Does OPPO’s F1 Plus Selfie Expert Live up to the Hype? [Camera Review]

We’ve already covered the unboxing and hands-on review of OPPO’s recently launched flagship smartphone, the F1 Plus, and today in this article our focus will be on the camera of the device.

The remarkable setup offering a 16-Megapixel front facing and 13-Megapixel rear camera is the highlight of F1 Plus; however, other specifications are noteworthy as well.

It comes with 4GB of RAM, 64GB on board storage, fingerprint scanner, radiant 5.5 inch IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 and VOOC Flash Charging; all packed in a slim metal body.

In terms of design, F1 Plus looks more like an iPhone but has some of its differences and to be very honest, this is not a bad thing at all. The phone feels pretty good in hand and gives a premium feeling.

Talking about the camera setup, let’s start with the new Camera UI of ColorOS 3 which looks promising and simple enough for all kind of users.

Camera UI

If you’ve used the previous iterations of ColorOS, you’ll immediately notice the change in Camera UI. Now it’s cleaner and all the settings are one touch away.

It also takes advantage of Beautify 4.0, an imaging technique that makes photos look more “beautiful” by brightening your skin and removing blemishes.

The layout puts shutter key on right side, accompanied by plugins and photo previews. The number of plugins have been reduced as some of them are moved to core settings.

Now you get Normal, UltraHD, GIF, Expert Mode, Filters and Double Exposure.

• Normal Mode: The most common way of taking photos,
• UltraHD: Boots image resolution to 50-Megapixels by stitching multiple images
• GIF Mode: Allows you to make animated photographs
• Expert Mode: You can tweak settings like ISO, Shutter Speed and take RAW photos
• Filters: Need different colors? Here you can apply live filters
• Double Exposure: Superimpose two different images in a single photo

A scroll bar next to shutter key allows you to quickly switch between video, photo, beauty mode, panorama or time-lapse.

On the left side, you get controls for switching between front and rear camera, resolution tweaks, HDR and flash light switch.

It’s all very simple and user friendly, however if you’re holding the phone in landscape mode, some of the UI elements remain in portrait mode.

Front Facing Camera

Dubbed as the “Selfie Expert”, F1 Plus puts more megapixels in the front facing camera as compared to the rear, 16 million of them (16-Megapixel) to be precise.

OPPO claims that with a 1/3.1-Inch Image Sensor, F1 Plus can pick up four times the incoming light as other smartphone cameras and ISOCELL technology helps it reduce the noise. So you can get brighter and noise free selfies even at night. However, we do miss a front LED light to brighten up the photos a bit more.

As per my experience these claims are justified. In day light, it is able to capture lifelike vibrant photos, saturated with details. The processing is quick and colors are accurate, so is the white balance.

Having said this, I am not an admirer of “Beauty Mode” as it makes the photo soft and somewhat blurred.

In indoors and low light conditions, it does add a little bit of noise but the overall experience is much better.  There is a function “screen-flash” which turns the screen to white for a moment while you’re taking a picture. It doesn’t make much difference and you’ve to put the phone very close to your face in order to brighten it up.

If you’re willing to document your journey, the front camera allows you to record 720p and 1080p videos at 30fps. However, I do miss the slow-motion video, offered by Find 7 and N3.

Anyway, the front camera experience is quite incredible.

Rear Camera:

If you’re bored taking too much selfies, you can tap on screen to turn the primary camera on. It is a 13-Megapixel shooter with f/2.2 aperture, coupled with phase detection auto-focus, and a single LED flash.

In terms of functionality, if offers pretty much the same features as the front camera with an addition of HDR, flash light and a couple of more plugins, including Ultra HD (big size photos) and the ability to manually tweak photos and save them in RAW format.

The rear camera does a very good job while taking photos, with a good dynamic range and a high amount of detail. Contrast and white balance are well handled and even in the night shots it manages to keep the noise at minimum. However, in some shoots the color saturation seems to be on the high side and sometimes colors feel faded.

HDR mode allows you to get an even wider exposure of a scene with better highlights and shadows, but it takes a little longer to save photos and may overexpose the scene and increase the noise.

The Ultra HD mode is good, if you’ve to crop the photos or taking photos of small objects, so you can crop them and zoom in without losing much details.

Is This the Camera Phone You Were Looking For?

Concluding the overall experience, I would say that the camera setup does work well and it might be one of the best camera phone in this price-segment. For eager beavers it will do fine both in terms of camera and performance.

OPPO Pakistan has recently slashed the price by Rs. 6,000 and now you can buy it for Rs. 39,999.

That’s all for this review, if you’ve any questions regarding the camera or other details of F1 Plus, do comment below.