OPPO has announced its new Find X3 Pro smartphone, and it comes with a pair of primary cameras with each featuring 50-megapixel Sony IMX 766 sensors covering both the wide and ultra-wide fields of view for “billion colour photos and videos”. The camera module also features a 60x microlens that lets you capture super close up detail. Weighing in at 193g, the new flagship phone is IP68 rated, too, meaning it can withstand dist, dirt and stand and submersion in water up to depths of up to 1.5 metres for up to 30 minutes. Great for shooting in the rain or even in the pool! It also has a 120Hz QHD+ HDR10+ screen capable of displaying all those colours the cameras see, too.
It looks like OPPO wasn’t quite able to get their under-display camera ready for this one, so the OPPO Find X3 Pro features the not-too-unexpected peephole selfie camera on the front. The front camera is quite respectable, featuring a 32-megapixel sensor with an f/2.4 aperture. But beyond that, there isn’t really any information about it. And while it is an impressive 32-megapixels, it is a selfie camera, so I wouldn’t expect it to do all that much for you.
However, while it may be business up front, there’s definitely a party goin’ on in the back with a quad-camera module that features TWO 50-megapixel Sony IMX 766 flagship sensors. Here are all four of the sensors in the camera module.
50-Megapixel Ultra-Wide-Angle Camera – 1/5.6″ Sony IMX 766, 1 billion colours, 110° field of view, f/2.2 Aperture, 4cm macro shooting50-Megapixel Wide-Angle Camera – 1/5.6″ Sony IMX 766, 1 billion colours, f/1.8 Aperture, optical image stabilisation13-Megapixel Telephoto Camera – 1 billion colours, 5x Hybrid Optical Zoom, up to 20x Digital Zoom, f/2.4 Aperture3-Megapixel “Microlens” – Up to 60x magnification, FHD video recording, f/3.0 Aperture
The wide camera has a focal length equivalence of around a 26mm lens on a full-frame camera. The 50-megapixel Sony IMX 766 is a quad-Bayer sensor, which means your final result is 12.5-megapixel images (although you can probably shoot 50-megapixel DNG raws, like you can with most other quad-Bayer sensor smartphones). The ultra-wide camera offers a pretty huge 110° field of view, and also provides macro focusing at distances as close as 4cm. This camera uses the same 50-megapixel Sony IMX 766 sensor, which OPPO says can handle shots taken during the “day or night, rain or shine, indoors or out”, with anti-reflective coatings and a “freeform surface” lens that helps to physically correct for distortion, chromatic aberration and other issues.
OPPO says that the dual primary cameras were co-engineered with Sony for “rich, billion colour 10-bit capture from more angles” and is the world’s first smartphone offering a complete 10-Bit Colour managed pipeline from shooting to display. And to help with that colour, OPPO offers something that few other manufacturers seem to be able to – colour consistency across all of the cameras. With phase detection autofocus using 100% focus pixel coverage across both the wide and super wide angle cameras, OPPO says the Find X2 Pro is capable of focusing in super low light conditions, rasing the “dark light focus success rate” from 3% to 97% for “crisp shots across all lighting conditions”. Exactly what they consider to be dark isn’t specified, but that would be an interesting one to put to the test. The OPPO Find X3 Pro features many cool features to help with your images and video, including Digital Overlap High Dynamic Range (DOL HDR) which continuously generates frames to reduce long and short exposure frame intervals to minimise ghosting and light streaking. They say it also helps to improve the signal-to-noise ratio to provide a wider dynamic range and improve support for high-frame-rate HDR capture. AI Palettes can also help to colourise and match your shots to each other. It seems to achieve a similar result to the Match Colour feature in Photoshop to let you use the colours from one image to tone another, except using AI.
And we haven’t even spoken about video yet. The OPPO Find X3 Pro lets you shoot 4K HDR BT.2020 LOG footage with optical and electronic image stabilisation and full manual exposure control right out of the box. Without any kind of 3rd party apps. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it with Filmic Pro (although I have no idea if Filmic Pro actually supports this device just yet) but just that you don’t have to go out and buy the Filmic Pro app if you haven’t already. Shooting video on the Find X3 Proalso comes with an AI Highlight Video feature, which lets you capture more detail in a range of scenes including “sandy beach, blue sky, cat, text, landscapes, night, snow, spotlight, sunrise, sunset, one or multiple faces, backlight, flowers, greenery, bird, and building”. It also has “Audio Zoom” to home in on the subject you’re filming and not those standing outside of the frame. Exactly how it achieves this is unclear, but we’ve seen a similar idea implemented in the Panasonic G100. So, perhaps this works on the same sort of principle. And to power all this phot and video goodness, the OPPO Find X3 Pro houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 8-core processor running at up to 2.84Ghz with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Overall, it’s a bit of a beast. You can find out more about the OPPO Find X3 Pro on the OPPO website. It’s expected to cost somewhere around $1,500 (there are no different ram/capacity options besides 12GB/256GB) and begins shipping on March 30th. Price and availability may vary around the world.
