Motorola One Action review: Remarkable for innovation, wanting in prowess

Once a dominant smartphone brand, Motorola lost its market share as other Chinese brands saw a sudden surge and challenged its monopoly in the budget and midrange smartphone segment in India. But now, with back-to-back launches, the company seems to have somewhat got its mojo back. After earlier launching the photography-centric Motorola One Vision (review), Motorola, now owned by Chinese electronics major Lenovo, on August 23 launched the videography-centric Motorola One Action (Rs 13,999) in India.



The Motorola One Vision and Motorola One Action are similar in design, features and specifications, but they have different sets of optics for different audiences. As the name suggests, the Motorola One Action aims to replace your action cameras by providing a dedicated ultra-wide sensor for videography. We reviewed this phone to see if it can really replace action cameras like GoPro, and how it fares in comparison with the Motorola One Vision, especially in imaging performance:



Camera


The Motorola One Action packs a triple-camera set-up on the back, featuring a 12-megapixel primary sensor of an f/1.8 aperture with phase detection autofocus (PDAF), a 16MP ultra-wide angle sensor stacked in 90 degrees, and a 5MP depth sensor. By comparison, the Motorola One Vision has a dual-camera set-up on the back — a 48MP primary sensor of an f/1.7 aperture with PDAF and optical image stabilisation (OIS), and a 5MP depth sensor.



Speaking of the Motorola One Action’s ultra-wide angle sensor, claimed to be an action camera, its 90-degree stacking helps capture an ultra-wide field of view (FoV) in the portrait orientation. Unlike other smartphones with ultra-wide angle cameras to record videos in the landscape mode, the one in the Motorola One Action allows video recording in portrait, without the need to tilt the phone to landscape. Thought the sensor lacks OIS, it supports electronic image stabilisation (EIS), which reduces motion shakes and allowed stable video recordings — but this is at the expense of a cropped field of view.



In the action camera mode, the phone supports video recording in up to fullHD (1920 x 1080) resolution at 60 frames per second in a 16:9 aspect ratio. There is also an option to record videos in the 21:9 aspect ratio, but it is limited to 30fps only.



Read Complete Article