The OnePlus 2 Review
by Brandon Chester on December 14, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 2
Display
At this point, it's hard to excuse shipping a smartphone without a great display. Not just great in terms of resolution, contrast, and brightness, but also great in terms of color accuracy. We've seen even inexpensive smartphones like the Moto G and the Lumia 640 achieve levels of color accuracy that weren't achieved even by many flagship smartphones only a few years ago. As for OnePlus, the OnePlus One was notable for bringing a very accurate and high resolution display to a low price point, and at the time it was one of the best displays you could get on a smartphone. With that being achieved by their very first smartphone, OnePlus has some big shoes to fill with its follow up.
To analyze the quality of a smartphone's display we run it through our custom display workflow which measures accuracy relative to the sRGB color space. Measurements are performed with an i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and organized using SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.
Out of the box, things look promising for the OnePlus 2. The display can get quite bright, and despite that it can also get quite dark, which leads to it achieving the best contrast ratio on record for an LCD device.
Unfortunately, there's not much good news beyond high brightness and deep blacks. Greyscale accuracy on the OnePlus 2 is extremely poor. Right out of the gate, there's a large imbalance between the red and blue components that make up the shades of grey, and that gap grows increasingly large as you move toward white. The gamma is also quite a disaster, with a high degree of irregularity. Honestly I don't really know what to say, as this result is quite shocking when one looks back at how accurate the OnePlus One was. The OnePlus 2 is simply too blue, and even without the blue shift the highly irregular gamma will cause issues with both greyscale and color mixture rendition.
Moving on to the saturation sweep test, the OnePlus 2 again performs poorly. Every primary and secondary color with the exception of blue has a high degree of error, particularly red, magenta, and cyan. While in this test the phone narrowly avoids being the worst result on the chart, it's not very far off, and can hardly be called accurate. There's clear saturation compression occurring, with OnePlus managing to be accurate for more of the 100% saturation values, but being undersaturated for most values below that.
With poor greyscale accuracy, irregular gamma, and inaccurate rendition of primary and secondary colors, there's no hope for accurate color mixtures on the OnePlus 2's display. There's really not much more to be said. We're not talking about the kind of inaccuracy that you'd get from an oversaturated panel, but instead just general inaccuracy where no color is quite how it should be. It seems like OnePlus just focused on making sure the panel matched the sRGB gamut and put no effort into any further calibration.
The display quality of the OnePlus 2 is not impressive at all. For a $400 phone this is simply unacceptable, and it's such an enormous regression from the OnePlus One. What's even more problematic is how OnePlus keeps tweaking the display settings with their updates, and you never know whether it's going to change for the better or for the worse. I've seen the gamma curve change significantly, but the overall accuracy didn't improve for the better because some aspects improved and others got worse. In any case, I don't know what happened when OnePlus was deciding upon the display attributes they would be targeting, but as far as being accurate to the Rec. 709 standard goes the OnePlus 2 is actually one of the worst devices on record, and I'm at a loss as to how to explain why they allowed it to fall so far behind the original.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
132 Comments
View All Comments
Allan_Hundeboll - Wednesday, December 16, 2015 - link
Some info in this review is wrong. OnePlus One do not have OIS but it does have a metal frame.jabber - Wednesday, December 16, 2015 - link
I was going to get the One Plus 2 but waited so long for an invite I just gave up and went on Amazon and bought a LG G4.The invite appeared the next day. I kind of thought it would. Too late guys. You lost a sale.
I do not regret getting the G4. Great phone.
gg555 - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link
This review demonstrates everything that I've always thought about OnePlus. It's all hype over substance.They do not make flagship phones (let alone flagship killers). They put a couple high end features in the phone, cut corners in many other places, try to distract and dazzle you with the high end features, and then sell you essentially a mid-range phone at a mid-range price, which is exactly what you should expect for the money.
They also have engineering issues and not so great quality control. How they can have taken the already hobbled Snapdragon 810 and reduced it's performance even more, to the level of a budget phone like a Moto E (as the review says) is beyond comprehension. But still, they made a whole big promise about how they'd handled the 810s heat issues. Handled it by making the chipset worse than far inferior chipsets.
If this is your budget range, you're far better off with a Moto X, which is a truly nice phone.
p51d007 - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Not to mention out right LIES."First to have a USB-C port"....yeah, the plug & jack are "USB-C" like, but the PORT itself is still USB-2. No support, buggy software, ghost touches.
The X is a MUCH better phone. If you really really have your heart set on the 2 (personally, I'd pass), wait a few months for them to eventually work out the bugs. The OnePlus One is now not really a bad phone, but it took them nearly a year to get most of the bugs out.
OnePlus, is nothing but the beta tester for Oppo. Every OnePlus phone, has a Oppo version that comes out later. The Oppo Find9, was SUPPOSE to be out at the end of this year, but feedback from the suckers who bought the OnePlus2, about the glitches with the overheating/underclocking, they've DELAYED the Find9 until next year and it will come out with the SD820 chip, NOT the 810 chip.
UtilityMax - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
I have OPO since February, and it had been running pretty smooth. Fantastic smartphone for the money. Even today, it sort of makes sense given the price dropped $50 to $300 for 64GB version. One amazing thing about it is not just the great screen, camera and battery life, but also the reception. I must be living in an area with a sh1tty LTE coverage since all of our other smartphones work barely faster than 3GB (including iPhones), but the OPO, zOMG! The signal is like 10dbm better at all times, which results in very nice data benchmarks often slaughtering the broadband connection I have (used to be 20Mbps, now 40Mbps with Oneplus One getting that much over LTE)UtilityMax - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
I'd disagree with your comment. Both the OnePlus One and OnePlus X were a home run, but with a few small reservations. OnePlus One was well rounded and was at least 90% as good as any flagship phone, but sold for about half the typical price. Even today the 64GB Oneplus One probably remains the best $300 (with a few reservations, such as the store shows they're out of stock). And Oneplus X is basically a Oneplus One, but in a form factor and build quality that really should have been in Oneplus Two, and at $250 in the US, again it's one of the best phone for that price. The Oneplus Two may have its issues, but guess what.. all of the current crop of Android phones using Snapdragon 64-bit 808/810 SoCs have those issues.Ashwith - Friday, December 25, 2015 - link
Seems like the reviewer does not have much experience in reviewing nor regarding smartphone. These days we get to see reviewers dime a dozen and sadly most of them sucks like this one. There is no phone which is perfect and oneplus 2 has its list of cons which are many. But for the prize of $389/- it will give a stiff challenge to all other phones in that range. Only when you use 5X you will get to see that it does not stand a chance with Oneplus 2 and along with goes the credibility of this reviewer. S6 on the other hand does better in all departments. Cheers!UtilityMax - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
One great alternative is still the old good Oneplus One. Sold for 250/300 for the 16GB/64GB version respectively. Even today, it's still probably the best $300 smartphone, which is a testament to how well it was made. The only issue though is that it's out of stock at oneplus store...blzd - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Your experience reviewing and regarding smartphones is clearly inferior to that of the reviewers. Maybe one day you'll review a smartphone and not just try and justify your purchase decisions. Cheers!Cloudane - Sunday, January 31, 2016 - link
Yikes... what a slating. I just ordered one of these having seen other reviews and thinking they were good, starting to wonder about cancelling my order now :(