Reviews

TECNO Phantom 9 Camera Review

September 7, 2019

The mid-range smartphone market is getting competitive as moe phones get released. The TECNO Phantom 9 is the latest device that wants a slice of that pie. We’ve already played around with it for our hands-on review but the main focus of this article, will be how the four cameras it packs perform and do they give other rival phones a run for their money?

The TECNO Phantom 9 rocks four AI-powered cameras: three rear cameras and one selfe camera. The triple setup includes a primary 16MP camera, an 8MP wide-angle(120-degree field of view) and a 2MP depth sensor.

There’s a 32MP selfie camera housed on the tiny notch that interrupts the top bezel. There is Hair Crack Dual LED flashlights to brighten up selfies shot in lowlight scenarios using Night Algorithm 2.0.

You can adjust the intensity of the flashlights by further sliding down or up on the camera screen.

You also get various shooting modes including Beauty, Bokeh, AR Shot, Wide Selfie, Panorama, HDR plus features such as Auto Scene Detection.

The image quality of the shots taken by the TECNO Phantom 9 are surprisingly good. With good lighting conditions, the quality is pretty consistent. You get neutral colours with on-point edge detection. In certain lighting settings, you are bound to get average performance.

Selfies

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Regular shots

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Bokeh shots are also decent.

Bokeh

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For wide-angle shots, the pictures look amazing as you won’t have to deal with the wide-lens barrel distortion. However, they’ll appear darker, unlike the regular shots.

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The lack of a dedicated night mode is going to be a huge con but the low light photos turn out good enough.

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For videos, the TECNO Phantom 9 shoots full HD videos at 30fps(frames per second) and for a phone at this segment, they are decent enough but the lack of stabilization will make the videos appear shaky.

Conclusion

On its own, the TECNO Phantom 9 does pretty well for regular shots but when you put it difficult light settings, it struggles although the shots don’t look that bad – you get average performance. Also, it doesn’t help that the phone doesn’t come with a manual mode to tweak things around.

If you’re looking for a really good camera phone that will work under any given light setting, then you should skip the TECNO Phantom 9.

However, if you’re into selfies, then this is the phone for you.

We’ll be putting it against another phone at the same price point(Ksh 25,000), so stay tuned for our comparison review coming out in the next few days. Our full review is also coming out soon.