Oppo's 10x optical zoom system really works

Oppo came to the Mobile World Congress this year not with a phone, but with a promise. This promise is a 10x lossless optical zoom that you can get with a new triple lens camcorder system that the company has unveiled. I tried it myself, and although I would not say that the results are as clear as having a dedicated camera with a true optical zoom system, it's definitely the closest we have still managed to meet the seemingly insurmountable challenge of injecting real zoom within the narrow confines of a smartphone.

The key component of the Oppo system is a periscopic configuration inside the phone: the light enters through a lens, is reflected by a mirror on a set of additional lenses, and then arrives at the perpendicular image sensor to the body of the phone. . That's why the telephoto lens in the Oppo chart, which has an equivalent of 160 mm in 35 mm. Between this lens, a standard wide-angle lens and a super wide angle equivalent to 16mm, you get the full range of 10x promised by Oppo.

On the prototype device offered by Oppo for testing purposes, the camera software has been locked to allow only simple photographs. I can not try any video shooting, although it is encouraging to note that Oppo has added Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) to both the main camera, which will offer an impressive 48 megapixel resolution and the telephoto lens. The closer the zoom is, the more OIS becomes necessary, so it is imperative. I also appreciate the fact that Oppo's OIS telephoto lens is shaken by shaking the mirror a few fractions of a millimeter in response to unintentional hand movements from the user.

Even with the OIS on board, previewing photos using telephoto produces an unpleasant frost-like jitter effect on the picture. Thus, every time I moved the camera during my tests, the image flickered a little. The minimum focusing distance for telephoto shooting is also quite long: it is primarily intended to capture certain architectural details when you visit cityscapes or to focus on a particular location in a vast landscape.

"Building on the development work presented by Oppo two years ago at MWC – it was a 5x periscope zoom at the time and the phone was significantly larger than the average – the new prototype is better in every way. More zoom, more lenses, more sophistication, reduced footprint and weight, and most importantly, a planned window. According to Oppo, a retail device with the 10x lossless zoom system will be released in the second quarter of 2019.