The OnePlus 13 has dethroned the iPhone 16 Pro as my go-to concert camera

It takes a lot for me to pull out my phone during a concert. As much as I like to document my day-to-day life, I don’t want to be that guy holding up his phone for the duration of his favorite song. Besides, I’m not usually that impressed with the shots I get in tricky concert lighting, anyway. But, when I started reviewing the OnePlus 13 and dug deeper into its camera features, I began to change my tune.

Suddenly, I had a smartphone camera good enough to trust whether I was in the front row of a bar or the back half of a much larger venue, and I started reaching for the OnePlus 13 over my trusty iPhone 16 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro. Here’s what made me change my mind.

What is OnePlus’s camera secret?

What makes the OnePlus 13 such a capable concert camera — or camera in general — isn’t just its hardware. Sure, it’s using Sony’s new 50MP LYT-808 as its powerful primary sensor, and yes, the tri-prism 50MP LYT-600 telephoto sensor is an interesting way to keep the phone slim, but they’re not massively different from sensors you’d find on similarly priced flagships. Instead, what I think puts the OnePlus 13 ahead of its rivals is its camera software — or rather, an excellent update to a shooting mode from the past.

Several years ago, OnePlus flagships and mid-rangers offered a feature called Smart Content Detection and, later, Smart Scene Recognition. Although its name was a mouthful, the idea was simple: Point your camera at a subject, and your phone would identify the scene for optimal camera settings or pick out a QR code to scan. Essentially, Smart Content Detection would help you balance your exposure before you press the shutter button, saving your phone some time with post-processing. Then suddenly, it was replaced by a dedicated Google Lens button without so much as a farewell.

Now, the tables have turned again, with Google Lens making its way out the door thanks, in part, to Circle to Search. With that gone, I guess it felt like the right time for OnePlus to take another look at automatic content detection. That and the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset probably sped the process along. Either way, OnePlus decided to bring scene detection back to the OnePlus 13 and gave it a slick new name: Smart Scenes. I don’t know about you, but I’d say Smart Scenes rolls off the tongue — or the keyboard — better than Smart Content Detection.

New name aside, I think Smart Scenes also works better than the previous Smart Content Detection. It’s still fundamentally the same feature — point your camera at something and wait for OnePlus to recommend a shooting mode — but it’s faster and more reliable in my experience. Smart Scenes supports just three profiles (Stage, Fireworks, and Silhouette), which feels like the magic number for low-light scenarios. Too many more, and I think the OnePlus 13 would second-guess itself more, and I think it would struggle to differentiate subjects.

OnePlus 13 Stage Mode camera samples

Notice anything about all six shots above? Hopefully, the answer is yes because I have two things in mind. First, I think the OnePlus 13 did a remarkable job of handling the background noise in each situation. Usually, when shooting in low light, you have to crank up the ISO in your image to capture as much light as possible. Unfortunately, that comes with increased grain (or noise), making your background look a bit fuzzy or soft, like an old TV. Sometimes, you can process that noise after the fact to recapture some of the dark concert lighting, but it’s easier said than done.

With Smart Scenes, though, the OnePlus 13 actively processes for that noise, capturing as much light as possible but automatically denoising the image so that your subject still looks crisp and well-lit, but the background remains largely dark. It does this by taking one short, fast exposure for detail and a longer, slower one for lighting — the same process that most low-light photography uses, with much better and faster processing. The result is that somewhere, there’s a bright, noisy version of your image, but by the time you see the finished product, OnePlus has largely cleaned it up.

The second thing I had in mind is that no matter how crisp your subject is, OnePlus’s Smart Scenes always have a bit of motion blur. Don’t get me wrong — it’s miles better than how Samsung usually handles motion, but it’s easy to pick out little quirks like the hands of the backup dancer in the top middle image or Lil Jon’s hands as he dances with the microphone. To me, they’re minor flaws in otherwise impressively sharp images, but I can see how a perfectionist might complain that a mirrorless camera with a faster shutter might handle them better.

What makes OnePlus’s Smart Scenes better than my iPhone 16 Pro?

Many people might look at an iPhone 16 Pro’s video chops and think it would be an excellent concert companion. Honestly, I don’t blame them. However, if I’m not the type to pull up my phone to grab still images during most of a concert, I’m certainly not going to take full-length videos of songs that I’ll realistically never watch again. So, when we sit down and compare photos from the two, the differences become night and day.

I carried my OnePlus 13 and iPhone 16 Pro to two of the shows shot above — Lil Jon and Low Cut Connie — and have some head-to-head shots worth looking at. Although the framing won’t be identical, the lighting will be similar enough for me to point out a few key differences that make me want to pick the OnePlus 13 time and time again. As mentioned above, I’ll point out the differences in each comparison, and then I have a bonus comparison to show at the very end — once again favoring OnePlus’s scene detection.

Lil Jon

I won’t lie — both of these images do a few things pretty well. The iPhone, for example, actually does a much better job of freezing Lil Jon in place. There’s no blur to either of his hands, while both are blurry in OnePlus’s final image. There’s also a little bit less color bleeding from the red line of advertising in the background, which I didn’t notice until I pulled both images onto my laptop screen.

However, the iPhone falls apart somewhat with the noise (high ISO) that I mentioned above. Almost everything in the shot, from the crowd to Lil Jon himself to the rafters of Allegiant Stadium, has a level of fuzziness. It’s not quite bad enough that you can’t tell where one object ends and another begins, but it does give a flatness to the heads in the foreground, the DJ in the background, and the amplifier off to the side of the stage. OnePlus, by contrast, shows a slightly too-smooth Lil Jon and darkened fans in the foreground, which, to my eye, makes Lil Jon pop a bit better.

Low Cut Connie

Once again, both images capture things pretty well, but this time, I think the OnePlus comes out further ahead. From top to bottom, I prefer how the OnePlus 13 handled the lighting inside the bar, letting the space under the piano appear truly dark and keeping consistent shadows across the entire image. It handles the background singer impressively, too, keeping solid contrast across her face without trying to artificially brighten her. I’d also like to draw your attention to the piano keys to the singer’s left — in the iPhone image, they bleed together a bit, but the OnePlus 13 keeps them nicely shadowed and separated.

And now, for the Smart Scene that truly leaves the iPhone in the dust, let’s look at some New Year’s Eve fireworks.

I don’t know about you, but I would have been just as happy never to share the final image from the iPhone 16 Pro. There’s too much motion blur throughout the shot, making the fireworks display and the rooftop in the foreground look a bit blurry. You can’t come close to making out the logos lit up on the sides of the buildings, and yet the entire sky has a brightened haze to it.

The OnePlus 13, on the other hand, keeps everything much darker, allowing the lights of the fireworks to speak for themselves. You can barely make out the dark rooftop in the foreground, which means it’s not distracting you from the show, and the city lights don’t draw your eye downward.

Of course, I’ll continue to put the OnePlus 13 up against the best Android camera phones that I have — including the Pixel 9 Pro and the just-announced Galaxy S25 series — to see if OnePlus truly earned its place on the podium. So far, though, it’s impressed me at just about every turn.