March 30, 2021. OnePlus has just announced a partnership with Hasselblad, the Swedish camera manufacturer, for the OnePlus 9 series camera system. $150 million committed over three years. Hasselblad color calibration profiles in the camera app. Access to Hasselblad’s optical engineers for camera tuning. The OnePlus 9 Pro launches today as the first device carrying the Hasselblad co-development branding.
The tech press response is cautious, and the caution is warranted. Hasselblad has been working with DJI on drone cameras for several years. The relationship between a Swedish legacy camera brand and a Chinese smartphone manufacturer raises a question I keep coming back to: what does a partnership agreement actually change about the physics of a mobile imaging system? Hasselblad’s reputation is in medium-format film cameras, large-format sensors, and optical precision at price points where smartphone camera systems are not competing. What translates from that expertise to a smartphone camera tuned in ColorOS, running on a Qualcomm ISP?
What Hasselblad actually contributes
From the OnePlus 9 Pro samples available today, the Hasselblad partnership is primarily delivering color calibration: the “Hasselblad Natural Color Solution” produces natural-looking tones that prioritize accuracy over the aggressive sharpening and saturation common in competing devices. This is a real and valued quality to many photographers. It is also not the same as improving the actual imaging capability of the hardware, which is determined by the lens quality, the sensor size, the ISP processing, and the machine learning models doing computational photography behind every shot.
Early reviews are rating the OnePlus 9 Pro camera system as competitive but not leading. Better than the OnePlus 8 Pro, comparable to the Galaxy S21 Ultra in some conditions, behind the Pixel 5 and the iPhone 12 Pro Max in computational photography performance in others. The Hasselblad name is on the lens. The gap is in the algorithm. I am curious to watch whether the partnership delivers real imaging improvement over the next two years of the three-year commitment, or whether the badge is doing more work than the engineering. Time will tell, but today’s launch data suggests the camera is good rather than great, which has always been OnePlus’s camera story regardless of what name is on the module.
Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.