ZTE Axon Elite review

Camera

The dual rear camera takes images up to 13-megapixels. It’s one of the better cameras I’ve seen on a ZTE phone, as there was a decent level of contrast and detail on show, and colours looked very rich and natural despite overcast weather conditions. There’s a fair amount of post-processing visible when you zoom in at full resolution, though, and areas of shadow looked particularly gritty and riddled with noise. I managed to improve this slightly by switching on HDR mode, but this also had the negative effect of bleaching out colours beyond all recognition, creating images that were far too light overall.

^ On the whole, colours and contrast were excellent, even in cloudy weather, but there’s a lot of gritty detail when you zoom in up close

^ HDR mode helped smooth over any excessive post-processing, but it also made images much lighter than they should be

Indoors, the situation was much the same, except here it struggled to keep everything in focus – regardless of whether our external lamp was turned on or off. This is a shame, as colours and contrast levels were both very good, but objects had such fuzzy outlines and a lack of fine detail that we wouldn’t recommend using it for family album shots. Admittedly, the dual LED flash improved things greatly, as our still life arrangement was much sharper and more defined, but the detail on our teddy bear and felt tip pens was still rather lacking.

^ Even in bright light, the camera struggled to focus corrently on our still life arrangement

Conclusion

The Axon Elite is a very reasonable phone for £280, as it has all the speed of a flagship for almost half the price and its battery life compares well with other handsets around £300. However, its choice of operating system and rather off-putting design holds it back in my eyes, and its camera isn’t without its problems either. If looks aren’t important to you, then the Axon Elite is a good buy, but for our money, we’d rather spend it on the Motorola Moto X Play.