Tecno Camon 15 Premiere Full Review
My unboxing and Initial impressions video on the Tecno Camon 15 Premier was filled with much disappointment due to the quite disappointing performance of its Cameras. But hey!, we’re here again with an updated Camon 15 Premier and Tecno says they’ve fixed the previous issues and that this device much improved now. But is it?
Cameras
I’ll start this review with the cameras. Since this was the pain point in my previous video. We’ve got a quad camera setup at the rear of this phone. There’s a 64MP main wide angle camera, a 5MP ultra-wide and a 2MPdepth sensing camera. The fourth and last camera is a QVGA camera. I can say for sure compared to the results from my first look, the image results are way better than what it was.
In my first look at this device the images taken with the Camon 15 premiere were a far cry from what we were used to seeing from the Tecno Camon Series of smart-phones.
The Camon 11 Pro still holds a place in my heart as one of the best released photography smart-phones from Tecno. But let’s see how the 15 Premiere holds up.
So I took this around Lagos and here are the results from the camera array on the rear of this phone. First let’s put this out there, the results from the Tecno Camon 15 Premiere cameras are much better than what it was a month ago.
Dynamic range is bit improved. I took some pictures of the sky directly, and it handled the highlights quite well although there are times when you have blown out sections of the sky. The other parts of the photos taken however were pleasing. You get well balanced photos with decent color reproduction of the scene. The rear cameras actually took some impressive photos.
Low light performance on the rear camera was also improved with some of the shots I took actually surprising me. Although I noticed I had to really keep the phone steady to achieve good low light photos. This however is a thing with almost all cameras.
Selfies on the other hand were okay, We’ve seen this pop-up design all through 2019 and it’s still functional now, but on the photos from the selfie cam, I was still dealing with some overexposure where you had a lot of light in the background. But the pictures looked very clean and you, I particularly liked the skin-tones from the selfie and you get mostly great shots.
With regards portraits, I was quite impressed with some of the photos I took. Edge detection on subjects were quite good and the background blur was not the best or deepest but it was quite good. You know just the right balance of blur and focus on the subject
Battery
Enough with the cameras, how has the Camon 15 Premiere performed in the last month of use. Well the 15 premiere has performed just as good as you’d expect a mid range device to perform. Battery life is something I’m really impressed with. You get a 4000mah battery on this phone and you typically get a full day of use on this device and have to charge at the end of the day. I’m a really heavy user and I must say the battery here is quite decent.
Storage
If there’s one thing lots of new phone buyers ask about, it’s about storage and RAM capacity . Well with the Camon 15 Premiere or Pro, you got sufficient storage to do as much as you want to. The Camon 15 premiere features 128GB of internal storage and 6GB RAM, and if somehow you manage to fill that 128GB up, there’s an option to expand it via a dedicated micro SD slot up to 256GB
Screen
There’s a 1080p LCD screen on the Camon 15 Premiere and it’s an average 1080p display. Colors look accurate but are not as saturated as you have on some other LCD screens. Videos generally look good on this screen if you’re watching in 1080p. But you’d find that the using this device under direct sunlight may be difficult. This is because it doesn’t get very bright under direct sunlight. But it’s a really big screen and I really like the 19.5:9 aspect ratio here. It’s ideal for watching videos and you have no camera cutouts or notches obstructing your view. I’d give this screen a 5 out of 10.
Software
So if you’ve seen my previous review of Tecno phones, you’d know that I’m actually always impressed with Tecno’s HiOS except for the bloatware part. We have HiOS 6 on the Camon 15 premiere and I think this is a very clean and smooth iteration of HiOS.
The UI looks clean and streamlined and I love how clean the settings page is.The icon design is getting better, it’s much flatter and just makes the overall UI look really good. I wish however that Tecno would do away with the incessant addition of apps that most people would probably never use.
You have Android 10 on the 15 premier and thank goodness for that as system wide dark mode and gesture navigation is here. On if this will be upgraded to Android 11, i don’t know and I wouldn’t raise my hopes up.
Price and Build
The Tecno Camon 15 Premier costs $260, that’s N95,000 in these parts. It uses a glass front, plastic back and plastic frames. There’s a earphone port, a USB C charging port, fingerprint reader at the back of the device and more. But at this price point some people would argue that there are other phone that use much premium materials and they’d be right, but you also have to consider what you want. Like I always say, glass feels much premium but glass shatters when dropped, plastic doesn’t. So the choice really is yours. You may feel much safer with a phone made with plastic than a phone with glass on the front and back.
I have a case constantly on my S20 Ultra and whenever I take that case off, I’m always sad, cos then I realize how much I’m missing the actual feel of the phone in my hands, but I guess you can never have it all.
Conclusion
Guys what are your thoughts on the Tecno Camon 15 Premiere, do you think the improvement in the cameras are significant? I’d love to hear from you in the video comments.
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