OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite hands-on review

Camera

The Nord CE4 Lite has only a single usable camera on the back. This is a 50MP f1.95 system with 25mm equivalent lens using a Sony LYT-600 sensor. The other camera on the back is just a depth sensor for portrait mode. Finally, on the front is a 16MP f2.4 camera with fixed focus and 24mm equivalent focal length.

The camera app is basic with a fairly typical set of features and options that you expect to see on every device these days, including a portrait mode with skin retouching option, filters, slow motion, and time-lapse modes, and a pro mode without RAW capture. There's a handy text scanner mode, which is useful for capturing documents as it automatically crops out the area outside of the document while saving.

Let's move on to discussing the image quality of the sole usable camera on the back. The main camera has above-average image quality with a few caveats. The color reproduction and white balance were good but with a tendency to oversaturate greens, making foliage more vibrant than it was in reality. The detail captured is good but oversharpened and exaggerated a bit. The dynamic range was a bit disappointing as the camera would struggle with bright highlights and dark shadows in high-contrast scenes. There's also noticeable color noise in the shadows.

Main camera images

Compared to the previous generation model, the Nord CE4 Lite does perform a little better in terms of details and color reproduction.

Unlike the previous model's lossless 3x digital zoom, the Nord CE4 Lite has no special tricks up its sleeve. You get a button for 2x zoom but it seems to simply crop into the 12.5MP image and then blows it back up, which results in poor detail when viewed up close. The images are far from being unusable but anything higher than 2x is not fit for viewing on larger screens.

2x digital images

Video recording is where the Nord CE3 Lite impresses the least. You are limited to a maximum of 1080p resolution at 30fps on all cameras. Thankfully, there is optical as well as electronic stabilization available.

The quality of recording isn't too bad but you aren't getting the same surplus of detail that you do from 4K resolution and the sharpening doesn't quite make up for it. The video also has the same issues with dynamic range and noise as the still images. The stabilization could also be better.

The issue here seems more to do with the choice of the Snapdragon 695 chipset rather than the camera hardware itself. A more modern and capable chip would have supported higher resolutions and better image processing and gotten more out of the same camera hardware. Still, we are getting better camera performance on the Nord CE4 Lite compared to its predecessor.