realme C3 review | Finder

On paper, and in the technical specifications, the realme C3 seems like an impossible bargain, offering up a triple rear camera array on a phone that costs under $300, which is almost unheard of. There’s a primary 12MP lens, a secondary 2MP portrait lens and a tertiary 2MP macro lens to play with, along with a front-facing 5MP selfie camera.

That should give the realme C3 a lot of photographic muscle, but the reality is somewhat different, and sadly a little bit disappointing. The focus isn’t particularly quick on the primary lens, and, as is common with most dual-lens cameras with a portrait lens, you never shoot with that secondary lens, it’s just there for depth effects, which often end up looking rather artificial anyway.

While there’s no optical zoom lens on the realme C3, the camera app does offer up 2x and 4x dedicated zoom buttons, but this is purely digital and predictably comes at the cost of clarity.

Here’s a sample park photo at a native 1x zoom resolution:

The same framing at 2x zoom, with loss of detail already apparent:

And then at 4x zoom, where everything is starting to look decidedly blocky:

There is a dedicated mode for shooting with the macro lens, which is great at this price, but the results are often lacking in the finer details that you’d actually want from a true macro camera.

The front-facing selfie camera can deliver reasonable shots, but by default, they’re AI-enhanced with some very fake looking bokeh:

None of these issues is particularly crippling for a budget phone, because if you want cracking visuals, you’ve at least got to step up into mid-range prices these days, but the realme C3 also has another problem. It’s just plain slow at taking shots, and especially so if you prefer to use the software shutter button within realme’s camera app. More than once, I totally missed a shot because the shutter button simply wouldn’t take a photo when I pressed the button.

You can get past this problem via the age-old method of using the volume buttons as the shutter, but the arrangement of the volume and power buttons on opposite sides can make it difficult. I often found that in setting up my shot and holding the realme C3 horizontally, I’d nudge the power button, switching the screen off as I went. There’s no fast shortcut to the camera via a quick double-tap of the power button, so you’ve then got to unlock the phone to get back to the camera and start all over again. If you’re looking at a moving subject, you’ve just lost your photo.

It’s not that the realme C3 delivers terrible photos at the end of all that. At this price point, they’re fine in good light, and you can have some fun with that macro lens. However, you do have to work a little harder to get those shots than I’d really like.

realme C3 sample photos