OPPO F1s: Top Mid-Range Selfie Smartphone Yet [Camera Review]

A while back we did the unboxing and first impressions and later a full review of OPPO’s latest camera-focused offering in the market, the OPPO F1s.

Although most of the details were covered in those two articles, I felt that the camera on the F1s deserves to be discussed separately.

The camera is without doubt the F1s’s main selling point. The 16MP front camera ensures that the selfies you take are sharp while the 13MP rear camera is also decent performer. So, without any further ado, let’s get going with OPPO F1s cameras.

User Interface

Tap on the camera icon and it will instantly launch the application. There’s hardly any delay in the opening of the app.

The layout of all the settings and controls in the camera app on OPPO F1s is nice and it is not cluttered in any way. You have a big round shutter button on the bottom of the screen with your gallery button to its left and the camera modes button on its right.

Above the shutter button, you also have various shooting modes, which we’ll discuss later on. And finally, on top of the screen you have the flash light toggle, HDR toggle and the icon to switch between the front and rear facing cameras.

Summing up, the interface of the camera on the OPPO F1s is as simple as it could get. Every thing is very well-laid out and easy to manage.

Primary Camera of OPPO F1s

Do we really call the rear-facing camera a “primary” camera, considering the pixel count is lower than the secondary camera. Nevertheless, in my testing of both the cameras, the rear facing camera performed magnificently.

In good light, the OPPO F1s produces sharp and clear images with a good amount of detail. There was no kind of softness in the photos that it produced.

Thankfully, the OPPO F1s didn’t over-sharpen the images, a technique used by most manufacturers to make the photos look better. Due to this the photos didn’t look artificial and were more realistic.

Just a bit of gripe that I have with this camera is regarding the exposure and its white balance. The white balance was very unpredictable. Some images came out looking a bit cold and in some cases they turned out to be warm.

The issue wasn’t very common though, as most of the images looked very true to life and the white balance was spot-on. Secondly, while changing the exposure when you tap on a bright part on the viewfinder, it instantly became completely dark.

Tap on a dark side and it becomes bright. I know that this is how it is supposed to work but the exposure compensation was very aggressive.

In terms of low light performance – we all know how that is for most phones, especially mid-rangers – the OPPO F1s was no different.

As soon as you move into low lighting conditions, the details in the images start to drop and noise starts showing up. But it wasn’t all bad. It still held a respectable amount of detail that you would require. The f/2.2 aperture of the rear camera on OPPO F1s definitely helped in this regard.

Focusing was an issue in low light and you had to make sure that the subject was in focus otherwise you mostly end up getting a blurry shot. But in artificial lighting, such as being indoors, the camera performed extremely well and results were impressive.

I don’t want to end this on a bad note at all. My experience with mid-range phone cameras has not been good but I was very happy to see that the rear camera on the OPPO F1s was way above my expectations and what I had in my mind at the beginning.

No matter how many pixels you stuff into the front facing camera, the rear camera is the one that is going to end up being used the most and that’s what really matters. And I am glad to say that it performs very well on OPPO F1s.

Selfie Camera of OPPO F1s

As mentioned above, the front camera features a 16MP shooter with an f/2.0 aperture. With those specs, you would expect it to take vibrant, sharp and a good detailed photos, right? It does exactly that.

Performance is almost the same as that of the 13MP rear shooter in terms of lighting. Daylight shots are brilliant with a very balanced exposure. In low light it still holds up pretty good, even better than the rear facing camera.

I tested this out by taking another selfie, one with the rear facing camera and one with the front facing camera with just the light coming from my laptop screen and the photo that I took with the latter was much better and much brighter than the other one.

But noise is an issue in low light photos, obviously.

Like I mentioned before, I am not the kind of person that takes a lot of selfies and shares them. And if you do the same, the F1s is very much going to change that and you’re going to end up with a lot of selfies in your gallery.

And I think that sums up my experience of the front facing camera, it is that good. And the title of the “Selfie Expert”, that is carried on from its predecessor, is well deserved by the F1s and no other phone in this price segment will even think of threatening that.

Camera Modes

The Oppo F1s camera has some really nice and useful shooting modes that will make the photography experience much more enjoyable. Read on to find out more details about them:

1. Normal

The Normal mode is the most basic mode on the camera. It’s basically an automatic mode and takes pictures in the same way as you would on any other smartphone. In my testing I used this one the most and it handled most of the situations really well.

2. Ultra HD

As the name implies, the Ultra HD mode takes a few pictures at once and stitches them together to create one very high-res image. You can also see in the details of the photos that it carries a higher resolution and storage size count than other normal images.

3. Various Filters

While it is not exactly a mode, it is still there. The filters mode gives you tons of options to choose from between various filters so you don’t have to use those Instagram ones anymore.

4. GIF

The GIF mode allows you to take a short animated photograph. The GIF mode somehow reminded me of the Live Photos on the iPhone 6s. You can either record a GIF in Positive mode or if you want to have a bit more fun, you have the Reverse mode.

5. Double Exposure

You know how when you tap to focus on a bright area, the viewfinder instantly becomes dark most of the times and tapping on someplace dark will make it instantly go bright? The Double Exposure mode on the F1s aims to fix that issue. What it does is that it will allow you take 2 photos with different exposures and then blend both of these images together.

You use it, select this mode and take a photo. It will then ask you to take a second photo and you can take it on another exposure level and the software will combine them for you.

One problem I faced while using this mode is that when you have to take the second photo, it will show you an outline of the first photo and you have to line them up. If not, then the photos come out looking weirdly blurry. And that was the case with me most of the times. But if you use a tripod, this mode is excellent for HDR photography.

6. Expert Mode

Expert Mode is where things start getting a bit serious. This mode gives you the ability to manually change each of your settings such as the ISO, Shutter Speed, Exposure, AWB and Focus. You can even shoot in RAW format!

The manual controls of the camera give you more control over how you want to capture your image and fine tune it. But being a hobbyist photographer myself, I did not use the Expert Mode that much. Part of the reason is that the Shutter Speed options start from 1 second.

You can’t choose a faster shutter speed than 1 second. This makes taking photos in daylight pretty much useless since all of your photos will be white. You do have the option to keep the shutter speed on Auto and adjust the ISO and Exposure. But it would have been nice to see shutter speeds faster than 1 second. You can use the lower speed for light painting and other fun experiments at night.

Apart from these 6 modes you can also select between Timelapse, Video, Photo, Beauty and Panorama. I loved playing with the Timelapse feature as it allows you to make smooth and seamless videos instantly.

The Beauty mode softens your skin in the selfies, and honestly, I don’t know why you would want to use that. Interestingly, the panorama feature was only available in portrait and you couldn’t change it into landscape. This was a minor annoyance that I faced.

Conclusion

That is it for the camera review of the OPPO F1s and this concludes the full review too. In the end, I would again mention that in this budget if you are looking for the best front facing camera to snap those beautiful selfies, look no further. The F1s is your answer.

OPPO F1s comes with one of the best designs and build quality and the camera definitely complements it.

As seen from the photos too, the camera on the F1s is definitely no slouch and it will give a hard time to its competitors. Priced at around Rs. 29,999, you won’t regret spending that amount if you are a selfie-lover.