The ASUS ZenFone 7 Pro Review: The Triple Flip-Camera
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 1, 2020 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Asus
- Smartphones
- ZenFone 7
- ZenFone 7 Pro
Conclusion & End Remarks
As we wrap up the review of the ZenFone 7 Pro, we’ve come to make some noteworthy points about ASUS’ new flagship device, most of them positive, but also with some negatives.
Starting off with the design of the phone, the one thing that’s notable about the ZenFone 7 versus the previous generation ZenFone iterations is simply that this year’s model is supersized to a larger form-factor, which might not be to everyone’s taste. Although short of being a beast like the ROG Phone III, at 77.28mm wide and 230g heavy, the ZenFone 7 will dwarf many other phones in the market.
Thankfully due to the rounded back glass panel and frame, the phone still manages to have good ergonomics and doesn’t feel quite as big as it is.
The display on the ZenFone 7 is meant to be a key feature for the phone, but that’s not due to its specs as the 1080p 90Hz panel doesn’t really stand out in any regard, being mostly average across the board. Instead, the lack of a display notch or hole camera cut-out is the phone’s special feature, enabled through the unique flip-camera design. ASUS’s hardware implementation is generally excellent and the whole mechanism feels extremely solid. The positive of such a system is that you’re getting extremely high-quality selfie cameras as you’re essentially using the main cameras of the phone.
Performance of the ZenFone 7 Pro was excellent and in most cases top-notch. In fact, gaming performance was so good that it puts into question why you’d buy the ROG Phone III.
One answer to that question would be battery life. Oddly enough, the ZenFone 7 Pro didn’t fare quite as well in this regard, and actually landed well short of expectations, barely matching other 120Hz devices of the same class. I’m not sure why this is, and we’re still rerunning battery tests right now, but it just seems the phone isn’t as efficient as competitor devices or the ROG Phone III. It’s not a bad performance thanks to the 5000mAh battery, but it’s also not what you expect when you consider its capacity.
ASUS’s camera performance on the ROG Phone III wasn’t too great, and I’m glad to report that the ZenFone 7 does improve upon it by quite a bit. The new sensor has stronger optics, the telephoto module is generally quite competitive, and the new sensor on the ultra-wide has also augmented the picture quality of this module. Nevertheless, ASUS still has a long way to go in terms of software processing, as daylight shots often still have large issues with exposures and HDR processing, making the ZenFone 7 still rather lacklustre here.
Low-light photography was a big surprise, as ASUS’ night mode computational photography mode is seemingly top-notch, not only competing with the best of the best, but many times actually being the top performer in our testing. It’s to be noted that this praise can only be said of the Pro variant, as the regular model’s lack of OIS is likely to make it lag behind by quite a bit.
One big surprise for me was the overall software experience as ASUS’ latest ZenUI software interface seemed quite well designed and keepings things clean and functional, all whilst adding a lot of useful features.
Discussions about availability and pricing of the ZenFone 7 series are quite complicated to make due to the phone currently only being officially announced in Taiwan. There, the phone comes in at TWD 21999 and 27990 for the regular and Pro models, which comes to around USD 750 and 950.
For the Pro model, what I think is missing from the package is a better daylight camera experience. Without that, I don’t think the phone is competitive in its pricing as you can get much better value alternatives such as the OnePlus 8 Pro or the S20+.
The regular variant seems more reasonable in its price, but then again there’s the camera aspect which comes at play, and a OnePlus 8 would again present the better value device.
It’s kind of hard to position the ZenFone 7 and 7 Pro in the market – if they were perfectly performing devices, then those prices could be rationalised, however as a matter of fact, there’s some lacklustre aspects to them. ASUS has to either really up their camera processing game in the coming months with firmware updates, or quickly reduce the pricing to something that’s closer to the $560 mark at which the ZenFone 6 was released last year.
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JfromImaginstuff - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
Seriously, doing away with the headphone jack in exchange for 5G. Might as well go with Samsungs.yu - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
Yeah they say 5G antennas are small, sometimes they omit the fact that you need more than a dozen of them.melgross - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
You need from three to five, depending on whether you’re using sub mm bands or not, not dozens.Quantumz0d - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
It's 100% b.s LG V60 and Sony Xperia Mark II both of them are 5G and LG even has full U.S band support with mmWave technology as well and has a superior Audio performance from the standalone RFI shielded high end ESS9219 DAC chipset (ESS9218P was being featured in LG phones from V30 and up) and both of them have IP68 rating along with Qi charging too. The fact that Note 20 gets a full blown Silo for the S-Pen makes so fucking ground for these lying bastards. Removing jack is saving pennies and forcing them to buy accessories which also die out due to the Li-Ion technology.5j3rul3 - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
Can anyone describe how to understand the ∆E ITP and ∆E ITP LC value？I did use ∆E 2000 with Gamma 2.2 for long time, but even searching in google, the data just saying about Rec.2100, EOTF, PQ, HLG and ITU-R....
I knew ∆E ITP is a part of Rec.2100 HDR...but, the info I really want to know is the relationship between ∆E ITP (LC) and real world.
∆E 2000 < 1：Great and almost perfect
∆E 2000 < 2：so hard to see the difference and it's good enough for professional users
∆E 2000 < 3：good for general users
∆E 2000 < 5：ok for general users but still has noticebal color difference
∆E 2000 > 7：esay to see the color difference
Can ∆E ITP and ∆E ITP LC use those standards (0 ~ 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 5 ~ 7 ~)?
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
dE ITP is a new standard that takes into account more modern reproduction formats such as HDR. Generally ITP is a little more sensitive than the 2000 standard to colour deviations: https://kb.portrait.com/help/about-deltae-edE ITP LC as I use it in the new reviews is simply a luminance compensated value, meaning that the error value ignores the luminance error and only looks at hue and chromacity. This makes sense for example in this review here as the ZenFone is targeting a 2.4 gamma by default, however our measurements are against a 2.2 gamma target. So the dE LC values are always going to be lower since it ignoers that part of the colour inaccuracy.
Under dE ITP of 1 it's imperceptible, under 3 it becomes acceptable when not viewed next to each other, and over 10 means it's horribly wrong.
5j3rul3 - Thursday, September 3, 2020 - link
Thank you @Andrei, the reply is really helpful!!!Now I can read the Calman's color calibration charts and info well based on that very useful knowledge, and easy to judge which device can provide great display quality.
Two more things I was wondering in this article:
1. The devices that Anandtech had reviewed such as Mate 20, iPhone XR, Xperia 1 even Surface Pro or XPS13, will get the updated display quality review based on the new delta ITP (LC) standard?
2. ASUS ZenFone 7 Series has a telephoto camera that has very similar spec to HUAWEI and Honor devices' (OV8856, 1/4.4", 1 um, F2.2, 80 mm{, OIS}, with terrible PDAF). It brings 3X Optical Zoom to ASUS smartphone first time and I'm expecting the 3X OZ camera can shows on ZenFone 7 Pro's review. This will be interesting if we have a comparison between ZF7P, 1+7P, M30P, P30 those who having a 3X OZ camera.....is there any opportunity to see this kind of comparison?
in the end, I really thank to AnandTech's great quality reviews!!!
shabby - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
"This is something that ASUS actively acknowledges as being a deliberate design choice so that that they could fit in more components and a larger battery"Did they forget about the headphone jack?
drexnx - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
>made phone huge for more componentsoh yeah we couldn't throw the 3.5mm jack in there, not enough room. The 5 gees, you know, they take up too much space.
Hamm Burger - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
I thought that the unexpectedly low battery life might be because this phone did mm-wave 5G. Bit no: having dug up the specs, the highest 5G frequency band it can handle is 3.3–4.2GHz.