Realme 8 Pro Review: What’s Next in Midrange Smartphone Imaging

Realme 8 Pro is a good, cheap Android phone that you probably shouldn’t buy now – at least if you’re in the US. But it is also a preview of the positives to come in the midrange class, especially in terms of camera hardware. I’ve seen the future of smartphone imaging around the $ 400 price point, and that’s good.

If you are not familiar, Realme is a Chinese company, which started as a sub-brand of Oppo; Like OnePlus, it was founded by the former Oppo vice president. Its phones are sold in China, India and Europe. However, you can technically buy a global version of the phone and use it in the US, but we would not recommend it. It is not compatible with the 4G bands we use in the states, so the coverage will not be great.

The 8 Pro uses a relatively new 108-megapixel Samsung sensor. It has the same pixel count as the main camera in the Galaxy S21 Ultra, but a separate, smaller chip designed for budget-friendly phones. As in the S21 Ultra, the point of this technology is not to take 108-megapixel images (although you can do so if you want). This is to combine information from clusters of pixels to create a better optimized 12-megapixel final image.

There are other reasons to like Realme 8 Pro. Given the £ £ (approx. $ 380) price, the performance is very good, due to its strong combination in Snapdragon 720G processor and 6GB of RAM. Battery life is healthy and the phone supports 50W fast wired charging. Depending on how you feel about inspiring corporate branding, I think “Dare to Lap” printed on the back of the phone may be a plus (not my thing, personally).

But the camera impressed me the most, and it is a component that will likely make its way into many more midrange phones sold around the world. let’s take a closer look.

Realme 8 Pro Camera

If at any point you need a reminder if the main camera provides how many pixels, you can just look at the back of the phone where you will find “108 MP QUAD CAMERA” on the camera bump. In particular, it is Samsung’s 1 / 1.52-inch Isocell HM2 sensor with f / 1.9 lens.

Unfortunately, there is no optical image stabilization here, but perhaps due to the image processing tricks that this high-resolution sensor can pull, I did not see a significant number of blurry shots that OIS would have fixed. Other rear cameras include an 8-megapixel ultrawide, 2-megapixel macro, and a 2-megapixel depth-sensing camera. There is a 16-megapixel selfie camera on the front.

The main camera is capable of doing some interesting things. In bright daylight, it can use all 108 million pixels individually, to capture your scene at multiple exposure levels at once, and various pixels to combine information into a 12-megapixel final image. uses it. In low light, the camera switches things up and uses binning to combine pixing into groups of nine, effectively turning relatively small individual pixels – 0.7μm to be precise – into very large 2.1μm sized pixels. , Which helps to produce low noise images.

Photos look good in bright light as expected. If you zoom up to 100 percent, an impressive amount of capture is captured, although some over-sharpening is evident. The colors are slightly saturated to my liking; There is no amount of lawn fertilizer in the world that makes my yard look as green as the 8 Pro thinks it is. It seems more prone to this inspection with landscape and the picture mode is thankfully less invasive with photos. Portrait mode photos look good, and I appreciate that the camera does not crop when going into this mode.

Dim indoor lighting and low light are where phone cameras typically clash, but the 8 Pro turns into an impressive display under these circumstances. In moderate light, the images are amazingly detailed and show little noise. The camera’s night mode will bring even more detail, although it does apply a distracting amount of sharpen and contrast.

I had, frankly, low expectations for the 8 Pro’s digital 3x zoom, but I’m happy to say that it’s much better than I feared. In good lighting and even medium indoor lighting, the images show great detail and I am hard pressed to find unpleasant artifacts that typically appear in digitally zoomed images.

The camera is not cropping only on the 108-megapixel image. Compared to them 100 percent, a photo taken with a 3x digital zoom shows more detail and makes less noise than cropping a 108-megapixel image. The Samsung HM2’s pixel binning powers are being put to work here as well, and the result is a digital zoom that is really worth your time.

There is not as much exciting news to report about the 8 Pro’s other cameras; They do fine. Ultravide is prone to some subtle but unpleasant color changes: white balance can be very hot and blue skies can sometimes look a little gray. The macro camera is a low-resolution sensor that is slightly more than a gimmick, and the selfie camera thankfully avoids over-smoothing the face at its default settings. All reasonable for a phone at this price.

Realme 8 Pro Display and Screen

Outside the cameras, the Realme 8 Pro is a well-capable midrange phone. Battery life is sufficient to get through a day of moderate to heavy use and the above processor / RAM combo handles day-to-day app scrolling and tasks easily. The 6.4-inch 1080p OLED with a standard 60 Hz refresh rate is fine, but nothing special, and I struggled with auto brightness which makes the screen dim on many occasions.

There is attractive branding on the rear of the device, which is either yours or not. Realme 8 Pro does not support 5G at all, which is to consider if you are in the UK and thinking of buying a phone.

However, my biggest gripe is with the optical in-display fingerprint sensor. I would say at least a third of the time that when I unlocked the phone my finger required more than one to try to read. Twice – both out in broad daylight – left it and I had to enter my PIN instead. If this was going to be my forever phone, I would probably drop the fingerprint sensor and stick it in person, with just a pin.

The Realme 8 Pro is a kind of midrange phone that we don’t see very often in the US: great performance and good all-around specs combined with an excellent camera, all for the equivalent of a sub-$ 400 price tag.

Phones from this description are surprisingly rare; In fact, its closest counterpart is probably the Pixel 4A, which we’ve recommended as essentially the lowest-cost Android phone since it became available last summer. The 8 Pro surpasses the 4A in some cases by providing an ultraviolet rear camera and fast charging. If it came down to it, though, we would probably favor the Pixel for its much better device support and excellent lone rear camera.

If you live in the UK and you don’t care much for class-leading display specs and the lack of 5G doesn’t bother you, the 8 Pro has a camera and a processor that will last for many years to come. For the rest of us, the 8 Pro will (hopefully) be a sign of good camera hardware coming our way soon.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Reporter Door