TCL Plex Preview – Affordable smartphone with night camera

You don’t see the TCL brand much in Europe. Yet this Chinese player is certainly not a small one. Of course we know the smartphone sub-brands Alcatel and BlackBerry, but TCL, for example, is also a huge television manufacturer. You often come across the brand in Asia and the United States, including on huge refrigerators, washing machines and smart locks, to name a few. At the presentation of the Plex at the IFA in Berlin, the manufacturer indicated that it would now also like to release smartphones under its own flag.

The Plex is the first and it is already a quirky beast. We can appreciate that. The smartphone has a special night camera, which is intended to shoot videos in poor lighting conditions. This camera does this with the help of particularly large pixels of 2.9 μm. To achieve this, the sensor only has two megapixels. You might expect these kinds of special things on a high-end smartphone, but the Plex gets the very reasonable price of 329 euros. We therefore dived into the TCL hall at the IFA to find out as much as possible about this special smartphone.

The design

Before we talk about that night camera, let’s get a better idea of ​​the Plex’s appearance. It is a smartphone with a glass back and, according to the manufacturer, a metal edge. Little news so far, but we have to say it feels a lot cheaper than most other phones that have this. Both the back and the edges feel like plastic. Still, the device is quite sturdy if you try to bend it.

There’s a white and a black version, and both have an s-shaped pattern when you hold them up to the light. The black refracts the light into rainbow colors and is reminiscent of mother-of-pearl. If you don’t look too long, these devices seem more expensive than they are. However, if you give your eyes a living, you can see and feel that it is a mid-range car and that this first TCL smartphone lacks some refinement.

For example, the ‘dotch’, or the hole in the screen for the front camera, is much closer to the top bezel than to the side bezel, which does not benefit the design. The border between the screen and the outside is also very large, and the bezel under the screen is also larger than desired. The latter, however, we can forgive a phone with this price. The back looks as flashy as it is well-groomed, with a striking row of cameras and a flash on either side of it. The finish is slightly less than with some other devices in this price segment, such as the Nokia 7.2 , also announced at the IFA . The buttons also feel less nice and they are probably made of plastic.

Interesting camera setup

The most interesting thing about this device, however, is the camera setup. The primary camera has the 48-megapixel sensor IMX582, which is also in the Xiaomi Mi 9T, for example. The pixels of this sensor appear small by spec, which would allow them to capture low light, but when taking a regular 12-megapixel photo, four are combined into one pixel.

The ultra-wide-angle camera has a decent angle of view of 123 degrees, which comes in handy regularly. There is no telephoto lens on the camera, but as mentioned, it does have a night camera. It is not intended for taking pictures; two megapixels is also a very low resolution. You can shoot videos with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels. The 2.9μm pixels capture a relatively large amount of light, making this camera very suitable for night shots in theory. You also need a lot of light output for slow-motion videos. The camera can shoot 960fps videos at 1080p resolution, which is unique for this price range.

We were able to do that on the exhibition floor and it was certainly not disappointing. Where you normally need a fairly well-lit room to shoot 960fps videos with, for example, an Xperia smartphone or recent Samsung Galaxy S device, we were able to shoot slow-motion videos on the moderately lit exhibition floor with the Plex. Of course you see noise, but the result is quite impressive at first glance, especially with the price in mind.

We also dived into a darkened room with a miniature landscape with the Plex and compared the results with those of the Xperia 1. The Plex immediately recognized that it was too dark for the regular camera and switched to the night camera. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the video off the device, but on the smartphone screen the video from the TCL Plex looked a lot clearer and more detailed. Still, we need to test more to really say whether this night camera offers much added value. After all, it is difficult to judge on a small screen and with a snapshot like this. For example, the brightness of the screen can be a misleading factor in the rating. It is promising, but we really want to compare the videos on one and the same monitor before we draw a conclusion.

There is also a Super Night Mode, which allows you to shoot photos in dark conditions. This mode also did well, although focusing in the dark was a challenge. We were also able to shoot a few photos that we could smuggle with us.