Oppo announces Find X3 Pro flagship with microscope camera

After a protracted series of leaks and teasing, Oppo has fully announced its 2021 flagship. The Find X3 Pro is a sleek, powerful phone with an unusual design and some unique features. It is also an important device for Oppo, which recently overtook Huawei in the Chinese smartphone market and will then try to capitalize on the problems of its competitor.

The Find X3 Pro’s most enduring visual element is its camera hump, which looks almost organic in the way it rises seamlessly from the same glass as the rest of the phone’s back panel. Combined with the finish, which is aggressively shiny and glossy on my unit, the phone looks like it’s counterfeit Terminator 2-style liquid metal.

The camera system itself is no less unusual. There’s a primary camera and an ultra-wide one that both use 50-megapixel 1 / 1.56-inch Sony IMX766 sensors, which means the image quality in both should be comparable, though in practice we should see how it goes.

There is also a 3-megapixel microlens, which should not be mistaken for the useless macro cameras found in some phones today. Oppo claims up to 60x magnification, and it’s more like a microscope than a macro lens – you can take pictures of subpixel layouts on screens, and there’s even a ring light to illuminate the subject. I’m not sure if this will be a selling point for many people, but in my early testing I can confirm that it’s pretty cool. Here is a quick survey of my computer monitor:

You will see that the whole shot is not completely in focus, and that is because the depth of field is extremely shallow when you shoot so close – you have to get within millimeters. I probably need more practice to use the microlens, but my first impression is that it may be more useful to look at things in real time than to capture them for sharing.

One notable omission is a periscope zoom lens, though Oppo has done more than anyone to popularize the technology. Here’s a tele-lens, but it’s just a 13-megapixel sensor with 2x optical zoom over the primary camera. This is not necessarily a downgrade, as it may improve image quality at mid-range recording distances, but it does mean that the Find X3 Pro will not have nearly as much zoom range as its 5x telephoto-equipped predecessor.

The screen of the Find X3 Pro is another important feature; it is a 3216 x 1440 LTPO OLED panel with a peak brightness of 1,300 nets and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Oppo makes a big deal out of the fact that it is a 10-bit panel and that it has integrated full color management into ColorOS; this means that photos and videos captured with the cameras can be displayed with more than a billion colors, as opposed to the 16.7 million colors on conventional smartphone screens.

The Find X3 Pro typically has internal flagship level: a Snapdragon 888 processor, 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The 4500 mAh battery can be quickly charged up to 65 W, and Oppo has finally embraced wireless charging on a flagship with a 30 W system that can fully charge the phone within 80 minutes. The lack of wireless charging was my biggest knock against the Find X2 Pro, so Oppo’s got off to a good start here.

We do not yet have pricing or launch details for the Find X3 Pro; Oppo plans to announce it next week. Stay tuned for more information and a complete overview.