The OnePlus 8 Pro's Camera Can See Through Some Plastics

The OnePlus 8 Pro’s color filter camera can see through certain plastics

The OnePlus 8 Pro is OnePlus’ best phone ever, thanks to its excellent processing power, good camera, and modern design. But it turns out the phone has another superpower — the ability to “see through” plastic.

Eagle-eyed OnePlus 8 Pro users discovered the phone’s ability to see through plastic by using the monochrome color-filter camera sensor. We tested the camera on plastic ourselves, and found that it worked mainly on certain types of plastic, like that found at the end of a remote, or that used on the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller. The types of plastic it can see through seem to be plastic that doesn’t have infrared shielding. The camera can also see infrared LED lights and some other things that can’t be seen by the naked eye, however, that was already known.

It’s very easy to use the camera to see through the plastic for yourself. All you have to do is open the OnePlus 8 Pro‘s camera app, then switch the color mode to “Photocrom.” You’ll then be able to see through non-IR-shielded plastics.

Of course, on its own, the ability to see through plastic isn’t all that useful, and it likely wasn’t OnePlus’ goal when building the camera into the phone. That said, it is pretty interesting, if not a little creepy.

The use of an infrared camera isn’t all that new, but using it like this is somewhat new. Other phones, like the Pixel 4 and the iPhone 11 series, use infrared for their facial recognition tech — although you can’t use those infrared cameras to actually take photos. Some other cameras also use infrared to be able to see in low-light environments, though most modern phones use different tech to take low-light photos.

Apart from the color-filter camera, the OnePlus 8 Pro also features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, along with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of storage. The phone also offers a quad-lens camera, with one 48-megapixel main sensor, one 8-megapixel telephoto sensor, one 48-megapixel ultrawide sensor, and, of course, one 5-megapixel color-filter sensor, which is also used to capture depth information. On the front, the phone offers a 16-megapixel selfie cam.

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