The full review of the $699 OnePlus 8 is linked here, but this article is about hosting my camera samples taken from the phone.
16 MP Wide Camera
I like what I see with daytime photos, especially how HDR imaging is handled because the images don't have too much of an HDR look that Pixels phones are known to have. Personally, I don't really like what the newer Pixel 6 phones have their image quality look like, but I do like that the OnePlus 8 has pretty good photos with it's good contrast and subtle vibrancy. I enjoy how greenery is captured because it makes the plants look very vibrant, yet I wish I could say the same for the sky. In the first photo, both the sky and tree look relatively neutral where more saturation would have made the photo look more HDR like. In the other photos with greenery, I can't help but notice that the sky remains to be neutral and I personally prefer more vibrant sky scenes especially with green landscapes in broad daylight. Sharpness is good, and I can really come to appreciate that in the scene with the mushroom. The photo of the pastry could have been handled better, mostly with the exposure and although shadows could have been higher, it's also a natural looking photo with good sharpness. In the last two photos of the green wall, the first was taken normally and the second with the vibrant color filter. Only thing I want to mention is that the sky is properly blue to which I would of loved to see more renditions of this in the other normal photos, yet I don't like how the green is portrayed. It looks too green that makes the photo look distracting and overexposed. Overall, I think the main camera is pretty good.
16 MP Ultrawide Camera with 116 Degree FOV
I'm impressed with the first photo because of how it handled the exposure of the sun, and how it decided to add saturation to the tree. Again, I would have loved to see a more vibrant sky, but I'm more happy with exposure and HDR on shadows. This ultrawide does have a little bit of distortion around edges in some of the photos, but in a severe manner nor is it distracting. In the last photo, I wonder why that plant almost the same amount of saturation that the main camera would probably capture in that scene, yet that isn't the case for the other ultrawide photos with its more neutral saturation. I like that last photo, but I do dislike how muted the background scene is with its lack of color. I'd say this ultrawide is pretty alright, yet it doesn't work with my color tastes probably more often than not.
2 MP Macro
Firstly, this isn't a cheap macro sensor. Not unlike other 2 MP macro cameras that trend with budget-oriented smartphones. This sensor is much more better than those others, given that this IS a flagship device, and it would be beyond unwise to give this phone a cheap camera sensor. For the record, in all of my scenes, there was plenty of lighting that gave all of the images a bright photo result. Especially with the first photo of the book page because that was shot indoors with normally a low amount of light that would have casted a huge shadow onto the page. However, I had an additional light source specifically for this shot so that the photo wouldn't be dark. That leads me to my next part, the flashlight is disabled while in macro mode. An active flashlight while on macro mode would give your scene more light since not all scenes have a plentiful amount of light, and the close proximity of your macro sensor to your subject is likely to cast a shadow. Can the OnePlus team enable the flashlight to be used while in macro mode? Yes. Will they do it? No, probably because of exposure control. Overall, macro shots are good as they have good neutral colors, but sharpness could be better.
Portrait Mode
I'm a bit mixed with how this phone does portraits because although it has good image quality with good background separation, I don't like the amount of blur that it gives. If you look at all of the photos, you'll see that the background is properly blurred and such, yet this isn't the case with the ball. It looks like OnePlus is applying a gradual amount of blur where the further the background is from your foreground subject, the more blur is going to be applied (to some extent). In the ball photo, the phone clearly knows what's background and what's foreground, yet since it's probably gradual blur, the close background received a light amount of blur. If you look at this exact same scene with the TCL 10 SE article, the TCL applied an insane amount of blur with good accuracy too! Besides the differences of image quality and such, I would prefer the TCL photo over this one because I think this OnePlus photo "plays it too safe" with the blur or some sort of that answer. Other than that, these are good portraits. And the camera is automatically zoomed in a little bit for better framing your shots, yet you can go back to 1x zoom as seen with the first two photos. No variable zoom though. Only two togglable focal lengths.
There's also video portrait mode which is pretty good given that there is no time-of-flight or depth sensor or telephoto camera that would potentially help out the foreground and background separation even more. I think there is a color grade filter that is automatically enabled on this mode because my appearance, the sky, and the greenery are colored differently than what can be seen on normal main camera video. The only thing I don't like is that skin smoothening is active while in this mode as seen with my soft skin. Other than that, it's a pretty cool cinematic effect that works relatively well. The mode is capped at 1080p 30 FPS probably due to SoC processing reasons, but I scaled that video to 4K by resizing dimensions so just something to ignore.
Lowlight with Main And Ultrawide
The first photo is the main camera, with the second being with the nightscape mode on. Between them two, there isn't that much of a significant improvement which leads me to be disappointed about lowlight performance because I could have edited the non-nightscape photo to look similar and even better than the nightscape one. This is just a small sample as per all my other photos and videos, so I still have some hope that nightscape isn't as useless as seen with this example. The third photo is with tripod nightscape mode which requires a tripod (a steady hand will NOT do the trick) and I am very pleased with this photo. That photo in its entirety including the contrast, brightness, and color white balance is what I expected to see with normal nightscape, but sadly that wasn't the case. The tripod nightscape photo took roughly 28 seconds to take. The last two photos are from the ultrawide, with the very last photo being with nightscape on. In the first ultrawide photo, I am very disappointed that the phone did not do any noise reduction in post-processing because that photo is LITTERED WITH NOISE. Nightscape ultrawide gave me a way better result which I am happy with, and wow no noise in that one. That was sarcastic, even though there really is no noise in that photo. It's just that the first photo has be distraught. Night mode enabled on ultrawide is definitely a must, this goes for all phones at this point in time. The OnePlus 8 has OIS on the main sensor so it helps out with night shots in general.
First two videos are on the main camera, with the third being on the ultrawide, and the second video is using nightscape video mode. Night video on the main camera is pretty average, but you can improve the low-light situation using nightscape video mode. The mode is capped to 1080p 30 FPS which does make sense because more megapixels at times can affect dynamic range performance on smartphones, and a 30 FPS frame rate lets more light into the sensor as compared to how much light is captured into a 60 FPS running sensor. I like that nightscape video is a mode on the OnePlus 8, because low-light video in general can have mixed results all the time. Low-light on the ultrawide is unusable, but it's on track with other low-light videos taken on a 2020 flagship device while on ultrawide. At least it doesn't stutter to 9.90 FPS like how the TCL 10 SE handled that one.
16 MP Selfie Quality
Selfie quality is ok with background separation being a bit off, but it's not by a whole lot. The first two photos are portrait selfie and it looks like there is some skin smoothening active in both cases. The third photo is a non-portrait selfie with sin smoothening off and the last photo is with it on at the first tier (3 skin smoothening tiers in total). Only thing to say is that selfies look good with a good amount of exposure, contrast, and sharpness.
Video on Main and Ultrawide Camera
First is the main then ultrawide sensor. Both have pretty similar saturation, contrast, and brightness, with both sensors being able to record in 4K 60 FPS. Unlike the photos taken on the main camera and on the ultrawide, I actually enjoy how the sky is perceived to be blue. It's the right amount of blue saturation I want to see in these scenes, and I appreciate how sharp and textured the clouds look. Is it better than what iPhones can record? I don't know because I don't exactly know what iPhone videos look like, but iPhones have come to be known as having the best video quality. I'd agree with this consensus, yet I bring this up because I am very satisfied with this tier of video recording on the OnePlus 8.
Super Stable Video Mode
The OnePlus 8 comes with super steady video mode and in this sort demo with it being on then off, it does help keep video jitter out. It works well, but not gimbal level stabilization of course. The phone comes with OIS so that's a positive already. The mode is only available on the main sensor.
Zoom and High Megapixel Mode
The max zoom is 10x which is digital zoom from the 48 MP main sensor as there is no telephoto camera here. Zoom quality is good with the zoomed photo having good word readability as seen with the sign "voltage." Sharpness for digital zoom is ok, but the photo suffers from some noise seen in the sky.
On the left is the main sensor at 12 MP and 48 MP on the right. At a simple glance, both photos are a little bit different with most notably white balance, a bit brightness difference, and shadows. The 48 MP photo has a better white balance, slightly higher brightness, and darker "contrasty" shadows. The 48 MP photo (as expected) has better sharpness than 12 MP, but I would always be mindful about that change in dynamic range between Full-Res and pixel-binned photos. Even though the Full-Res photo is better in my opinion, this is just one example.