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The OnePlus One is a rather interesting phone. As many out there know it’s nearly impossible to get ahold of for now, but OnePlus is promising to change that soon with more invites going out and eventually moving into more of an actual production schedule. While you can readily buy the OnePlus One on store shelves of a few stores in China, that’s a slightly different version of the phone, and comes with Color OS which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. The International OnePlus One ships with CyanogenMod 11S, a special version of the popular custom ROM CyanogenMod that is built upon Android 4.4 KitKat and gives you more customization than any phone out there ever has, without being modified of course. It also ships with a brand new piece of camera software that the CyanogenMod team has been working on for some time, and I’ve thankfully been able to put it through some serious tests over the past week of having the OnePlus One.
Anyone who follows our Podcast series will know that I’m quite the picture taking fiend, and am super picky about the final results and what they will allow me to do with the final photo. I’m also someone who doesn’t like to spend precious time editing my photos to make them look better than they technically do, so I want it to be right the first time. Below I’ve assembled a gallery of some of my favorite shots taken with the OnePlus One over the past week, and I think you’ll probably agree with me that this camera really is something special. It’s 13 megapixels like a number of other smartphone cameras out there, but it’s all in the magic of image processing that makes the picture look better than most 13 megpixel shooters out there. While I’ve found that photos from Samsung phones usually end up being blurry and over-processed once actually viewed on a larger screen than the phone itself, photos from the OnePlus One hold up extremely well even on a large TV.
Another area it seems to excel at over even the LG G2, which I personally found to be the best smartphone camera of 2013, are the areas of white balance and color accuracy. The G2 takes some amazing photos, but they tend to be a little overexposed and slightly saturated, giving an unnatural look to some scenes. I’ve not found this to be the case on the OnePlus One, but be your own judge by checking out the shots below!
