OnePlus 16 could be a return to glory with this big camera upgrade

The OnePlus 15 brought major performance and battery upgrades, but we took umbrage with the downgraded camera hardware. Now, a trusted source has revealed a few apparent OnePlus 16 details, and it looks like a major camera zoom upgrade is on the cards.

Tipster Digital Chat Station has posted a couple of purported OnePlus 16 specs on Weibo. The most notable claim is that a OnePlus 16 engineering prototype has a 200MP periscope camera.

There’s more to a great telephoto camera than megapixels, but 200MP sensors have become a popular solution for telephoto cameras. All these megapixels mean that phone makers can use lossless resolution crops to deliver improved long-range zoom. For example, OPPO claims the Find X9 Pro’s 200MP 3x camera delivers up to 13.2x lossless zoom. I’d take this specific claim with a pinch of salt, but there’s no doubting that these sensors are proving their worth when zooming in.

It also doesn’t hurt that some smartphone brands and chipmakers are finally offering 200MP photos with multi-frame image processing. Companies like vivo and OPPO combine multiple 200MP frames in some modes, spitting out a higher-quality full-resolution snap. It stands to reason that

There’s no word on the other OnePlus 16 cameras just yet, but I hope OnePlus offers a larger main camera instead of the OnePlus 15’s 1/1.56-inch main camera.

Digital Chat Station also asserts that the phone will be equipped with Qualcomm’s SM8975 chipset. Previous leaks suggest this chipset could be branded as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro processor and would launch alongside a standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip (SM8950). So those who value performance above all else should be happy with the OnePlus 16, provided OnePlus can keep temperatures in check.