Oneplus 9 Pro: Revolutionary display, evolutionary camera
These are the early days of the Hasselblad camera partnership with Oneplus—and it shows.
The Oneplus 9 Pro arrives with a major focus on camera performance, an improved display, and the newest Qualcomm processor, the Snapdragon 888 ( go.pcworld. com/n888).
Over the years, Oneplus has been aiming at the flagship end of the market, hoping to gain a foothold in that exclusive smartphone tier. But do these latest improvements—and particularly those in the camera—put Oneplus in a position to challenge Samsung’s Galaxy S21 or Apple’s iphone 12? Let’s dive in and take a look.
There are four different phone configurations for the Oneplus 9, each with its own color and combination of specifications. The lowest-end model
comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and costs $729. The top-end configuration (which is the model that I review here) costs $1,069, and features 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. As such, the Oneplus 9 Pro hits basically the same price point as the Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G ( go. pcworld.com/215g), and it costs just a bit more than last year’s Oneplus 8 Pro ( go.pcworld. com/on8p).
Here are the Oneplus 9 Pro’s key specs:
Dimensions: 163.2mmx73.6mmx8.7mm
OS: Oxygenos 11
Display: 6.7-inch AMOLED, 1440x3216 resolution, 1-120Hz refresh rate
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 888
RAM: 12GB LPDDR5
Storage: 256GB UFS3.1
Battery: 4500 mah, Warp Charge 65T (10V/6.5A)
Cameras:
Main: 48MP, f/1.8 aperture, Sony IMX789 sensor, OIS/EIS
Ultra-wide: 50MP, f/2.2, Sony IMX766
Telephoto: 8MP, f/2.4
Monochrome: 2MP
Front: 16MP, f/2.4, Sony IMX471, EIS
CAMERA: MINOR IMPROVEMENTS
In early March, Oneplus announced a partnership with Hasselblad, a boutique professional camera manufacturer that’s been operating for more than 80 years. The goal: to improve the camera systems in its phones dramatically over the course of three years. The Oneplus 9 and 9 Pro are the first phones to emerge from this partnership, and they receive prominent Hasselblad branding inside the camera module. But does having Hasselblad involved actually improve the camera experience? Let’s first touch on how the companies work together.
Hasselblad has a long history of making high-end camera gear, including worldfamous lenses. The lens systems in today’s smartphones are very complicated, and if
there’s any company that could help out in this department, I’m fully confident it’s Hasselblad, especially given its track record in refining glass. Oneplus claims only 1 percent edge distortion on its ultrawide camera, while most smartphone lenses rate at 10 to 20 percent. In practical terms, this means photos taken with the Oneplus ultrawide camera should be sharper around the edges and should suffer less extreme warping.
This holds true in my testing, and in fact edge distortion is the area of biggest improvement in the Oneplus camera system. In side-byside comparisons, the 8 Pro’s images look smeared around the edges compared to the 9 Pro’s, exhibiting plenty of chromatic aberration. This shows up in the 8 Pro’s images as purple outlines around dark edges, and is a surefire marker of poorer lens quality. There’s always some bending and wrapping of the light in such small lenses, but Hasselblad definitely refined the system in the 9 Pro.
The next area of focus for the Hasselblad and Oneplus partnership was in the camera’s color science. In simple terms, this is a camera’s unique approach for capturing accurate and pleasing colors. Every camera—including every smartphone camera—boasts its own color science, which blends the quest for color accuracy with the maker’s subjective preferences.
Achieving ideal color science is easier said than done. The camera must balance color coming from different light sources, determine how that color affects objects in frame, and then make decisions about how all this information will affect colors in the final image. Improving color science isn’t as easy as simply “being more accurate.” Rather, it involves a lot of software tuning, an area where Google has excelled in its Pixel phones but Oneplus has traditionally fallen short.
In my testing, this isn’t a cut-and-dry win for the 9 Pro over the 8 Pro. With smartphone cameras featuring multisensor arrays, it’s always difficult to maintain the same color quality across each camera—and the 9 Pro features a three-camera array on the back. This means you’ll see slightly different colors as you go from the ultrawide to main to telephoto sensors. This was a problem with the Oneplus 8 Pro, and it continues to be one on the 9 Pro.
When directly comparing equivalent lenses between the two Oneplus generations, I don’t see any really drastic improvements in terms of color reproduction. In fact, there are plenty of scenes where I prefer the colors of the 8 Pro, especially when shooting in mixed-lighting scenarios. The 9 Pro holds an edge in brightly
lit outdoor scenes, but the 8 Pro does a bit better in low-light, indoor scenes. Once again, color preferences can be very subjective, but for all the hoopla Oneplus is touting with its Hasselblad partnership, I expected a more consistent experience.
The final piece of the Hasselblad and Oneplus partnership is the software and image processing department. In this area I’m a bit skeptical as professional camera needs are quite different from smartphone camera needs. Hasselblad cameras are made for professional use, and their image processing is very much tailored to that use case. Mobile photography, on the other hand, focuses on ease of use and extreme JPEG processing— two things that I would never call a strength for Hasselblad.
So did Hasselblad add image processing value to the Oneplus 9 Pro? In my testing, the biggest differences I’m seeing between the processing in the 8 Pro and the 9 Pro are in sharpness and HDR. The 9 Pro features sharper photos when viewed under scrutiny— some of which is the result of lens improvements, but also more aggressive post-processing sharpening. This is obvious in the more contrasty edges around small details like rocks and wood grains.
In images that don’t feature people, this is a great thing. But it can backfire when taking photos of faces, as it tends to accentuate imperfections. The 8 Pro’s images feel natural and were plenty sharp to begin with, so depending on the subject of any photo, I wouldn’t call this a win for the 9 Pro.
Oneplus has already stated that its partnership with Hasselblad is going to be a multiyear journey, and that’s backed up by relatively incremental improvements in the 9
Pro. While there are already some signs of positive change, it’s not a drastic leap in quality over the 8 Pro, so don’t get your hopes up. But I do believe this is a step in the right direction, and I look forward to the day when a Oneplus phone stands toe to toe with the best smartphone cameras on the market.
OS EXPERIENCE
The Oneplus formula has always been marrying high-end specs to a simple phone experience, and then offering that package at an affordable price. While this approach has changed over the past few years as Oneplus gradually increased prices, the Oneplus 9 Pro still packs the high-end specs you’d expect of a flagship model.
We first experienced the Snapdragon 888 processor in the Samsung Galaxy S21, but it continues to impress in day-to-day snappiness and solid battery life. For everyday use, the phone’s 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage have been more than capable of keeping up with my workload. The new Turbo Boost 3.0, meanwhile, uses a couple of technologies to allow more apps to stay open in the background. I can’t actively remember a time when I saw one of my main apps needing to reload because it fell out of memory. Everything, including games, loads quickly and seamlessly with no hangs.
The 9 Pro’s 4,500mah battery easily lasted me through some days of heavy use, while other days it hit 20 percent by 8 p.m. This really seemed to depend on the things I was using my phone for, and it probably varies due to the new display technology (more on that later). Luckily the phone’s fastcharging capabilities—over wired and wireless connections— continue to impress. A mere 15 minutes on the Warp 50 Wireless Charger (sold separately for $69) charged the 9 Pro from about 20 percent to 50 percent—more than enough to get me through the rest of the day.
The 9 Pro’s fast performance is complemented by a smooth and beautiful display. On top of the high refresh rate of
120Hz, Oneplus has implemented a LTPO OLED display that features multiple benefits. For starters, the new display tech uses less power— Oneplus claims 50 percent less—thanks to its Smart 120Hz feature.
In a gaming phone that’s tuned for pure speed, the display’s refresh rate will be locked to 120Hz, and the display will drain more power to maintain that speed. But if you’re doing a mixture of tasks in normal usage, you want the display to adapt to what you’re viewing. Scrolling Twitter or
Instagram? You want smooth motion. Pausing to read a Pcworld article? Then you don’t need the screen to refresh as fast, which should ultimately preserve battery life. Thanks to its Smart 120Hz feature, the display in the Oneplus 9 Pro can even go down to a refresh rate of 1Hz—that’s a first for a smartphone. The screen was plenty bright to see outside in daylight and wasn’t blinding in a completely dark room.
The QHD+ (3216x1440) display is also great at color reproduction. The long list of calibration features is interesting to a professional like myself, but in plain terms the colors just pop. Colors look bold and vibrant even in bright light, and I never had to worry about odd coloring when editing photos for Instagram. This is easily one of the best and most comfortable displays I’ve used to date, and it’s a real treat.
When it comes to the Androidbased operating system, Oxygen OS 11, I’m still not a huge fan. I much prefer the more stockAndroid approach of past Oneplus phones. Still, it’s got a nice, clean design that organizes everything in a simple and easy-to-use way. The latest Oxygen offers a snappy experience that rivals what you’ll find on Samsung Galaxy phones.
That said, I wish various design elements didn’t take up so much space. Each “bubble” in the notification shade takes up more space than I would like, and the menu layout in the Settings app takes more scrolling than I believe is necessary. These are all personal preferences, of course, and you might love the look and feel. But as I mentioned, I tend to lean toward stock Android—probably more than most phone reviewers.
WHO SHOULD BUY IT?
Other than offering a marvelous display, the Oneplus 9 Pro isn’t a giant leap over the Pro devices of the past few years. I’m absolutely loving the new display, and even if you’ve purchased a Oneplus device in the past year, this one might be worth a look for the screen alone. If you’re coming from an even older device, it will blow your socks off—and you will, of course, get the generational upgrades in terms of camera and processor speeds.