Its exposure metering leans slightly too much towards making your images bright and vivid. As a result, there are often small areas of overexposure even after the dynamic range processing has done its thing. The macro camera does let you shoot ultra-close shots such as this; but the results can be disappointing Relatively low-end camera hardware doesn’t quite do justice to the texture of these petals and the stamen detail TCL puts its own spin on screen optimisation, too: Nxtvision. This is really just a fancy name for the part of the Settings menu that lets you customise the display, but it does include some neat features.

In addition, general image processing isn’t nearly as good as that of Google, Xiaomi or Huawei phones at the price. Fine textures sometimes end up looking “painted”, turning gravel into brush strokes, and fine detail is over-sharpened. This phone’s stamina is passable, but little more. I find it claws its way to the end of the day, but often with under 10% charge remaining. This isn’t a handset on which you should rely on a long night out, or when GPS navigating through an unknown city all day long. Unless you bring an external battery, anyway. One design trait I actually prefer about the 10L versus the 10 Pro is the former's rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. I've written before on how in-display sensors like the one found on the TCL 10 Pro eliminate the tactility and gesture controls I came to love in rear fingerprint sensors, and that still hasn't changed.The phones maximum brightness of 600 nits is nowhere near the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 1300-odd. Resolution is much lower, too. Nevertheless, the screen is sharp and bright enough to be usable on super-light days, lowering the real-world impact of these differences. There’s an optional real-time HDR enhancement mode that will supposedly ‘upscale’ streaming SDR (standard dynamic range) video and photo content to HDR. But to be honest, we struggled to notice a huge effect, or to even find an everyday means for putting such a feature through its paces. The Google Pixel 3a XL has a far better night mode than any of these phones. TCL’s 10 Pro brings up the rear, with a dim shot that features less detail than the rest, although it’s similar to the Galaxy A51, but darker.

We encountered another glitch when we got to reviewing a bunch of our photos, with around half a dozen out of 70 or so shots inexplicably orienting in portrait when we quite clearly shot them in landscape. The TCL 10 Pro’s snappiness is more likely down to low added software overheads and the use of fast RAM and internal storage. We get LPDDR4X RAM here, which is the same type used in top-end phones. It can handle data at 17GB/s. And the storage reads at an SSD-like 509MB/s. TCL 10 Pro gaming – Great with most titles, but the speaker disappointsMacro photos are passable, with greater close-up detail than you’d see from the main camera. However, the macro isn’t good enough to make me want to actually use it regularly. Portrait depth images aren’t great, either. Too often you’ll see images that look unnatural thanks to dodgy depth mapping. Test shots with the 5MP macro lens, however, are a disappointment, looking flat and mushy across the board. You might get a better shot with a tripod, but it doesn't work well handheld. The TCL 10 Pro also supports 18W fast charging, which it claims can get you from 0 to 50% in 35 minutes. In our own day to day usage, we observed that half an hour of charging with the battery at 27% yielded a 37% gain.