Oppo N1 CyanogenMod edition review: Pure mind

13 MP rotating camera

The camera has a 1/3.06" CMOS sensor with 13MP resolution. The lens has a bright F/2.0 aperture and 6 lenses - Oppo says this is the first Android camera with a 6-lens design. More importantly it matches the Nokia Lumia 1020, which also has a 6-element lens - the WP cameraphone has the recognizable ZEISS brand name, but its aperture is F/2.2.

The interface has two control sidebars in the viewfinder, the right one holding the still and video buttons and gallery shortcut, while the left one is for settings, flash and scene selection. The standard way off accessing recently snapped photos is here too - a left swipe - is available and you can swipe up to delete photos from there.

There's a little three dot toggle which will guide you through the different shooting modes - Beauty, Panorama, HDR and Normal.

Camera app

There's a slight drawback that we noticed - turning the camera assembly around doesn't automatically launch the camera app. That's a nice feature, which ColorOS packs, but CyanogenMod doesn't.

Photosphere lets you take Street View panoramas of your surroundings. You start by aligning your image and then just move the phone about following a generated dot. After you've covered the entire surrounding scene the device generates a panorama, which can be viewed as a Photosphere in the Gallery and uploaded to Google's servers to be featured in Maps (if it's good enough).

Photosphere

Anyhow, the CyanogenMod Oppo N1's camera is more than capable of taking detail-rich images in good light. There was plenty of detail even at 100%, but colors are noticeably warmer than they are on the ColorOS version. The metering is also slightly more enthusiastic resulting in the occasional clipped highlight, but the overall output of the two ROMs is on par for the most part. This is to say the output is pretty solid, even if it comes slightly worse than the best snappers out there.

CyanogenMod Oppo N1 camera samples

Macro shooting is good on the CyanogenMod Oppo N1. It captured a lot of detail and blurred the background nicely to create a true macro feel to the image. Check out some full-res samples below.

CyanogenMod Oppo N1 macro samples

HDR mode is available on the regular Oppo N1 as well as the CyanogenMod version. It finds multiple exposures to the same scene and then combines them into a single image. Here are two samples in full-resolution.

CyanogenMod Oppo N1 HDR samples: Off • On

You can see that the CyanogenMod Oppo N1's HDR samples lack in contrast, despite the phone's best efforts. The ColorOS version of the phone managed a better job here.

Photo quality comparison

The CyanogenMod Oppo N1 enters our Photo quality comparison tool to compete its brethren and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. You can see that it's quite noisy, even more so than the ColorOS variant.

Oppo N1 in our photo compare test

Decent video recording

The CyanogenMod Oppo N1 retains its video recording capabilities and just as the regular version records 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second as well as 1080p high dynamic range video and slow-motion WVGA video.

The normal mode of capture resulted in a video with average levels of detail and pleasant colors. Unike the ColorOS running Oppo N1, the CyanogenMod version produced double the bitrate at 18.1Mbps. Unfortunately that doesn't help it deal with the choppiness which is still present and quite irritating.

Check out the 1080p video sample below.

Framerate hovered around 27fps, while audio bitrate was 157 Kbps with 2 channels (read, stereo) and a 48 kHz sampling rate.

HDR video does improve the dynamic, but only slightly and it comes at the expense of contrast, which is ruined. The level of captured detail is about the same, but the HDR video is again, a little choppy.

And finally, there is the slow motion capture. Unlike the Galaxy Note 3, which captures slo-mo clips in 1280 x 720, the Oppo N1 can only go up to 800 x 480px (WVGA). What's worse the resolved detail doesn't even do that resolution justice.

You can find an untouched 1080p video sample (00:10s, 23.1 MB) for direct download. An HDR sample (00:10s, 21.6 MB) is available, too.

Video quality comparison

To greet the Oppo N1 in our Video quality comparison tool we've lined up the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the ColorOS Oppo N1. However, you can also pit it against the HTC One Max, Samsung Galaxy Note 3 or any other device you wish at the tool's page.

Oppo N1 in our Video quality comparison tool