Bluboo S8 Review

Cameras

The Camera app offers several shooting modes. They are listed above the circular shutter button and the default one is called Photo. There are Beauty and FaceCute shooting modes where you can adjust the beautification level and a Bokeh mode, which employs the two rear cameras. The latter uses a slide for adjusting the aperture and strength of the bokeh effect. It actually looks quite artificial. Of course, there's a video shooting mode as well. You can adjust the video resolution from the toggle on the top of the screen when this mode is active. There are additional modes, which can be accessed by tapping on the three dots in the top right corner of the screen. These are Watermark, Time lapse, and Beauty video. Below those modes, there's a settings cog icon which leads to the general camera settings. These contain photo resolution choice, choice of bit rate for the video quality, various toggles (grid activation, face recognition, etc.). The Camera app offers a number of filters, which can be applied prior to making a photo. They are accessed from the icon that's placed to the right of the shutter button. To its left is the icon leading to the list with photos. The camera switch is placed on the top of the screen. The front-facing camera shoots in Video, Photo, Beauty and FaceCute modes, too. It utilises the same filters and general settings. The photo editing options include adjusting of the exposure, contrast, shadow, vibrancies, hue, black/white filter, rotating, mapping, cropping, doodling and adding mosaic effects.

Primary camera

The main rear camera of Bluboo S8 utilises a 13MP Sony IMX135 Exmor RS sensor with a 5.867 mm diagonal (size type 1/3.06"). It is coupled with an f/2.0 lens and phase detection AF. This camera shoots photos with a resolution of 4864 x 2736 pixels. It is also capable of recording 1080p video at 30 fps. The second rear camera employs a 3MP sensor and has a fixed focus. The two shooters are aided by a dual-LED flash. Other smartphones, which we have reviewed and use a Sony IMX135 sensor for their primary shooters are the Oukitel U20 Plus and the Elephone S3. The shooting experience with the Bluboo S8 is far from good. The photos do speak for themselves. There's one thing we'd like to pay attention to and this is the fact that the video bit rate is ~9 Mbit/s. This means the compression is too high. There is an option in the camera settings to choose the bit rate and this level is achieved after choosing the highest option. This can be easily be fixed with a software update, so we do hope Bluboo will do this.

Secondary camera

The front-facing camera is equipped with a 5MP sensor, which is software interpolated to 8 megapixels. The camera has a fixed focus, an f/2.8 lens and makes photos with a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels and 480p videos.