Everyone owns a smartphone these days and nearly every smartphone has a camera, but how do these cameras line up against cameras like the BMPCC? Armed with the Oneplus One smartphone as a comparison, we recently shot a short video while abroad in Morocco.  Now, when it comes to cameras, general rule of thumb is that bigger means better, with a...

Everyone owns a smartphone these days and nearly every smartphone has a camera, but how do these cameras line up against cameras like the BMPCC? Armed with the Oneplus One smartphone as a comparison, we recently shot a short video while abroad in Morocco. 

Now, when it comes to cameras, general rule of thumb is that bigger means better, with a bigger sensor meaning better low light performance, sharper images and less noise. With smartphones being incredibly small these days, this means their sensors are tiny in comparison to the full frame 35 mm sensors, often found on high end cameras like the Canon 5D, but with the advancements of technology, these smaller sensors are quickly catching up with these high end sensors, rivaling them on lowlight performance as well as sharpness. The Oneplus one is armed with a Sony 5.867mm IMX214 stacked CMOS sensor, with 13.13 megapixels, this camera can record 1080p at 60fps as well as 4k at 30fps. This beefy little sensor can definitely put up a fight against its bigger brothers.

 b2ap3_thumbnail_SensorSizes.jpg

Filmed at 4k and rendered at 1080p, we produced this little video just to show what the OnePlus One IMX214 sensor is capable of. At first glance, the video is incredibly crisp and sharp with very little noise, even at low light. The colours also pop out, but this is helped with colour grading. Probably the only downfall of this camera is the dynamic range, as compared to the BMPCC, in the highlights as well as the shadows, a bit of detail is lost, but this can be recovered through post processing. 

[embed=videolink]{"video":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T222x79xSCY","width":"400","height":"225"}[/embed]

Overall, with the quality of this camera and the general quality of smartphone cameras are slowly catching up with the quality of professional cameras like the BMPCC, but are still a bit off, but with a bit of post processing this does make smartphones a viable B-camera, especially with the option of 4k as well as 60fps at 1080p.