Inconsistency (Premium)

You may have heard the aphorism “perfect is the enemy of good,” and on that note, I’ve come up with a similar phrase for personal technology in general, or for digital photography specifically: Inconsistency is the enemy of reliable.

That is, I find it to be worse, much worse, when something works unreliably than when it doesn’t work at all. At least in the latter case, you simply know to work around a missing feature or capability, and you won’t be disappointed when something that should work every time fails.

Here’s an example.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the miso-glazed cod that my wife ordered on Saturday night.

Now, I had to actually look it up on the restaurant’s menu to remind myself what it was because this picture isn’t just terrible, it’s unusable. That’s bad, of course, but it was taken next to these shots, which came out (relatively) fine:

So what’s happening here?

Well, I’ve been using the OnePlus 8T for the past several days and while I’m still several more days from publishing a review, I’m going to spoil the ending for you: Its camera system is unacceptable—with middling and inconsistent quality—and that alone makes this handset a non-starter for me. There are many things to like about the OnePlus 8T, for sure, from its epic 65-watt wired charging to its display, performance, and software efficiency. But none of that matters if the camera isn’t at least passable. And it is not.

What’s odd—infuriating, really—is that the OnePlus 8T camera system sometimes works just fine. Can even be great on occasion. But that’s not good enough. And to understand why, I need to dive a bit deeper into my approach to photography in the smartphone era.

I assume you’ve already heard the story about me getting a Nokia Lumia 1020 for review in the summer of 2013, and how I brought it to our Amsterdam home swap that year, wondering whether it could possibly replace the digital point-and-shoot camera we would normally have used. Long story short, it could and it did, and we never looked back. Since that summer, we’ve only used smartphones for photos, and whatever point-and-shoot camera we did have at that time is almost certainly still gathering dust somewhere in a box in our cellar.

Arguing that a smartphone can’t possibly take as a good a photo as a decent-quality point-and-shoot camera, let alone a digital SLR (DSLR) camera, more than misses the point. Smartphone camera quality is still excellent, and since this device is always with me, and can fit in a pocket, it lets me capture moments that I’d never have captured with a DSLR. And for those moments that really do matter—family events, and so on—we have thousands and thousands of photos that neatly prove the point: Our family photos are incredible.

Well, at least I think they are. Those viewing the photos I take from the outside may or may not be impressed with the image quality, or the framing, or whatever. And I’ve certainly received my share of both compliments and complaints. But I’m not trying to outdo Ansel Adams here, I’m just capturing moments. These are snapshots, not art.

Related to this is my central rule of photography, which one might narrow down to “cause no harm” or “don’t get in the way.” That is, my goal as a photographer of sorts is to not interrupt what’s happening, but rather to document in a way that doesn’t bring it all to a halt.

Like so many things in life, this reasoning is based on experience: My stepfather was a middling photographer, but he was incredibly annoying, too. He would interrupt whatever we were doing, make everyone pose just so, keep moving around, trying to get the right angle, and just make everyone upset. By the time he snapped a picture, we all wanted to kill him, and were too upset to continue with whatever we were doing. Ah, childhood trauma.

Anyway, for me to take what are essentially snapshots and not interrupt what others are doing, the smartphone camera has to just work. And the OnePlus 8T smartphone camera doesn’t just work. In fact, during the dinner in which I took that horrible photo of my wife’s meal, my brother-in-law, who owns a Samsung Galaxy Note 10, asked about the phone and whether the photos were any good. So we started comparing our shots and taking new shots to compare.

And the results were not just disappointing to me, they weren’t even close: His camera consistently took much better photos, with better lighting, clarity, and contrast, of the same scenes. And in some cases where my pictures seemed OK on the phone’s display, zooming in betrayed any even bigger issue. These were not good photos. Even some of the ones that seemed OK.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t even notice how blurry the cod photo was until I saw it on Google Photos on my PC, using a much larger screen. (And for the record, I took two shots for some reason. Both are equally blurry.) But then, that’s another great example of how this camera failed me: I framed the shot, tapped on-screen to focus, and took the shot. The whole thing should have taken a few seconds, and it should have just worked. It did take a few seconds, but it did not just work, and I didn’t notice the problem until a day later: The OnePlus 8T somehow managed to focus on the area behind the plate.

This kind of thing happens far too often with this handset. And while losing inconsequential shots of food is not a huge issue, obviously, losing a more important memory would be.

And I will have none of that. So the great smartphone debate of 2020, or whatever, continues.