Last month, OnePlus held an Open Ears Forum in New York City, where it listened to customers" problems and potential solutions. Recently, the firm outlined some changes that it plans to make based on the feedback that it got. It all has to do with the camera, or more specifically, video recording capabilities.
The Shenzhen firm says that its top priority is exposure, color, and white balance consistency across all of its cameras. Consistency was a big one, in fact, noting improvements coming to autofocus and skin tone. As for autofocus though, OnePlus said that it couldn"t reproduce the issues noted by OEF attendees, but it"s still planning both software and hardware updates to address it this year.
Another issue was sharpness, and the company really only claimed to be evaluating this. It said that it"s trying to find the balance between sharpness and noise.
Of course, people want stabilization on 4K video recording, and OnePlus said that there are hardware limitations here. That means that this is something that will be reserved for future devices. HDR is another big one, and it"s also another one where OnePlus only said that it"s working on it.
There are issues with light flickering that the firm is trying to improve. One complaint is about panning shots not being smooth enough, and once again, OnePlus said that it can"t repro this, but it"s working on being better this year.
Obviously, users want a faster camera, and OnePlus said that this is a top priority. Feature parity between lenses is a big one, something that Apple showed could be done with the iPhone 11 Pro. Users want to be able to have the same resolution and frame rate options no matter what lens is being used. Of course, this is a hardware issue, and it may or may not get resolved in future devices. Unfortunately, a big feature this year with the Snapdragon 865 will be 8K recording, so even if all three lenses support 4K, we"ll now have 8K to deal with.
This goes along with users wanting to recording with two cameras at the same time, another feature that Apple has pulled off. OnePlus says that this is partially available already, but it"s working to make it better.
There were plenty more issues addressed at the OEF, including time limit for 4K video recording, single-handed use, better video editing tools, pro video mode, portrait video capture, zoom-in time-lapse video, night mode video, AR emoji, social media mode, and light painting mode.