Dual rear cameras on phones are officially a thing. Like the iPhone 7 Plus, the OnePlus 5 uses dual-cameras to make zoomed in pictures look great and create photos with bokeh (gorgeous, out-of-focus backgrounds). But unlike the iPhone, the OnePlus has higher resolution cameras with slightly wider apertures that let in a bit more light.

On paper, the OnePlus 5's camera hardware looks impressive (see chart below) especially since it costs hundreds of dollars less than the iPhone. But when it comes to photography, the proof is in the pictures. That's something the iPhone 7 Plus proved in our tests against single camera shooters like the Google Pixel and the Samsung Galaxy S8.

However, the iPhone hasn't gone up against the OnePlus 5. Until now. And the OnePlus 5 gives it a run for its money.

I took this pair of dual-camera twins around the Mission in San Francisco for an old fashioned camera battle royale, snapping pics of people, cityscapes, murals, food, indoor golfers and skateboarders.

All images are right off the phone without any post-processing and features like HDR were left in auto mode while shooting.

The dual-camera weigh-in

Sunny cityscapes

The OnePlus 5 photo looks vivid with significant contrast. The iPhone 7 Plus photo has more of a natural appeal.

It was a perfect sunny day at Dolores Park, which meant each phone could really shine in all that gorgeous sunlight. I walked away with so many good shots from both phones that it felt almost unfair to choose a winner and a loser. Overall though, photos on the OnePlus had a tad more detail. But the colors on the iPhone looked more true-to-life.

On the way to the park, I snapped a couple photos of a building covered in graffiti of cartoon cats (obviously home to some cat lovers). Each phone has its own photo character. Pictures from the 7 Plus looked more accurate with cooler tones. Images from the OnePlus 5 had more contrast, saturation and looked more vivid. In this sense, what took the better photo comes down to personal preference.

The OnePlus 5 captured pictures with more detail than the iPhone, but sometimes camera shake made that hard to see. Optical image stabilization inside the 7 Plus helped it avoid this blurry problem.

Give the people bokeh

The 7 Plus captured people better using Portrait Mode and the OnePlus 5 was better at food and objects.

Patrick Holland/CNET

One of the runaway features on the 7 Plus is its Portrait Mode, which uses both rear cameras and some clever processing to simulate bokeh. This artistically blurs the background and makes for a truly stunning photo. It became a main selling point of the phone and Apple even launched an advertising campaign behind it.

The OnePlus has the same mode on its phone. As I was out and about, I used Portrait Mode to take pictures of people indoors, outdoors, in good light and low light. Neither camera was perfect, but the iPhone yielded consistently better results especially for pictures of people. Portraits looked more natural and had better fall off from in-focus to out-of focus areas.

The OnePlus 5's portraits had less background blur and sometimes the bokeh effect was patchier than the iPhone. When it did nail a Portrait Mode shot, images were comparatively flat.

But, because the OnePlus 5 engages Portrait Mode within a foot of your subject, I snagged lots of nice shots of food and inanimate objects. To get the same shot on the iPhone, I had to be about an extra foot farther away, which widened the shot and made it less dramatic.

All phones use digital zoom, which basically crops into a photo as you take it. The results are less than stellar. Pictures are usually unsteady, noisy and have super low resolution. The advantage of dual-cameras on these phones is that they have a fixed optical 2X zoom (this is in addition to the 8X digital zoom on the OnePlus and the 10X digital zoom on the iPhone). Now when you zoom in on a scene, your photos will get much better results than doing it digital.