OnePlus announced its 8 and 8 Pro smartphones a couple of months ago. While the 8 Pro is yet to go on sale in India, the device has been in the news for a fair bit of time now.
First, it was for the display-related issue where few people claimed a green tint appeared on a part of the display when the phone was in dim-light settings. And, then it was the colour filter photochrom sensor which could see through plastics and even clothes if they are thin enough. This could lead to privacy issues on some occasions.
OnePlus acknowledged this and Pete Lau, the CEO, posted on Weibo saying this issue will be solved with a new OTA update where they will be disabling the filter function. Later on, it was confirmed that the update will be only for the Chinese version.
However, OnePlus “accidentally” pushed the OTA globally and the filter was disabled even on the global variants. Soon after, OnePlus addressed this and OTA will be reverted shortly.
XDA Developers has something interesting with regards to the OnePlus 8 Pro’s camera. As per it, the OnePlus 8 Pro will come with the colour filter disabled when it goes on sale in India.
The evidence for the same was found on the OnePlus camera app version 4.0.267 when they decompiled the app. The Oxygen OS 10.5.10 update was rolled out to Indian units recently. The update has added a new smart scene enhancement feature.
Further, there have been some modifications to a couple of model names which refer to Indian OnePlus 8 Pro (IN2021) and Chinese OnePlus 8 Pro (IN2020), as per the report.
For both the models, “InfraredCameraBuilder.ModelsToDisableInfraredCamera” property has been modified. So, when the camera app is opened, it checks for the system property and if the model number is either India or Chinese, the colour filter camera will be displayed along with photochrom mode.
Since there are no OnePlus 8 Pro units available in India, the XDA team tested with a global variant by changing the model number to Indian on a rooted phone. The results were the same, the colour filter camera was disabled.
So, with the aforementioned details, it is almost sure that the Indian OnePlus 8 Pro units will come with the fourth camera disabled and so, the x-ray vision will be disabled. OnePlus could preload this update and only then put the devices on sale or this might the first update as soon as one received their OnePlus 8 Pro device in India.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is yet to go on sale in India and the company has already pushed the sale at least two times in a month now. And, yet we don’t have a confirmed date for the sale of OnePlus 8 Pro in the country. However, the OnePlus 8 went on sale a few times and the next sale is scheduled on June 8, 12 noon on Amazon.
