP sensor, the resolution will probably be 8,352 x 5,742 or 8,368 x 5,753 pixels – map it to the resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 of 8K and you will end up with the relatively modest 10% crop.
This is completely different from the Samsung Galaxy S21, which uses its 1.1x 64MP camera and a fairly healthy crop. Of course, the new OnePlus flagship, just like the Galaxy S21, can use its secondary camera to capture the main 8K video. This makes sense if the IMX789, as in most 48MP sensors, is made from the ground up to behave more like a 12MP sensor, with a Quad Bayer setup.
But we also know that the wide camera of the OnePlus 9 series is the 50MP IMX766. It’s apparently also a Quad Bayer sensor, which means these chips are really designed for 12-12.5 megapixel levels of detail, not the 33-megapixel detail of a pro-grade 8K camera.
Either way, let’s be honest – the OnePlus 9 Pro is a phone. Quad Bayer or not, we are not going to get such details from the 8K video of the OnePlus 9. But it certainly sounds like the results may be some of the most appealing we’ve seen from a smartphone.
Oral eyes
There is one last potential trick up the sleeve of the OnePlus 9 Pro – it will apparently also have ‘omni directional AF’. This may sound confusing, but here’s no mystery – the feature has been used in phones like the Oppo Find X2 Pro and Huawei P40 Pro.
This is again an application of something that Sony has worked on in its latest sensors, with a 2×2 OCL (On-Chip Lens) pixel design.
In a standard Quad Bayer 48MP sensor designed for 12MP photos, the subpixels are arranged in small squares of four. Four red subpixels, four blues and two sets of four green subpixels form one pixel in the final image. Each of these subpixels also has its own microlens, but the 2×2 OCL setup uses a lens for each color block of four subpixels, for better light capture and native sensitivity.
Add it to the ‘all-pixel’ AF phase tracking AF, and you’ve got a system that can detect focus in all directions, and do it faster in low light than a more traditional Quad Bayer design.
Evidence is on the photos
OnePlus’ phone launches are like wedding parties held six weeks after the actual event. By the time it happened, OnePlus had already spent weeks showing photos of the ring and honeymoon on Instagram.
This is a similar story with the OnePlus 9 series – we already know about the Hasselblad partnership, while the Sony IMX789 sensor will definitely be part of the Pro version’s optional rear cameras.
But it is the possibilities of the latter that excite us most – the name of Hasselblad is perhaps so weighty that it can probably break the back of a phone’s glass, but the custom sensor, as we have seen, certainly has a lot of potential. We are very much looking forward to seeing if it can meet the bill when it launches on March 23rd.