The OnePlus 10 Pro has a 10-bit color mode on its cameras, and it’s an unusual feature that can take great photos. Except we can’t show them to you.
The OnePlus 10 Pro’s camera has a 10-bit color mode, which the company says is great for amateur photographers wanting to take the best possible photo, and that it expects the mode to become more common in the future. Is OnePlus right, and should you be using 10-bit color on the OnePlus 10 Pro? Well, yes, but you’ll have to take my word for what the photos look like, as not only do you need specific hardware to truly appreciate the results, but the format the photos are saved in makes doing anything with them a bit of a hassle(blad). Here’s what you need to know about 10-bit color mode on the OnePlus 10 Pro. If you’re not a photography expert, there’s every chance you’ve not come across the term 10-bit color before. It refers to the bit depth of an image or video, which is the depth of tone it can contain. Most cameras record in 8-bit color when you shoot and save files in a JPEG format, which contains 256 levels of tone, or 16.7 million colors. Quite a lot, in other words. However, switch to a device that can capture 10-bit color images of video and the depth of tone leaps to 1,024 levels, which equates to 1.07 billion colors. That’s a lot more, and as we know, bigger numbers are usually better. What does it mean to capture more colors? The benefits come when looking at scenes with color gradients, and when you want to edit your images and video. A sunset is a good example of where 10-bit color helps take a better image. An 8-bit color photo of a sunset may contain “banding,” where you can see a clear divide between levels of red, yellow, and orange that usually make up a sunset. In a 10-bit color image, this banding disappears and is replaced by a smooth gradient of color. If you want to deeply edit your photos or video in Photoshop or another program, the additional levels of tone make a big difference to the eventual results. Eight-bit videos and images can’t be upscaled to 10-bit, so you must shoot in 10-bit from the start if that’s what you want. The catch is that JPEG doesn’t support 10-bit, so the images can’t be saved using it. This is where the RAW format comes in, or in the case of stills on the OnePlus 10 Pro, the High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format.
