Oppo announces flagship Find X3 Pro with microscope camera

After a long series of leaks and teases, Oppo has announced its 2021 flagship in full. The Find X3 Pro is a sleek and powerful phone with an unusual design and unique features to match. It’s also an important device for Oppo, which recently overtook Huawei in the Chinese smartphone market and will look to capitalize on its rival’s woes this year.

The most striking visual element of the Find X3 Pro is its camera bump, which almost looks organic in that it rises seamlessly from the same piece of glass as the rest of the phone’s back panel. . Combined with the finish, which on my device is aggressively shiny and shiny, the phone looks like it was forged Terminator 2-liquid metal style.

The camera system itself is no less unusual. There is a main camera and an ultra-wide camera that both use 50-megapixel 1 / 1.56-inch Sony IMX766 sensors, meaning image quality should be comparable between the two, although we will have to see how this is verified in practice.

There is also a 3 megapixel microlens, which should not be confused with the unnecessary macro cameras found in some phones today. Oppo claims up to 60x magnification, and it looks more like a microscope than a macro lens – you can take photos of things like subpixel layouts on screens, and there’s even a ring light for it. illuminate the subject. I’m not sure if this will be a selling point for a lot of people, but in my first few tests I can confirm that it’s pretty cool. Here’s a quick look at my computer screen:

You’ll notice that the whole photo isn’t quite in focus, and that’s because the depth of field is extremely shallow when you’re shooting so close – you need to get a few millimeters closer. I probably need more practice with the microlenses, but my first impression is that it might be more useful for looking at things in real time than for capturing them to share them.

One notable omission is a periscope zoom lens, although Oppo has done more than anyone to popularize the technology. There’s a telephoto here, but it’s just a 13-megapixel sensor with 2x optical zoom on the main camera. This isn’t necessarily a downgrade, as it could improve image quality at mid-range shooting distances, but it does mean the Find X3 Pro won’t have as much zoom range as its equipped predecessor. a 5x telephoto lens.

Another key feature is the Find X3 Pro’s display; this is a 3216 x 1440 LTPO OLED panel with a maximum brightness of 1300 nits and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Oppo goes out of its way to be a panel 10-bit and integrated with full-path color management in ColorOS; This means that photos and videos captured with the cameras can be displayed with over a billion colors, compared to 16.7 million colors on conventional smartphone screens.

The Find X3 Pro typically has flagship-level internals: a Snapdragon 888 processor, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The 4,500mAh battery can be quickly charged up to 65W, and Oppo finally adopted wireless charging on a flagship with a 30W system that can fully charge the phone in 80 minutes. The lack of wireless charging was my biggest downside against the Find X2 Pro, so Oppo got off to a good start here.

We do not yet have pricing or details on the Find X3 Pro version; Oppo plans to announce it next week. Stay tuned for more info and a full review.