For the second time, OnePlus has been caught overstating the zoom capabilities of the cameras in its smartphones. At issue this time: The 3x optical zoom in the OnePlus 7 Pro is really just 2.2x.

“New to the OnePlus 7 Pro is a telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom and OIS [optical image stabilization],” the firm claimed onstage during its OnePlus 7 Pro announcement. The claim is repeated on the OnePlus 7 Pro website, which notes that “with 3x optical zoom, you’re always ready to shoot high-quality, detailed images even at a distance.” The device’s specifications page repeats this attribute, noting that the “optical zoom” is “3x.”

There’s just one problem. The optical zoom is not 3x. It’s 2.2x, as explained by a photography expert on Reddit. (I learned about this from Android Police.)

How this works is highly technical. But the OnePlus 7 Pro basically takes a 13 MP telephoto image, crops it to 8 MP, and uses a software-based method to smooth the resulting image. This is still superior to digital zoom, which often results in a pixelated or blurry image. But it’s not true 3x.

Worse, OnePlus has done this before.

As Android Police points out, the OnePlus 5 was marketed as having 2x optical zoom, but only 1.6x of that was actually optical. The result was created using digital zoom. “Optical zoom is at 1.6x, the remaining 0.4x is realized through SmartCapture multiframe technology,” OnePlus’s Carl Pei admitted at the time via Twitter when asked about this. (SmartCapture was a marketing name for digital zoom.)

This time around, OnePlus isn’t using digital zoom, at least. But it’s still misleading the public by claiming 3x optical zoom.

“The OnePlus 7 Pro has 3x zoom with no digital zoom or loss of detail,” a OnePlus statement notes in response to the Reddit revelation. “The telephoto camera serves two main purposes: 3x zoom and portrait mode photography. It will switch the field of view depending on the camera mode. With 3x zoom, the telephoto camera delivers the advertised lossless 8 megapixels images. Portrait mode utilizes all 13 megapixels from the sensor in the telephoto camera.”

This is correct, but it’s correct because it never makes any claims about optical zoom. The OnePlus 7 Pro does provide 3x zoom. But it’s not all optical zoom. It’s a 2.2x optical zoom shot at 13 MP that is losslessly cropped to match the 8 MP resolution of the normal camera lens creating, in effect, a shot that is zoomed to 3x.

The nuance here may not matter to most OnePlus 7 Pro buyers, and I do like that the Camera app on the device has a handy on-screen way to quickly switch between 3x zoom, normal, and wide-angle shooting modes. But in my experiences so far, the 3x zoom shots are not particularly clear or crisp, and that wouldn’t be true of 3x optical zoom. More to the point, OnePlus needs to be more honest about the camera’s capabilities in its advertising.

Tagged with OnePlus, OnePlus 7 Pro