Oneplus 8 Pro : Infrared Camera can see through clothes and plastics.

You might have heard the news already. Oneplus has suspended its one of the cameras on its flagship phone. They've prevented people from using it. In my nearly 10 years of testing smartphones, I can genuinely say I've never seen this one happened and I've got a theory as to why so. With the  Oneplus 8 pro the company's top level 2020 flagship from OnePlus introduced a strange feature. The phone has a quad camera system and 3 of those cameras are just a normal phone cameras. There is a main camera, 3 times zoom camera and a ultra-wide. The fourth camera they call it the color filter camera, which is just bizarre you take photos through it and you get this low resolution shots with the just funky inverted looking colours and nobody could work out for the life of them, why OnePlus even introduced it.

We are talking about a company that is so cost conscious that it's taken until 2020 to even add to proper water resistance to their phones. How did this company see that and think “that's what we need, can we have 1 of those please.” Well this color filter camera is actually not what initially seems it's being marketed as just a cool way to see some interesting colors but it's actually more more than that. Without turning this into a full science lesson, you might know there's an entire spectrum of light and the light that we humans can actually see, it's just a small part of it. this sliver right here. 

But most cameras can see outside of that range. I don't know if you have tried this but if you pointed your TV remote to your face and pressed a button, you wouldn't see anything. But if you did the same thing and looked through your phone's camera, some phones will be able to pick up the infrared light. 

Now you can take this further by adding a specialized filter on top of your lens. You can either limit or completely block the visible light getting through so that you're only getting by, infrared. And we're pretty sure that's what's going on with this kind of filter camera. This isn't new. Infrared photography has a pretty strong following in the DSLR community. You can go on Amazon right now buy a filter, stick it on your lens and get a very similar effects. And it's been in for quite a while. If you restrict your camera to only being able to see the infrared, You can see through some objects. Through bin bags, through sunglasses and yet through some clothing. And this can be useful, for example; 

Fuji film came out with an infrared camera for crime scene photographers. You could take a photo and unearth hidden details that your eyes just wouldn't have been able to pick up otherwise. Airports, they use infrared to scan for weapons that people might be carrying under their clothing as an another example.

And I'm guessing that someone at Oneplus saw this. They saw that nobody had so far put that tech onto a smartphone and then they suggested that oneplus should do it first. It's different, it's quirky, it would make for an unbelievable TV advert the fact that your phone can see the invisible you gotta remember that for this year in particular Oneplus’s flagship pricing has shot up. It was $669 last year on the 7 pro and now it's $899 on the 8 pro. And when you going to do something like that, you've got to have stuff to show for it understandably. This particular feature has been controversial by adding the feature to a smartphone where it's super accessible. Where it's going to be in the hands of millions and it's gonna be taken everywhere. You could argue that, that is an invasion of people's privacy. 

And after all of that, if you were going to do this on a DSLR camera, it's an incredibly involved process you need high end equipment, you need powerful photo editing software and know how. But this one plus camera does the entire thing for you. When people realize what this one plus IR camera could do, it wasn't an initial reaction of  “ whoa this is amazing, I can see the insides of my TV remote “ . But within a couple of days that was replaced by “wait a second, should that be allowed”. So to stop it blowing out of control, one plus has just said, that they can issue a software update that stops people from using this camera.

Okay quick updates everyone is reporting that one plus is going to shut down this camera globally in all regions but from the latest statement it seems that OnePlus is only going to shut down the camera in China. Okay, here's my theory and just bear in mind to take this with a pinch of salt. I'm not saying I know this is true, it would just explain a lot. Oneplus knew exactly what this camera is capable of, I'm struggling to understand, how you can possibly develop something like this and not know what it is and what the implications are. And even if they didn’t, to start with then surely as you start testing this camera. As you take hundreds of thousands of photos to train the color processing algorithms. 

You must realize that it can see through stuff. And there are few odd things about this kind of color filter camera. For example, before any new smart phone is being launched. A few people in the media get something called, pre briefing. That's the company's chance to show us the devices ahead of time just so we can prepare content on it. And when I was in the briefing for this phone and they showed me the color filter camera. I was just sitting there scratching my head. Because this is the first time a camera like this has ever been seen on the phone. It's completely unlike anything out there. But in the entire 1.5 hour briefing session they spent a total of one minute on it.

The demo they gave us, was by taking a really quick photo of a green plant using the main camera. 

And then taking the exact same photo again with the color filter camera and showing us that it now looks like a yellow plant. And I remember sitting there thinking “what did I just see different?” Oneplus actually just build a fourth camera to be able to turn green plants yellow. The quality of the photo was bad and then when I asked further, “ how is this useful ?” , “Are there other situations its better in?”. The only real answer I got was very vague, “This will make your photos stand out.” From a company who has built their entire reputation on not wasting on putting any features that they think of  is really not important. I was just puzzled. So what I think happened is, at some point during the development someone realized that “this IR camera could cause controversy.”

They realized that if they start telling people that they could see through plastics. The people would very quickly realize, it could also see through some clothing. But maybe this realization just happened really late in development.

Where maybe it was too late to redesign the phone and maybe it was easier to just re-label it. So that people wouldn't focus on that. Instead of calling this like some new generation Oneplus vision camera. They just called it a color filter camera instead of bragging about all the interesting things it                                                                                can do.

 On their website there is this just one photo of a couple of trees buried right to the bottom of the camera section. And this would also explain why OnePlus makes it so difficult, to even use the color filter camera. When I first got the phone I couldn't understand if OnePlus is  going to introduce this crazy unique interesting camera on the back, then why do I have to click on the filters tab and scroll right to the last one, to reach it even though there's an entire camera on the back just for this one feature. 

Why is it lower down in the filter list than matt, which literally just takes a normal photo and turns down the saturation. And the only thing I can think of which may be kind of makes sense now is that OnePlus didn't want people to use it. Perhaps they knew what it could do. So if everyone started using it it would be more likely to become a controversy. 

By hiding it away like that it means that the people who bought the phone for that feature can still find it but that an average user isn't just going to happen to come across it. But bear in mind this is just speculation on my end. And the more important question is, does it matter? Is the Oneplus 8 pro now less of a good deal? Not really! And also Oneplus has said they're working on a fix for it. I'll be curious to see how that works though because as far as I can see this is more of a hardware thing. This will be fine as long as they deal with it right. If all they do is just re-release it with a less aggressive image processing algorithm. Then that does not gonna cut it because people can still just edit those images themselves afterwards. I'm curious where you guys stand on the whole thing let me know.