What are incorrectly touted as “x-ray-like” photos, the OnePlus 8 Pro phone supposedly has IR capability and of course, all the media can think about is that pervs will abuse this feature as it can see through certain materials – such is our sick 21st century world. But there are genuine uses for intra-red capability – including safety, scientific, testing and just good clean fun.
It turns out that the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 and Mi8 phones have had this feature all along – I’ve had my treasured F1 for something like 18 months, installed the PIXEL and countless other cameras on it along with the best processing tools available – and had NO IDEA that IR was possible even though I knew the phone was able to detect IR to do face recognition – and it isn’t a trick – as I’ll demonstrate herein.
So, thanks to an APP, we can now add IR to the huge list of features of the Pocophone F1 phone cameras – which already includes (with the right APPs) HDR, night vision, time lapse, photo sphere, slow motion video, 60 fps video and more.
The Mi8 and F1 introduced the hardware to support low-light face recognition at launch and I knew that – but I certainly was not aware of an APP to let the end user play with IR photography until my friend Antonio just this week pointed out a link. Here it is on the Playstore – make sure your phone oprating system is up to date.
Enough of that – here are some photos… enjoy and if you have the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 or the Mi 8 phones – grab the APP and you are good to go.
In the top-right photo not only can you see my fingers through the black case top but the internal battery is also clearly visible. You CANNOT see anything through the case with visible light.
Many years ago before digital cameras became affordable, never mind decent phone cameras, I used to spend hours with IR-sensitive film taking beautiful photos in the country. Fast forward to 2020 – this “new” feature on my F1 came as something of a treat – see below photo taken in bright daylight – and bear in mind that the ultimate resolution of the IR is only 640px high
Above left you see the original IR image from the F1 – centre version is sharpened with Snapseed, right version has a little Snapseed “morning” creativity – what fun.