OnePlus 9 vs OnePlus 8 Pro: Don’t make a mistake! By Jon Rettinger

Following OnePlus from their very first phone, the OnePlus one has been amazing to see the company grow, but there was always two things you could look at when you looked at any OnePlus phone, the phones were great, but the screens weren't that good the phones were amazing, but I can't trust the cameras and over the years, OnePlus has worked to correct that enter the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 pro. Are these the phones that finally make you no longer have to worry about cameras, the phones that bring one plus into the camera pantheon of google, Samsung and apple? I want to take a look at the two new OnePlus phones, compare them to the last gen and then finally answer that question. Do we have the most perfect, well-rounded OnePlus ever, let's find out, so camera is obviously the bulk of this comparison right, seeing how big or small a jump we've made one generation to the next, but I do want to begin with the design of these phones, how they look and feel in the hand, because that's always my first visual reaction to the device when I first take it out of the box, was how does it look and feel and if you've liked the design of the previous generation OnePlus phones for now the past few years? These are going to feel very familiar. The screen is absolutely gorgeous, we'll talk more about screens when we get there, but the moral for design. If you like the designs of the last gen phones, you will like this. I was hoping, though, that the matte finish that you could get on the OnePlus 8 pro make its way to the nine pro, but it didn't.

We've got fingerprints magnets galore on the back, but to clean them off. They still do. Look pretty so, while, like the design of the phones, are relatively similar uh. The camera is a real different story here for what's been changed from the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 pro so and again, like I said in the intro, these have typically been the big Achilles heel with one plus phones in the past. The OnePlus 8 pro was really the first time that that perception started to change, and you saw cameras become a priority.

So I was fully expecting for OnePlus to improve in that area, for the nine and the nine pro would make sense and improve they did, but we saw the jump be way more drastic in one of the two phones so like you can use your eyes. The photos on the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 pro are very different, so they partner with Hasselblad, and they're, using the Hasselblad color science, but the main reason you're, seeing the difference is just due to the larger sensor size in the pro model. This is gonna. Allow for way higher dynamic range, and, just generally, you can see it better, more vibrant color reproduction. Now that is not saying.

The OnePlus 9 takes bad photos in a vacuum. Just looking at the photos in the OnePlus 9. It is a huge step of improvements from the previous generations, especially with the new Hasselblad color science. I will say that is on par with the photos you got from the 8 pro, but in some cases actually has outperformed the pro, but when you compare it to the nine pros photos that difference is drastic more than we've ever seen in previous regular versus pro versions from OnePlus. Both the OnePlus 9 and the 9 pro also have a new tilt shift feature.

If you're not familiar, that kind of makes images appear like their miniature. It is definitely not a feature everyone's going to use if ever used it at all, it's something new and, if you're into it for probably the first couple weeks, you got the phone it's here, and you can see what the photos look like. They do look miniaturized, I'm sorry to interrupt, or are you busy fine, but I'm make it quick, I'm shooting I'm sorry. I just want to forget to remind you to tell them that we have a new channel that you're hosting uh called money rush all about like personal finance and how you can try to make money and make your money work free without having to have a lot of videos up there on tesla, some on apple, some of the companies that you know we talk about here. I just thought that people, you know maybe might want to know, I'm sorry all right.

So like check out money rush, I guess we'll link to it down below. What's that? Is that good enough? For you yep? Sorry, oh wait! I wanted to talk to you about your car's warranty, get out, I'm I'm so sorry about that. So portrait mode was something that I really wanted to test. Uh and my kids are on from spring break, and apparently they did too uh, and I'm happy to report that both look better uh that we had on the pro which is awesome. The portrait mode did have a tendency, and this is like a lot of times- do not like fine details like glasses and, as you can see here, they just disappeared.

Now, I'm assuming things like that will be fixed with software, but taking a lot of portrait photos of anybody with glasses. You might want to wait until a software update comes when glasses were off and using regular portrait mode without things being cut out. I did do a really nice job and speaking of improvements, video and I would just like to give hallelujah hands to perfect video from OnePlus. That probably has a lot to do with the snapdragon 888, but man. This isn't just good video for like one plus, but this is like good video in general uh.

The color science here is like leaps and bounds better than last year's 8 pro and both the 9 and 9 pro are capable of capturing 8k up to 30, fps and 4k in 1080 up to 60 frames per second uh. The pro, though, can record 120 frames per second at both 4k and 1080. Uh. The 8 pro in case you want to remember, could only record up to 60 frames per second on 4k and 1080p, so big steps there, mostly due to the chipset inside. If you use your phone for video a lot, it is a huge reason to consider the nine pro, especially over the pro, but also the nine pro over the nine.

I was really impressed the versatility that I got uh from the OnePlus 9 pro this was. I don't want to understate it. This is really, really good. Video from a company that has sort of struggled in the past through get video right. They didn't just hit this one out of the park.

I mean they rounded the bases like four or five times it is that good and that giant establishment we've had in the past. So I know I'm raving about the cameras on the OnePlus 9 because I'm so happy to see a company listen and realize where their flaws were and fix it that wasn't even what I was most excited about with these phones came down to the screen. So all the phones, the eight pro the nine and the nine pro phones, I'll use, 120 hertz fluid displays dynamic, is going to adjust your refresh rate depending on what you are doing with your phones and I want to. I want to give a big clap for how to refresh right. I've talked about them in pretty much every video.

Furthermore, I love them. Furthermore, I need them, I'm so happy when they are there, so they all have that. However, the color reproduction on the 9 and the 9 pro is amongst the best that I've seen on any phone that I've used. The screens are great, but the nine pro model, I think, is taking the display even further. So it's got what OnePlus is calling hyper touch.

It's marketing speak, but when turned on the phone can increase their refresh rate to 300 360 hertz. So it's only activated when you play like certain games on your phone, but the increased refresh rate directly translates to way faster touch sampling rates, essentially meaning your phone reacts way faster when you poke your meat stick at it, and this is like tremendously beneficial if you're doing like online competitive games on your phone and difference between someone like winning and losing uh. You know when it comes down to real millisecond difference in reaction time, so I'm not entirely sure how big a deal this is going to be to the majority of OnePlus audience. I get it! It's a really like niche feature. I can only unlock that crazy refresh rate while gaming, but as a self-proclaimed high refresh rate advocate.

Even just the idea of 360hz refresh rate uh being possible on a LPO screen is magic, so as excited as I am with these screens, there is one like weird caveat that I found, so the nine has eleven hundred nits of brightness, whereas the nine pro has three hundred it's a brightness theoretically plenty of brightness uh. When I took these phones outside in direct sunlight, I had a really hard time seeing that, if you have that 50 brightness, you can't see anything you kick it all the way up to 100. You can see the screen, but it looks like you've got like a sunglass on it or like a ND filter. It makes it really tough uh to see now not a huge issue. People aren't generally using their phones a lot of times in direct sunlight, something that you should at least be aware of.

If you're thinking about picking one of these phones up and again a huge step for OnePlus on the screens, and we saw them make huge improvements with the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 pro, and they've gotten better here on the 9 and the 9 pro now, comparing the screen on the 8 pro to the 9, not a huge difference, but comparing the screen on the 8 pro to the 9 pro does become more drastic, and again you're. Seeing a company realize areas they could improve and make those changes' year over year, and I love seeing OnePlus continue to get better at things that they used to have problems with performance. Category is kind of becoming like almost unnecessary, so I'm going to go through it really fast, uh, surprise it's 2021, and it's an OnePlus flagship day fast uh using snapdragon 88 in both of them a big step up, I think from the OnePlus 8 pro snapdragon 865. So ram is the same as the past couple years. It's 8 and 12 gigs, depending on whether you get the 8 or the 8 pro or the 9 or the 9 pro all the same pricing obviously varies depending on which model or configuration you get, but we see a bit of a price hike from last year's models, and I think the idea, at least from OnePlus standpoint is that the new camera tech is going to justify that price.

So batteries are also pretty much identical. Last year's phones, both of them, had a 45 10 million power battery. Well, this year I guess technically smaller at 4 500 but nominal difference. I had no issue with batteries here um, but speaking of batteries. OnePlus is really getting well known for their insanely fast charging rates.

They call it warp charging. So, for example, the OnePlus 8t could go from zero to 100 a little over 30 minutes. It seemed like a magic trick, and you figured that would be fast enough, but not if you're one plus they said no, we can do faster, so we've got warp charge wireless 50t. We can get a full charge on these phones uh in a ridiculous 43 minutes, but that's not even their fastest version. There's a 65 t.

You can go from 0 to 100 in 29 minutes, and I'm just going to let that sink in. I don't know what thermal management wizardry OnePlus is doing, but 29 minutes for a full charge is insanity, so OnePlus has been rocking in screen finger printers for a while. They go with the optical version and on the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 pro they were higher on the screen than they are on the OnePlus 9. I imagine they removed for thermal regions, but having the fingerprint reader on the nine line down to the bottom of the phone did make it harder, at least for me to kind of get my finger on it. It almost seemed like the sensor was smaller.

I thought the optical sensor in the OnePlus 8 pro was amongst the best fingerprint reader that I had ever used, and then I saw the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, the ones they worked with Qualcomm to make in Samsung's s21 line and that took the crown and now, when I'm, comparing the latest ultrasonic versus latest optical, I'm definitely preferential now um to the ultrasonic side. The optical version is good, but again the placement wasn't as accurate to me as what I've gotten used to when I'm using something like the s21s, though there's ever been an area where OnePlus has just always been good at software. This is running the latest version of oxygen OS. It's based on android 11. It's why a lot of people come over and switch to OnePlus they've just done an amazing job with oxygen OS.

I think it's, I think, in a lot of ways better than stock android, you get more customization than you get with what google does with the pixel side. They give you more options without sort of overwhelming you with things their support has been absolutely amazing. It's fast, it's fluid. They do a perfect job with backups to transfer auction. Os is just perfect, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that is the best version of android on the market so, prior to the 8 pro.

I think it was an objective. I guess matter of fact, that the cameras on OnePlus phones were not amongst the best and the pro started to change that narrative a little and now with the OnePlus, 9 and 9 pro now objectively, they are good cameras. Discussion is now subjective. Do you like the color science with Hasselblad? Those are very different discussions to have, and you can pick whether you like the way they handle saturation and black levels and that kind of thing, but there's really no denying that these are perfect pictures. They might not be your style or taste, but the quality of the image and the quality of the video is so much better than we've had before that barrier.

A lot of people had to getting an OnePlus phone has now been removed, and I commend, and I've said this a lot of times the video I commend them for fixing it. You don't see. Manufacturers address those things so quickly, especially six months later, so I think it boils down to this. If you've been holding out on getting a one plus phone for the camera, that's no longer a worry. If you have an OnePlus, 8 pro, and you're thinking about getting the nine, don't stick with what you've got if you've got an OnePlus, 8 pro, and you're.

Looking at that OnePlus 9 pro, especially when it comes to things like video and color science, I actually think it's worth the jump, but the elephant in the room is what's going to happen, six months later, are we going to have the 90? It's going to be a perfect combination of both the rumors of uh nine. Are they had to call it? Maybe a word version of the OnePlus 9 there's always something new coming from OnePlus, so you never really have the newest thing from them for very long. What we've got right now with the nine and the nine pro are two perfect phones and generally have a hard time justifying buying the pro version of anything, but this year I think differences are that drastic that would pick up the nine pro over the nine assuming it fits in your budget 100 out of 100 times.

Source : Jon Rettinger