OnePlus 6: New smartphone boasts dual-camera setup with OIS and wide-aperture lenses

Announced today at a London launch event, the OnePlus 6 is a new smartphone with a particularly impressive dual-camera setup. 

While the camera is mostly inherited from the OnePlus 5T, it arrives with a few useful upgrades. 

The rear cameras combine 16MP and 20MP sensors, and each is fronted by a lens with an f/1.7 aperture. The 16MP camera benefits from a larger sensor and larger pixels, which will also help with shots in challenging light conditions, as will the new optical image stabilisation and electronic image stabilisation features. For those reasons, we expect the OnePlus 6 to be seriously capable for night photography.

• The best OnePlus phones in 2021

Video functionality has been beefed up too, and one of the headline features is the ability to shoot super-slow-motion video at 480fps. That, in case you aren’t aware, is seriously slow, though it isn’t quite class-leading in the phone world; the Samsung S9, Huawei P20 Pro and a few others can get to 960fps. 

Read more: Huawei P20 Pro camera review

Shooting at the maximum frame rate will, however, downgrade your quality slightly from Full HD to 720p; if you want to keep shooting in Full HD 1080p, you’ll be able to shoot at a maximum frame rate of 240fps, which is still pretty impressive.

The 16MP front camera hasn’t been forgotten either, with a respectable f/2 aperture and electronic image stabilisation, but fixed focus.

Elsewhere, the OnePlus 6 is trading on being fast, with the Snapdragon 845 platform promising to keep processing speeds high. The tradeoff for this speed is no external microSD storage option; users will have to make do with either 64GB, 128GB or 256GB of internal storage. 

Read more: 15 of the best photo apps: top editing apps for iOS and Android devices

The OnePlus 6 also boasts the company's biggest ever display, measuring 6.28in in size and an aspect ratio of 19:9, all inside a glass body. It doesn’t support wireless charging, though the 3,300mAh battery is said to have been tweaked for efficiency and should last you a full day. 

And, as a nice extra bonus, the phone is also weatherproofed, meaning that while you can't quite take it swimming with you, it should withstand the rain.

OnePlus 6 price and release date

The OnePlus 6 officially goes on sale on 22 May in Midnight Black and Mirror Black finishes, though there will be some pop-up events on 21 May, where you can get your hands on one early. The limited-edition Silk White version goes on sale on 5 June. 

The starting price for the phone will be £469 in the UK and $529 in the US, rising to $629 / £569 for the best-specced option. You'll find the best deals right now below.

Read more: 10 tips on taking better photos with your smartphone

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Jon Stapley

Jon spent years at IPC Media writing features, news, reviews and other photography content for publications such as Amateur Photographer and What Digital Camera in both print and digital form. With his additional experience for outlets like Photomonitor, this makes Jon one of our go-to specialists when it comes to all aspects of photography, from cameras and action cameras to lenses and memory cards, flash diffusers and triggers, batteries and memory cards, selfie sticks and gimbals, and much more besides.  


An NCTJ-qualified journalist, he has also contributed to Shortlist, The Skinny, ThreeWeeks Edinburgh, The Guardian, Trusted Reviews, CreativeBLOQ, and probably quite a few others I’ve forgotten.