OnePlus has confirmed that its next smartphone launch will take place on March 23, and that the upcoming devices in the OnePlus 9 series, will have a major photography focus.
OnePlus has been improving the quality of its mobile cameras for several generations, but the OnePlus 9 series is set to have particularly intricate camera upgrades, due to a collaboration with the celebrated photography brand, Hasselblad. Executives from both OnePlus and Hasselblad have detailed that they will embark on a three-year R&D partnership, investing $150 million to further boost the quality of mobile camera photography.
Hasselblad is known for being the brand whose cameras captured man’s first steps on the moon, but with OnePlus, the 80-year-old company is looking use that use that quality inspiration to propel improvements to color tuning and sensor calibration on devices, starting with the OnePlus 9 series.
The smartphones will introduce Natural Color Calibration to provide “perceptually accurate and natural-looking colors” to photos. Handsets in the OnePlus 9 series will also introduce new technology to allow for ultra-wide photos with a 140-degree field of view, as well a faster focus for front facing lenses, and a freeform lens to do away with edge distortion.
OnePlus Founder and CEO Pete Lau stated, it is the the brand’s aim “to take the rich aesthetic knowledge of traditional photography and blend it together with the computational photography that we already do well, to form a camera system with superlative imaging quality.”
OnePlus and Hasselblad also shared details about the Sony IMX789 sensor, which will serve as the main camera sensor on the OnePlus 9 series, as the most advanced camera on a OnePlus devices to date. It will allow for 12-bit RAW, HDR video recording, and support for 4K 120FPS and 8K 30FPS video.
As the partnership will expand well beyond the OnePlus 9 series, the companies are creating four research and development, with stations in United States and Japan among them.
