Question for Nexus 5 and 1+1 owners

[podspi]

Looking at the reviews for the 1+1, one of the major things the One gets dinged for is the camera:

No OIS, bad (and poorly implemented) HDR, and 'catastrophic' low light performance.


I currently own a Nexus 5 (another phone with a camera that gets beat on all the time), and I think the camera is pretty good. I'd like to upgrade to the 1+1, but I'd be pretty disappointed if the camera actually turns out to be worse in real world usage (especially wrt HDR).


I know some of you must have both (or had) so - I'd love to hear some real world impressions on how these cameras compare in real world usage (not stock review photos)

 

[Radeon962]

I have had the OnePlus One since July and it is a great phone for the price. I had a Note 3 and Nexus 5 and sold both after owning the OnePlus One for a little over a week.

The OnePlus One is like a bigger Nexus 5 in performance but with battery life like the Note 3 if not better.

If I were to rank the camera only it would be Note 3 then OnePlus One then Nexus 5. Nexus got a bad rap for the camera due to how it performed when the phone was first released. The software updates made a huge difference and it takes good pictures in HDR+ in mode.

OnePlus One does very well in Auto mode in good outdoor lighting. Its average at best in low light or indoors without good lighting. It does have a tendency to slightly wash out colors. HDR mode generates somewhat cartoonish type colors as the software applied is way to aggressive.

I take most of my pictures outdoors of still subjects and it did a good job for me.

This guy has compared the OnePlus One to various other smart phones but I don't recall if he did a OnePlus One vs Nexus 5 but you should get a good idea from reading a few of his reviews which includes a lot of sample pictures.

http://fortheloveoftech.com/category/reviews/camera-reviews/oneplus/oneplus-one/

 

[paperwastage]

Honestly, I wouldn't switch from N5 to 1+1

1+1 gets the same "archilles heel" as the N5: No extendable storage, camera is hit-or-miss, battery life isn't top-notch, and it's cheap for a 2013-2014 flagship (price/performance ratio is good)

I'd only suggest going from a 2-yr smartphone (eg nexus 4/S3) to 1+1 (especially because it's cheap)

nexus 5 to a nexus 6/z3/z3 compact/moto X, maybe note 4/s5 (if touchwiz isn't a big hinderence)

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Honestly, I wouldn't switch from N5 to 1+1

1+1 gets the same "archilles heel" as the N5: No extendable storage, camera is hit-or-miss, battery life isn't top-notch, and it's cheap for a 2013-2014 flagship (price/performance ratio is good)

I'd only suggest going from a 2-yr smartphone (eg nexus 4/S3) to 1+1 (especially because it's cheap)

nexus 5 to a nexus 6/z3/z3 compact/moto X, maybe note 4/s5 (if touchwiz isn't a big hinderence)

As an N5 and OPO owner, I disagree. OPO is worth the upgrade for the battery life. How can you say that about the battery life when it gets such awesome runtimes on Anandtech's own benchmark?

As for the camera, they're both slow shot to shot, the AF is slow. The image quality is decent on the OPO, but nothing mindblowing. It might in fact overall be worse than the Nexus 5 because the HDR is bad, but the Clear Image function allows decent low light shots.

I'd say its about the same. I owned an iPhone 5 for work while I had my N5 and OPO, and honestly the iPhone 5 got most of the pictures taken on it.

To me though, the battery life of the OnePlus One was just so much better that I have no regrets. I noticed this again in September when I broke my first OPO and had to go back to the N5. The battery life was atrocious, especially after pairing an Android Wear device. I'd easily lose 20% battery with the screen off the whole day on an N5. Use it a bit more, and I'm down to 40-50% where my OPO would be in the mid 70s at least.

 

[podspi]

The Nexus 5 is still a great phone, but the real pain points for me are:

1) The battery life
2) Limited storage (I have the 16gb model).

Upgrading both of those, plus 3gb of RAM and a faster processor is worth the upgrade to me. Bummer that it seems the camera isn't that great (in a different way than I'm used to!)