The full review of the $159 TCL 10 SE is linked here, but this article is about hosting my camera samples taken from the phone.
16 MP Wide Camera
Daytime photos look pretty ok, but I'm a bit surprised that the phone had some good exposure control because I would easily assume that a phone priced around $159 wouldn't produce serviceable photos. I do like that the photos with greenery have a little bit of punchy colors along with the blue sky because I was expecting to see muted colors all round. Sharpness is ok, but it will become a bit unclear with subjects and background that are far away. Shadows in the photo with the bird are pretty balanced which is what I want to see in a scene with strong highlights and "conflicting" shadows. That one impressed me. As seen in the photo of the red flowers, color reproduction of red shades do not look good, and the bad exposure is what I expected to see in all the photos the main camera takes. Overall, the main camera is good, but I continue to wonder what other TCL 10 SE users think about the main camera, especially when it comes to the exposure control of their photo experiences.
5 MP Ultrawide Camera with 115 Degree FOV
If I was to think about mediocre camera in general, I would always default to the ultrawide cameras of budget and low-end smartphones because they never have a meaningful purpose other than to follow the trend of 3+ cameras on a smartphone with an ultrawide sensor being the 2nd most important camera of any smartphone. In all of the shots, there is pretty bad color accuracy, a lot of magenta tinting, noise, and distortion around the edges of your shots. There's also terrible exposure control with most ultrawide cameras on smartphones, but the pattern continues with low-end phones. My advice to anyone no matter if you have a low or top-end phone, be careful when using the ultrawide camera for photos because sometimes they can act differently than what you're already used to seeing in the photos results taken by your main sensor. In a way, I'd pretty much be confident in my ultrawide shots if I was outside with plenty of daylight, didn't have much shadows in my scene, and the daylight/sun exposure was not visible within 90 degrees of your camera sensor positioning.
2 MP Depth Sensor
Of course, the third camera is a depth sensor. It was either this or a 2 MP macro camera. From what I've seen with this phone, I'd rather take this depth sensor over a cheap macro camera because you'd basically get similar results with what was seen with the ultrawide camera. I am impressed by the depth camera because "depth camera" doesn't necessarily explain how the sensor is calculating depth between foreground and background. A REAL depth camera on a smartphone would be labeled as a time-of-flight sensor or LiDAR which is seen on some premium smartphones, and those sensors actually produce meaningful data that distinguishes the distance between subjects in a photo. Yeah, the 2 MP depth sensor does fail a little bit in the photos, but it still is believable at the same time. I also like the light discs/bubbles that the bokeh effect has. It reminds me of what portraits look like on my phone. However, does the picture quality not including the bokeh effect look good to you? Would you rather have A-quality portraits but with bad bokeh or C-quality portraits but with very good bokeh? I think people would still prefer image quality over bokeh, but this question sort of highlights that cheap phones with a cheap depth sensor can have some pretty good results. Impressive.
Low-Light with All Cameras
The first photo is with the main camera, then ultrawide, then selfie shooter. The main camera looks pretty ok, barely even serviceable I guess because of how much noise and softness is present. Yet, I do think shadows could have been controlled better. Just a little bit of a brighter photo would have impressed me. It's still mediocre. The ultrawide shot is as bad as I thought it would be. This serves as an example that the only ultrawide shots in low-light that can be seen as good or even serviceable are in premium phones. Especially if long exposure night mode is available to those ultrawide sensors. The selfie photo is pretty ok. It just needs to be brighter, but that bokeh effect was pretty good. The phone would have benefited from a "selfie night mode" where your display would have lit up max brightness with a blank white image to act as a light source in your low light scene. An easy fix for this photo.
Low-light video on the main camera and ultrawide camera are pretty bad. They are very noisy and are pretty soft. However, I'd still say that taking video on the main camera is pretty much ok even if you are in a low-light setting because neither the noise nor softness is really that obstructive in damaging your recording. It's on par with other smartphones that have been released since 2015, so we're somewhat used to this quality. However, the ultrawide video is horrendous. It's play at 9.90 FPS which is ridiculously slow, and it's very bad overall. This one I'm not surprised it turned out this way, but it does make me think about sort of getting a nostalgic camera experience when using the ultrawide sensor in low-light because the bad video results along with that stuttery frame rate remind me of flip-phone quality video. Use at your own caution I guess.
13 MP Selfie Quality
Selfies are ok, yet they do struggle with exposure. Not as bad as the ultrawide camera though, so I'd say I wouldn't have that much a problem with selfies on this phone. I like that the colors and sharpness are pretty good, yet it does have less saturation when compared to the main camera. A bit of an easy fix in editing, just turn up the saturation by a few points and you'd get a better result. Selfie video is also solid, but still struggles with exposure. I think in 2022, we have a new "standard" to follow by, and that is "will my selfie camera give me good results to post on TikTok/Instagram?" For the TCL 10 SE, I'd say these results are approved for those platforms. Just be mindful about exposure, and you'll be set.
Video Stabilization Using EIS
Video stabilization using EIS or electronic video stabilization isn't that good, though I would say turn it on anyways because it does make a difference when it comes to have much jitter will the video capture.
Ultrawide Video
Here's a quick sample of video captured on the ultrawide sensor. It's pretty ok for what it is, yet it still suffers from that magenta tinting and distortion around the edges. The frame rate was kept at 30, so at least it won't stutter in daylight situations.
AI Scene Detection
On the left side are photos taken with the scene detection on are the right are the same scenes but with the AI adjustments turned off. Just by looking at it at a simple glance, these adjustments are barely existent, and some I don't see anything different at all. It's still impressive that the MediaTek Helio P22 has scene detection built in because it's a low-end phone, and a lot of work would have needed to be put into the scene detection algorithm in order to make the feature work. Well it does work in correctly identifying scenes which included the greenery and my lunch meal, yet the adjustments don't do anything meaningful. I bet this feature would still impress and interest people whenever they take a photo of something and the phone reports back what it just took a picture of. And I was very impressed and still am about my phone being able to detect scenes and giving the scenes new meaning by applying certain camera adjustments. The TCL however, is very mediocre.
Zoom on the 16 MP Main Sensor
Since this phone only has 16 MP on the main sensor and there is no dedicated telescopic camera, the TCL 10 SE can only zoom up to 4x digital zoom. Other regional models of the phone have a 48 MP sensor and can go up to 10x digital zoom. Either way, that 4x zoom is pretty ok at least when given plenty of daylight. I thought the photo was going to be noisy and a bit unclear, but that's not the case hear. If there was less light and you zoomed in, you should expect similar or worse results with what was seen in the low-light performance of the main sensor.
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