Issue:

Pictures are often blurry, poor depth of field, poor focusing (non-uniform), noisy/grainy, lack of natural sharpness, and over saturation.



Zooming in on the pixels, you will often notice pictures have poor focus and high noise and grain.



While taking the picture, the live preview looks good, but after taking the shot, the images turn out to be blurry and or grainy (refer to example 5)



Oil painting effect: When taking pictures of people and skin, I often notice edges are not sharp and skin features have artificial smoothness due to post processing done by Camera app even though beautify mode is turned OFF. Pictures which contain skin of people (ex: face) tend to look "soft" and resemble a Gaussian blur, and lack sharpness and or contrasts. These pictures look unnaturally smooth. Other users in this forum that have similar issue often called this "oil painting" effect. In the live preview display oil painting effect is not visible.



[OOS 5.1.9] Camera has poor and non-uniform areas of focus. On the same image plane (ex: when taking a picture of a page of a book), there are random patches of area where image is NOT in focus (example 8).



[OOS 5.1.9] The depth of focus is very poor. Camera often has difficulty focusing on close objects but NOT macro. An example of a close object would be take a picture of page of a book. In the live preview display AND the captured shot, you will notice the some areas of the image are out of focus. The issue is magnified if the subject is angled and it becomes clearly visible that there is poor depth of focus and only center area is in focus.



[OOS 5.1.9] Live preview display sometimes shows incorrect representation of subject (example 7). I often noise subjects in the live preview being "image processed" and screen tearing artifacts are visible. Some times the artifacts also include blurring and incorrect color of edges of a subject. .

I am not the only one with this issue. Check out this detailed review by a "professional" photographer. (Thanks @hassan987 for sharing this video)

Other Issues:

Video recording has very high noise and blurring. In dynamic video recording, I often notice objects blurring in and out and it seems like the Camera has a hard time staying in focus. In addition, it seems like there is some additional processing happening on video that make objects look distorted or fuzzed out.



Depth of field is too shallow in Portrait mode. Example, if take a picture of my hand, I can see portions of one of my fingers (edges) and my thumb being blurred out and out of focus.

Comparison and Results

Photo comparisons are often subjective

I tried to convey the issue using pictures which have non-dynamic backgrounds and are standards that are often used by photographers

Below examples show cropped portions of the full image to convey the issues. I encourage reader to download original full images for a more thorough comparison.

Unless otherwise noted, photographed images are using regular camera mode and NOT in Portrait/Pro/Pano/Video mode.

Unless otherwise noted, all examples were taken on OxygenOS 5.1.8.If I update this thread with more pictures with future updates of OOS, I will explicit mention the OOS version number.

Both on front and back cameraBelow are issues I have noticed but I will not discuss in this post due to my lack of expertiseand every user will have different opinions. In the examples belowPicture taken of my laptop keyboard without desk light on. Notice how letters on the keyboard on iPhone 6s are naturally sharp but also smooth (clear). On OP6, the letters on the keyboard are overly saturated and unnaturally sharp resulting in lack of smoothness and high contrast. Zooming in shows high noise. In addition on OP6 there is poor depth of focus thus the function keys in the back are blurry.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/h68dx3qc2vtf226jalj22yi9htt7b19j | Mirror: https://imgur.com/BgO4OHm Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/204t8jafo27s7oacs8iwfpmgttm97gac | Mirror: https://imgur.com/QZG0JJe Picture taken of my laptop keyboard with desk light on to ensure ambient lighting conditions. Same issues as example 1 where there is blurriness due to poor depth of focus and features are not naturally smooth and sharp.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/spi86mn6jvy7lkw2zgek8332iz0yz29g | Mirror: https://imgur.com/1yr6Y7s Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/5f8qkqg7rz74d9dh54ze3r1orj90xvai | Mirror: https://imgur.com/H7UXcTt focusing test pattern was printed out and picture was taken at a fixed distance. Notice how numbers in the chart are fuzzy and not sharp with OP6.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/mano7su54hn03my2hd17sni7veovi1oz | Mirror: https://imgur.com/dRjUjk7 Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/irk1qefxpnuhlbsa0ajtu3qkbae6o3jd | Mirror: https://imgur.com/tXFI89Y Another type of focusing test pattern chart was printed out and picture was taken at a fixed distance. Notice how letters in the chart are fuzzy and not sharp with OP6.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/oeo4w9q0ihmicfm2kbo6yq43j6fs6b94 | Mirror: https://imgur.com/dZOu85B Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/vso9ga57di5flf2hslk0ba8e5dky6xr9 | Mirror: https://imgur.com/4DoNsVE A bag of chips. Notice how on the top portion of the image where it says "Gourmet Sandwiches", the image is blurry and out of focus.Prior to taking picture with OP6, the top portion was in focus and NOT blurry in the display preview (refer to example 5).Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/kfo3n3rowk3uomy1gu98wlta7p8v33nr | Mirror: https://imgur.com/BGBD2lx Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/lu9nmkkyxr9erf726dl1waikixdq6p9t | Mirror: https://imgur.com/WZF0gvK Prior to taking picture with OP6, the top portion was in focus and NOT blurry in the live preview. To prove this, I took a picture of the live preview (viewfinder) prior to capturing the photo. The photo on the right shows the capture image which is blurry in the top portion. I think this is a perfect example of the issue being a software issue and OxygenOS Camera app post processing the captured image causing the image to be blurry.Updating to OxygenOS 5.1.9 did NOT solve any of the issues being reported. In example picture below, you can clearly see that picture captured on OP6 is very noisy and grainy. Letters on the keyboard tend to have high contrast and lack smooth edges. In addition there is poor focus on top portion of keyboard. Metadata shows that OP6 used the following settings: ISO-250, f/1.7, 1/50sec exposure while iPhone6s used ISO-64, f/2.2, and 1/30sec exposure. The poor quality image of OP6 is clearly due to high ISO and a larger aperture (lower f-stop). A large aperture also leads to poor focus away from the center (bokeh effect), and grainy image because of more light being captured which results in higher noise due to high ISO being used.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/g8cgmnd5obhtgmzzfwym5irteobvyfxz | Mirror: https://imgur.com/PmhUp8D Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/s2jnhq8g83o4svx1ua0fjhbd3vd4rdco | Mirror: https://imgur.com/H5Jo7bD After updating to OxygenOS 5.1.9 I noticed the live preview display (viewfinder) has some sort of visual artifact similar to jittering or screen tearing. I noticed the live display of camera has some sort of instantaneous image processing being done on the subject being captured. One clear example of this is picture below which shows the live camera preview on the OnePlus 6. Notice the top corner of the green tea box which has a "brown" patch. This brown patch randomly occurred in the live preview and it is an artifact of some image processing being done on the live preview. I even captured a video of live preview which shows the brown patch occuring: https://i.imgur.com/JU5elFh.gifv . I noticed this issue on OOS 5.1.9 but haven't tested it on 5.1.8.Video: https://i.imgur.com/JU5elFh.gifv Picture of a paper with text on it was taken. In OP6 surfers from non-uniform areas of focus; there are random patches of area where the text on paper is blurry. Non-uniform areas of blurriness are circled in red in the image preview below. On iPhone6s entire area of the paper with text was in focus are no random patches of blurriness are visible. Inspecting the metadata indicates OP6's "Metering mode = Average" while for iPhone 6s "Metering mode = Pattern". Metering mode usually refers to "exposure" but could this be causing poor focus??? Lenses of both cameras were confirmed to be clean with no finger prints. Readers are encouraged to download original file to inspect for themselves.Original image (iPhone6s): https://app.box.com/s/gcu40m9tofm8eb489zb2rwvj8h0avrcy | Mirror: https://imgur.com/odLpJQX Original image (OP6): https://app.box.com/s/h38nmxnrdmv4uw65kbj2xk4xrjm1sgvi | Mirror: https://imgur.com/cBX53zK