How does the OnePlus 15 stack up against the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra? Here are my results after a day of camera shootouts.
The OnePlus 15 has officially launched, less than a year after its predecessor, and I’ve been testing it for several weeks. As an Android flagship, it naturally draws comparisons with other flagships available in the United States.
OnePlus has been particularly proud of its cameras in recent years — and rightfully so. The OnePlus 13, in particular, was a great shooter, and one might hope that this DNA continues for the OnePlus 15. But there are some differences from 10 months ago.What’s new with the OnePlus 15 camera
First and foremost is the Hasselblad collaboration. The OnePlus 15 no longer shares branding with the photography company. It comes with XPAN mode, which is something we worried about when we first found out that it was dropping its iconic partnership.
Nevertheless, I’ve been working with the OnePlus 15 review sample provided by OnePlus to see what the phone is capable of. When you want to find out if a camera is the best, you pit it against the best camera phone of 2025 (so far) — the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Here’s the hardware that these phones are rocking.
First, the OnePlus 15 has a triple 50-megapixel camera setup on the back. The main shooter has an f/1.8 aperture and a 1/1.56″ sensor, the ultrawide sensor has a 116-degree field of view, and the telephoto has a 3.5x optical zoom periscope lens.
Meanwhile, on the Samsung, you get a 200-megapixel main camera with f/1.7 aperture and a 1/1.3″ sensor and a 50-megapixel ultrawide with a 120-degree field of view. For telephoto lenses, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has two of them.
There’s a 10-megapixel 3x optical zoom lens and a 50-megapixel 5x optical zoom lens. Finally, on the front, the OnePlus has a 32-megapixel selfie camera, and the Samsung has a 12-megapixel selfie shooter.
Right away, Samsung offers you more options, and the 200-megapixel main camera is particularly compelling. That being said, the 50-megapixel shooters across the board should lead to a more consistent shooting experience with the OnePlus phone. So I headed to my local Six Flags Amusement Park to see how things turned out. Here are the results.1. Main camera (daytime)
OnePlus 15
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
On paper, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra outshines the OnePlus 15’s main sensor by approximately 150 megapixels. That reflects reality. It’s not that either of these shots is bad, per se, but the Samsung phone manages to capture more detail in the textures on the wall and more accurately reflects the shows and dirt/grime on the wall, whereas the OnePlus 15 smooths out a lot of that.
