Ever wondered how your smartphone camera is tuned? You won’t believe the answer

When most of us use our smartphone cameras to take a quick picture, after more than a decade of being able to rely on it to do so, we probably don't think much about exactly how it got tuned. It's one thing to consider the supply chain and assembly line that built your phone, but another to consider the choices that led to exactly how it works.

When I visited OnePlus' impressive health laboratory in Shenzhen earlier this year, I also got a quick tour of one of its other facilities – a smartphone camera tuning lab. Here, I was shown just how the phone brand tunes its cameras, and was surprised by what I saw.

I visited what felt like another world; it was a series of fake rooms, each carefully lit and filled with props to look exactly like a different real-world location, from the lobby of a hotel to a convenience store, a fast food joint and even a cocktail bar. These provided the variety subjects and lighting conditions to be tested.

Around this little town of fake rooms trundled a pre-programmed robot, with a large arm clasping a phone. It would go off on an identical route each time, stopping at designated spots to take the exact same photos over and over again. This way, OnePlus' technicians could rely on getting back photos in the exact same position to compare as they tweaked different variables within the camera.

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Watching this happen (or watching part of it, anyway) was a fascinating reminder of the amount of time that goes into tuning the software we take for granted, even after the hardware is ready. There's basically no way around this problem that doesn't involve taking thousands of photos to compare, so that the differences between different setups can be established.

It's also a good example of how automation can be a great thing in these processes. OnePlus told me how it took a fraction of the time for a robot to take identical photos compared to a human, with the job obviously being monotonous and finicky for people to do on their own.

Hopefully this stands as an interesting glimpse into how your phone actually comes together – for every component, you can easily and safely presume that similar amounts of time and work has gone into fine-tuning it.