#it's odd seeing it without the distortion & in the bigger aspect ratio

[emdotcom]

Found the source for that office render!

[ladystylestores]

OnePlus Nord review: Android’s best bang for your buck

The front, featuring a beautiful 90Hz display.

Ron Amadeo

The extremely vibrant blue back.

Ron Amadeo

Here you can better make out the shape of the display, along with the camera cutout in the top-left corner.

Ron Amadeo

A closer look at the camera cutout.

Ron Amadeo

Even though it’s a mid-range smartphone, you still get lots of camera lenses.

Ron Amadeo

Note the total lack of curve in the display. It’s flat!

Ron Amadeo

The camera bump.

Ron Amadeo

The bottom has a USB-C port and no headphone jack.

Ron Amadeo

The side.

Ron Amadeo

OnePlus is coming back to the budget smartphone market in a big way with the “OnePlus Nord,” a device with an odd name but a pretty spectacular feature set for the ~$450 price tag. We’ve had the phone for almost two weeks now and can say it’s easily one of the best Android phones on the market.

Let’s talk about what OnePlus is offering. With Snapdragon 865 phones often topping $1,000, this is the first phone we’ve tried with the cheaper Snapdragon 765G; at just one step down in Qualcomm’s lineup, this is what most manufacturers seem to be going with to bring smartphone prices back down to Earth. The phone still has a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and while it’s only using UFS 2.1 storage, the phone still feels plenty fast. The headline feature is probably the 90Hz display, which is sneaking out of the flagship realm and into less-expensive phones.

The biggest downside to this phone is the distribution; for now, it is not for sale in the US. OnePlus is sending a lot of mixed messages as to future US availability of the Nord. First, the official quote from CEO Pete Lau doesn’t totally close the door on the idea, saying, “We are going to start relatively small with this new product line by first introducing it in Europe and India. But don’t worry, we’re also looking to bring more affordable smartphones to North America in the near future as well.”

OnePlus both sent the Nord to US media and has the phone listed on its US website, which it usually doesn’t do for phones that aren’t launching here. The company is also running a “Beta Program” for the US and Canada that will see 50 people get the phone. People on OnePlus’ mailing list have been receiving a provocative email that screams “OnePlus Nord is coming to North America” (meaning all 50 units of the beta test).

You know, on second thought, maybe OnePlus isn’t sending mixed signals. Please just officially announce that the phone will be for sale here. It’s good!

Design—indistinguishable from a flagship

You wouldn’t know the Nord is a cheaper phone from the design or construction, since it’s basically identical to any high-end smartphone on the market. You get a standard all-glass smartphone with Gorilla Glass on the front and back. There’s a slim-bezel display with a hole-punch camera on the front and a ton of cameras on the back. Other than the option for a hyper-vibrant light blue color, it’s a positively generic design. In the case of a mid-range phone, that’s a good thing—there really haven’t been any corners cut here.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: ONEPLUS NORD SCREEN 6.44-inch, 2400×1080, 90Hz AMOLED

(408ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio)

OS Android 10 with Oxygen OS skin CPU Eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G

Two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores, up to 2.4GHz, 7nm

RAM 8GB, or 12GB GPU Adreno 620 STORAGE 128GB or 256GB, UFS 2.1 NETWORKING 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.1, GPS, NFC PORTS USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C CAMERA Rear: 48MP main camera, 8MP wide-angle, 2MP Macro, 5MP depth sensor

Front: 32MP main, 8MP wide-angle

SIZE 158.3×73.3×8.2mm WEIGHT 184g BATTERY 4100mAh STARTING PRICE ~$456 OTHER PERKS 30w quick charging, optical in-display fingerprint sensor

The OnePlus Nord’s primary sales pitch is that you’re getting the best display ever fitted to a mid-range smartphone. The 90Hz display means this phone looks and feels like a flagship from the past year or so, and it’s something no other company offers at this price right now. A faster display is one of the biggest improvements in smartphones in the past few years and makes everything about the phone feel faster and smoother. Scrolling, swiping, and animations all look and feel better, provided your phone has the horsepower to draw everything at 90fps, and we’re happy to say the OnePlus Nord is definitely fast enough. Once you’ve used a higher refresh rate display, it’s hard to go back to anything else.

Another major point for the OnePlus Nord display is that it’s completely flat, a stark contrast to the last few phones from OnePlus (and Samsung, and LG, and most Chinese OEMs) that have put a curve on the left and right side of the display. Curves have few upsides and come with a host of problems. A curved display can make the text hard to read and will distort the top and bottom of landscape videos. In some lighting, the curve gets a ton of glare, making it hard to see the sides of the display. Manufacturers have convinced each other that a curved display “looks cool,” but looking at a distorted screen doesn’t seem cool to me at all.

The Nord has a flat screen designed to display flat apps, webpages, and videos just like the creators intended, and it’s glorious. OnePlus says they did this because a curved display is more expensive, but curved displays are a gimmick. More expensive phones should use flat screens, too.

There’s a sizable cutout in the top-left corner of the display for the dual front-facing camera, making the phone look like a mirrored version of the Galaxy S10+. Beside the main 32MP front camera is the 8MP wide-angle camera, letting selfie shutterbugs get that wide shot without the need for a selfie stick. This is something manufacturers like Samsung and Google did a generation ago and then quickly discarded for the current generation, and no one really complained. I’m not sure why OnePlus is trying to bring back front wide-angle cams.

The oval-shaped camera cutout is the strangest part of the design. Being on the left side means it pushes the clock to the right, which now isn’t on the left side of the screen, or the right side, it’s just kind of floating around at the one-quarter mark of the display. It’s odd-looking.

Of course, there’s also the non-Android competition to consider, and any mid-range phone has a big problem in the form of the new iPhone SE, which at just $400 in the US is a killer deal. Apple’s SoC prowess and Qualcomm’s Android monopoly mean this mid-range iPhone is faster than even the most expensive Android phones this year and might out-benchmark Qualcomm’s chips from next year, too. There is more to a phone than benchmarks, though, and the OnePlus Nord actually has a decent argument against the iPhone SE, thanks to the bigger, faster display and more modern design. Right now, OnePlus also isn’t going up against the $400 iPhone SE, which is the price in the US. In Europe and India, Apple’s mid-ranger is a lot more expensive, at about $570, so OnePlus is actually undercutting Apple by quite a bit.

The light-blue version I was sent is one of the most vibrantly colored products I have ever seen, and photos really don’t do it justice. The light blue back is nearly luminescent, and while it’s not the dramatic color-changing effect that we’ve seen on other phones, it feels like it’s part of the same branch of materials science. Light likes to bounce around and scatter inside the glass panel, and the whole thing kind of lights up. It’s pretty, but it’s also fragile glass, so most people are just going to put a case on it.

The metal mid-frame is exposed around the sides, and this, too, gets a hyper-vibrant color treatment: a metallic light blue with a mirror finish. On the bottom you’ll find the SIM slot, USB-C port, and the phone’s only media speaker. There’s no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. On the left side, you have OnePlus’ trademark three-position mute switch, which changes between sound, silence, and vibrate, followed by the power button.

There are four cameras on the back, and together with the front, that makes six cameras. I have to ask, is it really necessary to have a budget phone with six cameras? If you asked me to cut down a phone’s bill of materials, the first thing I would do is start hacking and slashing at the superfluous camera lenses, but this $450 phone has more cameras than even a $1,200 Galaxy S20 Ultra. Google’s budget approach of “one good camera” on the Pixel 3a seems like the more reasonable approach, and maybe if OnePlus did that, it could bring the price down even more!

For a mid-range phone, there really isn’t much missing here. You still get NFC, the same in-screen optical fingerprint reader as every other phone, and OnePlus’ fantastic 30W quick charging. Compared to a flagship phone, the big list of missing features would be the aforementioned single speaker instead of stereo, no wireless charging, and no official water-resistance rating. OnePlus says the phone still has gaskets to provide some water resistance, but with no official rating it’s hard to say how much, like “is this submersible?” Even with an official rating, no smartphone company stands behind its water-resistance ratings with an official policy to replace a water damaged phone under warranty (see policies from Apple, Samsung, Google, Verizon), so I can’t ding OnePlus too much.

A surprisingly strong argument against the iPhone SE

The OnePlus Nord versus the iPhone SE. There is a bit of a size difference.

Ron Amadeo

The backs.

Ron Amadeo

You get a lot more webpage on the 6.44-inch display than on the 4.7-inch one.

Ron Amadeo

Android’s competition is stronger than it has ever been this generation, thanks to Apple’s launch of the iPhone SE. The SE has really upended the mid-range market by offering the same Apple A13 Bionic SoC that comes in the bigger iPhone, but in a $400 device. Android phones couldn’t compete with Apple’s SoC at the high end (certainly not at single-threaded performance), but to now have a $400 device that is still faster than the most expensive Android devices is downright embarrassing. Qualcomm, which is Android’s biggest SoC vendor, really has no answers at all for a mid-range device like this.

There’s more to a phone than just benchmarks, though, and I think the OnePlus Nord actually has a surprisingly solid argument against the SE. The 90Hz display is something the iPhone SE doesn’t offer, and it makes a major difference in how fast the phone feels. If you didn’t show them a benchmark first, I bet most people would say the 90Hz Nord feels faster than the 60Hz iPhone SE. The Nord also has a much more modern design with a huge display and thin bezels, while the iPhone SE design looks like it’s several years old. The SE design basically is several years old—Apple copy-and-pasted the iPhone 7 design from 2016. Some people might call the iPhone’s tiny 4.7-inch display a good thing, but, according to every smartphone manufacturer’s market research department and lots of sales data, those people are a vocal minority. Smaller phones also have worse battery life, a common complaint with the new SE.

There’s also the matter that the SE’s headline $400 price tag is a sweetheart deal for the US, and in the rest of the world, the SE is much more expensive. In Europe and India, where the Nord will actually be for sale, the SE is $570, so OnePlus is actually significantly undercutting Apple. The $450 price in Europe is already enough of a difference, but India gets a special, lower-tier SKU with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for ₹24,999, or $335.

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Cine Gear Expo: Cool Stuff

Cine Gear Expo, the two-day show on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, is the best place to see industry tools, many of which you’ll be hard-pressed to find at NAB or IBC.

A camera crane and a banner? It must be Cine Gear Expo time again!

Yesterday I covered Cine Gear’s three big camera-related announcements; today I’ll look at some of the other interesting things I ran across or that people steered me to.

Studio air conditioning

It was a toasty weekend in L.A., and this hydra-headed ductwork in Stage 14 helped keep things from getting too hot. See? I promised you “cool stuff”, and I delivered! <rimshot> Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week…

ARRI

ARRI Alexa 65

Alexa 65 is ARRI’s large-format, rental-only camera. The 2.11:1 aspect ratio sensor is 54.12×25.58mm and packs 6560×3100 photosites (by comparison, a “Super35mm” sensor is typically less than 25mm wide and 14mm high). Yes, it’s bigger and  heavier and its sensor captures a prodigious amount of data, but its control layout, menus, and workflow are just like those of an Alexa XT. Why mess with success?

ARRI large-format lenses, and one Cooke

More ARRI large-format lenses

ARRI Look Library

A swatch book for looks? The ARRI Look Library is a complete set of 87 Alexa Mini /Amira Premium LUTs spanning a wide variety of looks, and it comes with a swatch book: each look is shown on a head shot, a street scene, and a car image, so you and your director can pick a look you like and load it into camera. Looks come in three different strengths and are tweakble, too. Alexa Minis and Amira Premiums shipped after May 1st already include the Look Library; you can upgrade earlier cameras (once they have SUP 5 installed) for around €280 if I recall correctly. And there’s even an iPhone app—no camera necessary if you just want to, uh, take a look (pun intended).

Lens Evaluation

Stay focused!

The Fujinon booth included a lens projector and Matthew Duclos of Duclos Lenses described how to use a projector to evaluate lenses.

Matthew Duclos adjusting zoom and focus, as seen by the camera…

…and how the scene looked to the eye.

While resolution measurement, brightness falloff, and image circle are easily understood, the projector holds surprises. Any geometric distortion you see on a projector is the inverse of what you’ll see while shooting with that lens: if the projector shows pincushioning, you’ll get barrel distortion instead. It makes sense when you think about it—the projector pushes the light of a rectilinear reticle out through the lens, the camera pulls the light of the real world in.

Lighting

Carpetlight

Carpetlight: the name pretty much sums it up. It’s an array of dimmable bi-color LEDs (daylight/tungsten) on fabric, using conductive threads for power. You can hang it, drape it, even tie it in knots, as with that drape on the right side of the booth.

Carpetlight at full brightness: That’s full sunlight falling on it at the front.

Hive Lighting

Hive Lighting has been providing power-efficient plasma lighting for a while, but the new-this-year WASP 100-C is a 5-color LED fixture. It’s fully dimmable, white-light tweakable from 1650K–8000K (plus any saturated color you’d like in 6º increments), and can be set up manually or over DMX.

WASP 100-C controls

The business end of the WASP

The WASP can drive a mini Source Four front end

You can fit a variety of lenses, reflectors, Chimeras, and other light shapers. The unit runs very cool. It’s about $1000.

LightBlade LEDs

LightBlade LEDs are a co-production of NBCUniversal and Cineo Lighting. From the press release:

At Cine Gear, three different NBCUniversal LightBlade configurations will be on display:  the LB50 stand-alone linear source, the LB1K, an integrated 4′ x 4′ soft source, and the LightBlade Ladder Light, which continues the familiar form factors of NBCUniversal’s backdrop lighting system. The lightweight 1.5″ x 48″, 50 watt light engines are designed to operate in a variety of physical layouts, including stand-alone operation.  NBCUniversal LightBlade products are versatile, lightweight, silent and flicker-free, and built to endure the wear and tear of staging and production.

NBCUniversal LightBlade products feature reference-quality variable white light from 2700K to 6500K. They have superior color rendering with typical CRI>90, R9>95, and a saturated color engine that works creatively with high-CRI white light. Additional products are being developed for use on location and on stage.

Yes, there’s a website, but at press time it only had three bullet points and a phone number. Presumably there will be more posted once products get closer to shipment.

And it wasn’t just LightBlade and the WASP; high-output, high-saturation, variable-color (yet tunable for “white” light) LEDs in sticks, tubes, blobs, and panels were all over the show.

Cameras & Rigs

Redrock Micro Retroflex / Sony A5100 (?) / Veydra 50mm

I always get a kick out of Redrock Micro’s Retroflex rigs. They convert small, EVF-less hybrid cameras into eye-level Super8-styled shooters.

Panaflex Platinum loading demo

The S.O.C. gave loading demos on a Panaflex Platinum. Film loading is still a useful skill… but for how much longer will that be true?

Zacuto GH5 cage (with optional top handle)

I’m usually ambivalent about Zacuto rigging, but they’ve done it right with this GH5 cage. With the accessory shoe unavailable (it’s where the GH5’s XLR adapter attaches), many hybrid camera cages use the 1/4″x20 tripod socket as their sole mounting point, with perhaps a couple of additional points of contact to keep the camera from rotating. But that’s not enough to prevent “oilcanning”, the flexing of the camera on its mounting point. What to do?

Zacuto GH5 cage left side

Zacuto GH5 cage right side

Zacuto adds two more hardpoints, bolted to the carry-strap eyelets, for a rigid three-point mount. That is how it’s Supposed To Be Done. As a bonus, the right grip is left unobstructed for a comfortable handhold; you can fly the caged GH5 at eye level about as easily as an uncaged GH5. Well done.

Steadicam M-1 Volt

The Steadicam M-1 Volt marries the passive inertial stabilization of the M-1 with the active servo stabilization of the Volt. It flies just like a normal Steadicam, but when you’re hands-off, it holds its orientation, without bobble or drift.

The inertial brains live in that slab beneath the power distro

Simple controls, tweakable on the fly

Roll and pitch servos gently keep the camera aimed yet allow the usual inputs when you want to steer

Mark Weingartner told me he thought it was likely the most significant advance in Steadicams since, um, the original Steadicam itself. I tend to agree.

Chin-cam from Radiant Images

I don’t know what it’s really called, but this odd rig captures the P.O.V. of your chin and feeds a Codex recorder on a backpack frame. It’s the sort of oddball rig that Radiant Images seems to specialize in.

Lunch

Death by chocolate-dipped strawberries

It’s not a proper shoot—or a show—without craft services. Ingallina’s Box Lunch handed out samples; I enjoyed a fresh and tasty pesto tortellini / mozzarella / tomato skewer.

Daylight Displays and HDR

SmallHD 3203 HDR. 32 inches, 1500 nits

SmallHD and Boland were showing field monitors in full sunlight.

I should also mention that Canon showed two HDR displays—inside, not in sunlight—including one that peaked at 2000 nits and could maintain that level across the entire screen, without dimming. Freaking gorgeous—as it should be, for $50,000.

Canon ran an HDR demo reel in which every single shot was properly graded: high brightness and wide color were used as accents, and no shot was “turned up to 11” just because it could be. Seeing HDR used with that level of restraint gives me hope for the future.

More Anamorphics

Atlas Orion anamorphic image, shot off a monitor

Anamorphics, cheap? Atlas Lens Co. showed their first Orions, a set of three 2x anamorphic primes for $8000 each ($24,000 for the set). The lenses cover Alexa open gate, open to T2, and focus down to 2.75 feet (40mm and 65mm) or 3.3 feet (100mm).

Orion 65mm on a GH5 via PL-to-MFT adapter

I pixel-peeped the lens on the GH5 using focus mag. Plenty of character, but not too much. Not quite as crisp as a Cooke but consistent at all apertures, so you won’t need to stop down for sharpness. That means plenty of shallow-focus, wide-aperture oval bokeh to enjoy. PL or EF mount, interchangeable. And if that’s not enough, three additional focal lengths are under design, too. Sweet.

DIT-Cart-In-A-Box

Acromove ThunderPack

Acromove is the new identity for Athens, Greece-based Motion FX. The ThunderPack line is a range of DIT-cart-in-a-Pelican-case products: power, storage, I/O, and networking in a robust carry-on form factor.

Acromove ThunderPack top panel

Li-ion batteries are caged on the left, with disconnect switches allowing air transport. Weather-shielded connectors allow video and data I/O, power in and out, Thunderbolt, Ethernet, SAS, HDMI, etc. Two antennas provide a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Acromove ThunderPack with solar-power array

This particular pack runs full-tilt for about six hours on battery power alone while driving a MacBook Pro, LTO drive, and card reader. With the solar panel for trickle-charging, it’ll  run all day long. You can also feed it AC if you have that luxury.

ThunderPack drive array

ThunderPack spec sheet

Panavision

Panavision HDR EVF

Panavision demonstrated an HDR EVF for the Millenium DXL camera. The OLED EVF peak around 600 nits and can maintain 300 nits across the entire screen. It looks fabulous—more importantly, it brings the HDR viewing experience directly to the camera, so the DP or operator can see the effect that really bright wall sconce in the background has on the perception of the picture.

PX-Pro color filter demo: unfiltered spectrum above, filtered below

Panavision also showed their PX-Pro color spectrum filter, the spectral shaping filter—doing things like cutting excess IR—used in front of the sensor. The PX-Pro uses absorptive dyes, not reflective layers, so it’s much less prone to angular color shifts, as the demo above shows. Panavision extols the PX-Pro’s characteristics of making “colors appear smoother and have more transition with less red contamination. This is very helpful in tertiary and complex colors in skin tones as well as improved transitions in lens flares and shadow-to-light gradients.”

Panavision Millenium DXL

Both the HDR EVF and the PX-Pro are used on the Millenium DXL, Panavision’s large-format production camera introduced last year. Michael Cioni tells me there are now “several dozen” of these cameras in daily use.

DJI

DJI Spark responding to hand gestures

DJI’s new Spark drone was a crowd-pleaser with its gestural interface. The $500 Spark is more of a consumer item than a pro cine tool, but it was still fun to see it respond like a well-trained dog, rising and falling on command and settling gently onto an upturned palm.

RED

RED No. 13, because it’s not a proper show unless there’s some weird and scary-looking RED camera somewhere

RED was in Stage 2 along with DJI and Panavision, and RED is probably why there were waiting lines to get in; the fire marshal didn’t want an overcrowded venue.

Hawk65 anamorphics on the RED booth

AirHollywood

AirHollywood aircraft cabin

AirHollywood brought an aircraft cabin to the Paramount lot.

AirHollywood aircraft cabin, reverse angle

AirHollywood aircraft cabin, exterior view

Yes, it’s a cabin built onto a flatbed: why go to the set when you can have the set come to you?

If you’re prefer to go to the set, AirHollywood has aircraft-themed shooting stages in the LA area, Victorville CA, and Atlanta GA. And when you’re done shooting, take  a trip back to the “decadence of the 1970s” with the Pan Am Experience. I am not making this stuff up.

End Credits

A tip of the hat to Jim Rolin of Videofax for the tipoffs on the ARRI Look Library and Atlas Orion lenses (Videofax has orders in for the Orions), and to Mark Weingartner, ASC regarding the Steadicam M-1 Volt. Thanks, guys!

As to the hat being tipped, maybe it’s this one…

  Disclosure: I went to Cine Gear Expo on my own dime (actually, it cost a considerable number of dimes once flights, hotel, and car were included). There’s no relationship between me and any of the companies mentioned, and no one paid me anything for coverage. However, as the Ingallina folks gave me free food, I figured I should at least include a picture of their dessert strawberries.

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