The release of the OnePlus Nord is imminent, and while OnePlus is doing its best to prolong the situation as much as possible with a drip of documentary episodes, new details about the company's upcoming entry-level device continue to emerge and pique our interest. The new details about the company's next entry-level device are piquing our interest.

The most recent of these is a report from Android Central earlier this week that allegedly confirmed the OnePlus Nord's camera setup. The site claims the information comes from a "OnePlus insider," and according to the report, the Nord's rear camera will be a 48-megapixel lens with 8MP ultrawide, 5MP macro, and 2MP "portrait" optics. On the front will be a 32-megapixel primary sensor and an 8-megapixel ultrawide sensor.

This new information comes at the same time that OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei told TechRadar that the company is trying to offer a "flagship-level camera at a mid-range price point" with this device. This is a bold claim that many smartphone makers have been making for years, and we just saw it realized last year with the Google Pixel 3a and the second-generation iPhone SE.

Looking at Nord's camera specs, one might think that OnePlus has settled on the right hardware combination to deliver on its promise. While unconfirmed, it is possible that the 48MP primary sensor on the Nord is exactly the same as the one on the OnePlus 8 Pro. The difference, of course, is that the OnePlus 8 Pro starts at $899, while the OnePlus Nord is less than $500.

But it takes more than just a lot of megapixels to make a good mobile camera these days, and that has actually been OnePlus' problem over the years; OnePlus' image processing technology has certainly progressed since its inception in 2014, but to rival the likes of Apple and Google OnePlus has certainly made progress since its inception in 2014, but there is still more work to be done, especially with respect to computational photography, if it is to become a product that can rival Apple and Google.

The OnePlus 8 Pro's camera is good, but not great. While it tends to deliver more faithful images than the Samsung Galaxy S20 in our tests, we found that it occasionally produced washed-out colors, struggled with shallow depth-of-field blur photos, and especially had trouble focusing on nearby subjects.

Furthermore, the 8 Pro's questionable color filter-only lens did not significantly improve our experience. To add insult to injury, OnePlus was forced to deactivate its particular camera after users discovered that they could actually "see through" some surfaces.

The OnePlus camera is not bad. It just lags a step behind the competition's flagship models. And that makes the future of Nord's photography somewhat worrisome. If the camera in OnePlus' actual flagship is simply serviceable, it is reasonable to expect that the technology in the mid-range model will pale in comparison. After all, the camera quality of the standard OnePlus 8 has already taken a bit of a hit compared to the more premium Pro model, largely due to the use of a different, lower quality sensor.

Then there is the amount of lenses on the Nord to consider; while one cannot judge the Nord's camera on specs alone, the inclusion of dedicated macro and portrait shooters seems a bit gimmicky at first glance. A macro lens on a cell phone more often than not cannot justify its existence, and one has to assume that a "portrait" camera with a resolution of only 2 MP exists only to salvage depth data for bokeh effects. They may be useful for shallow depth-of-field shots, but not as useful as telephoto.

Had the OnePlus Nord debuted in 2018, it could have easily claimed the throne of mid-range camera phones. But these days, with the best camera phones like the Pixel 3a and iPhone SE offering machine learning tricks and truly flagship-grade photography at lower prices, OnePlus will need to do more than what it has offered in the past to join that conversation.