You’ve been hands-on with the OnePlus 15 camera and need to see the results
By David Lumb | Published: 2025-11-01 12:00:00 | Source: CNET
the OnePlus 15 It’s the next feature phone from the Chinese phone maker, and I just got it. To give her cameras a nice touch, she took her out on a quick tour of a corner of Los Angeles.
The big advantage of the OnePlus 15 is that it is one of the first devices to run Snapdragon 8 Elite Generation 5Qualcomm’s next generation chip High-end phoneswhich was launched in September. The on-chip system has a huge impact on how photos turn out, as it processes every photo taken by the rear cameras.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET As Google’s preferred source.
The OnePlus 15 has three 50-megapixel rear cameras, along with a selfie camera on the front, and I captured photos of the neighborhood’s flora and fauna using all of them. While there is a certain level of polish expected from it Outstanding phone camerasThis phone has something new: it’s the first OnePlus flagship phone released since the company’s partnership with Hasselblad ended. For years, OnePlus has incorporated the popular Swedish camera maker’s color science and image calibration into its cameras.
With the Hasselblad gone, the OnePlus 15 features the debut of the DetailMax Engine, a loftyly titled algorithmic processing system that aims to “render scenes as they really are, without over-beautification or distortion,” as the company’s practice is. Official blog post He explained.
This means a new page for taking photos on a OnePlus phone, which made me want to see what the OnePlus 15 can do. Join me on a casual tour of a vibrant Los Angeles neighborhood, and capture the types of shots that make up the majority of camera shots. I will need to spend a lot of time with the device to do a thorough review of it.
Silver Lake House, a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, is a mixture of shapes and textures.
Our first shot is from the outside of The Silver Lake House, a Thai restaurant in the neighborhood. While I obviously can’t resist a slight Dutch angle here, the color combination looks distinct and desaturated — a win for photorealistic processing. I like the way the OnePlus 15 captured the light and shadows filtering through trees, and the camera handled lens flare well without over-exposing that area. Also note the chrome reflection on the heat lamp.
Elephant and cactus vases containing small plants decorate the windowsill of The Silver Lake House.
Here’s a close-up of the gorgeous plant vases on the windowsill overlooking the restaurant’s indoor tables. The light is really balanced, bright in the foreground outside the restaurant and dark inside – but colors and details are still visible inside. You can also pick up some details from the reflections on the street window behind me.
A 1960s Ford Thunderbird parked on a sidewalk in Los Angeles.
I couldn’t resist a 1960s Ford Thunderbird sitting idly in the street, a cruising car from yesteryear resting in an upscale corner of Los Angeles. Note the contrast of the texture of the dirt stripes above the paint with the bright chrome-plated metal surrounding the taillights. Most importantly, even though the camera is focused on the foreground, the OnePlus 15 is still able to capture the blue sky in the background, complete with detail in the clouds.
Silver Lake Reservoir dog park is not very active during the afternoon of Halloween 2025.
I took this photo of a nearby dog park with the ultra-wide lens, which preserves the monotonous detail in the brown dirt amid the grass growing along the bottom.
Enlarged shot of Silver Lake Reservoir dog park.
Here’s a photo of the same dog park that I took while zooming in at 7x. It has a lot of detail and color. But we can go further!
Computer, boost! A zoomed-in shot at the far end of the OnePlus 15’s zoom capabilities.
This is the dog park photographed at 120x zoom, which is as far as this phone can zoom. The image looked quite grainy on the phone screen when I captured it, but the DetailMax Engine’s post-processing did relative wonders, making this almost unrecognizable despite a lot of smudging at the edges caused by noise reduction – see between the chain links. Sure, this isn’t a great image — it’s almost graphic — but the fact that it can zoom in this far and still present an image with something recognizable is amazing.
Selfie at Southlake Reservoir in Los Angeles.
Here’s a selfie that shows your true personality. I think this photo has good detail and shadow, but what impresses me most are the mountains in the distance, which are somewhat visible through the classic LA fog (marine layer, not smog) obscuring the air, not the OnePlus selfie camera.
Night portrait on the streets of Los Angeles.
For comparison, here’s a selfie I took at night. Color is good, with good detail in the foreground, although it’s starting to fade behind me – note the bricks in the lower right, the stickers on the light pole in the middle left, and especially the building above my shoulder.
A night shot on the streets of Los Angeles, showing the OnePlus 15’s capabilities in capturing detail and color diversity in low light.
This is the obligatory night shot of a street in Los Angeles. While the city would never be dark enough to test a phone’s ability to capture clusters of stars in the night sky, this shows the contrast between warm street lights and bright neon lights. The plaster details on the bowling alley walls are clear, even from across the street. Look closely at the texture of the street pavement. It is a granular mixture of gray flecked with white spots. All the city grime has been kept at bay by the OnePlus 15’s shiny new cameras.
Happy Halloween!
That’s it for a first look at OnePlus’ camera capabilities. Happy Halloween! And stay tuned for my full review of the OnePlus 15.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
