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Aug 24, 2023

Oppo Find X5 Pro camera Review

Wednesday August 31, 2022 By Jeff Meyer The Oppo Find X5 Pro is the first

Wednesday August 31, 2022

By Jeff Meyer

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is the first smartphone that I’ve used in some time that really demonstrates a big jump in quality over its predecessor. The collaboration with Hasselblad has paid off, delivering rich, accurate colours in a variety of light conditions, minimal distortions and the ability to capture stunning details from its dual-flagship cameras with glass lenses. At its £1,049 price tag, this won't be a phone everyone can afford to buy, but if you’re a content creator or take your photography and videography seriously, you should consider making the investment. Oppo's ColorOS Android interface takes a little getting used to, but overall the Find X5 Pro is a superb tool and a great everyday camera for snapshots, holidays and even more serious visual projects

Oppo's latest flagship smartphone is the first fruit borne from its partnership with Hasselblad. In our Oppo Find X5 Pro review we put the device's dual-flagship cameras through their paces on a visit to Paris.

The Find X5 Pro is the latest flagship smartphone from Chinese manufacturer Oppo, and the first in its collaboration with the legendary Swedish camera manufacturer Hasselblad.

The Oppo Find X5 Pro camera array boasts 50MP wide-angle, 50MP ultra-wide-angle and 13MP telephoto cameras on the rear of the device and a 32-megapixel selfie camera on the front. It's an Android device, supports 5G connectivity and boasts a 5000mAh battery with rapid charging. The Oppo Find X5 Pro also shoots 4K video at 60p and boasts a 4K Night Video mode.

On the outside is a 6.7-inch AMOLED display delivering more than a billion colours, which is made of scratch-proof Gorilla Glass and has an IP68 rating. Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage.

The Find X5 Pro is aimed at content creators and creative professionals.

The Oppo Find X5 Pro price tag is £1,049 and is available in the UK, Europe and Asia. It's not available in the United States.

Let's start by examining the Find X5 Pro's triple-camera system that was co-developed by Oppo and Hasselblad. Back in February of 2022 Hasselblad and Oppo announced a three-year strategic partnership to develop camera technology for the smartphone manufacturer's flagship Find series, and the Find X5 Pro is the first fruit borne of that collaboration. In particular, the two companies are collaborating to produce camera technology that renders more natural colours and natural skin tones.

The Find X5 Pro's main cameras are a 50-megapixel f/2.2 ultra-wide camera offering a 110-degree field of view and a 50-megapixel f/1.7 wide-angle camera with five-axis OIS. Oppo says these are dual flagship camera, which are powered by Sony IMX 766 sensors and can capture 10-bit video and record more than a billion colours (we haven't counted).

There's also a 13-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera, which is also capable of recording a billion colours.

Interestingly, the microlens camera that Oppo introduced on the Find X3 Pro is missing here, as are the periscope lenses. Oppo doesn't say why, but it would seem that these were sacrificed in order to pursue its stated aim of better colour accuracy and low light performance under the new partnership with Hasselblad.

The dual flagship cameras also boast glass lenses for the first time, which Oppo says reduces chromatic aberrations by up to 77% compared to plastic lenses. And the wide-angle camera's five-axis optical image stabilisation is "DSLR equivalent", according to Oppo, and is the first of its kind on a mobile device. It offers stablisation with sensor shift across three axes and lens shift across two axes. This technology, combined with Oppo's OIS algorithms, promise sharper stills and more stable videos.

What's more, Oppo has introduced a 13-channel spectral sensor to replace the five-channel RGBCW sensor from the Find X3 Pro. This is designed to better detect the colour spectrum of a scene. Combined with an upgraded AWB algorithm, the Find X5 Pro promise to produce better skin tones and better reproduce colours from any scene.

All of these upgrades stem from the partnership with Hasselblad, and for a nice extra touch, Oppo worked with several Hasselblad photographers to create a range of Master filters that you can apply to your images.

The 32-megapixel selfie camera uses a Sony IMX709 sensor an an RGBW subpixel matrix that Oppo says enables it to capture 60% more light. It does this by processing the W and RGB signals separately, allowing you to capture more colour and detail in low light. What's more, the selfie camera can detect when more people are in the frame and switches from an 80- to 90-degree wide angle.

Supporting the Oppo Find X5 Pro's dual-flagship cameras is a MariSilicon X Imaging NPU that provides efficient AI computing power for Oppo's 4K Night Video mode. What it does is allows HDR video to be captured in 20-bit, with 120 db dynamic range and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 between the lightest and darkest areas of a scene. The chip's computing power enables real-time raw processing down at the pixel level without any compression.

The Find X5 Pro can also upscale 720p and 1080p footage to create a high-resolution image at 2160p. Powered by Oppo's O1 Ultra Vision Engine, the Find X5 Pro can upscale standard definition content to deliver a wider tonal range.

Inside the Oppo Find X5 Pro is the latest generation multicore Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. Qualcomm's flagship GPU delivers 30% higher performance and 25% more power efficiency than its predecessor. What's more, it supports new AI capabilities.

The Find X5 Pro houses a large 5000mAh dual-cell battery that's capable of 1600 charging cycles – double the lifespan of most smartphones. What's more, the phone now supports 80W SuperVOOC Flash charging, meaning you can power the batter from empty to 50% in just 12 minutes. 50W AirVOOC charging enables you to restore the Find X5 Pro from near-empty to 100% in just 47 minutes.

The Oppo Find X5 Pro is large, boasting a 6.7-inch curved screen with 3216 x 1440 resolution. The AMOLED display has a refresh rate of 120Hz. There's also an under-display fingerprint scanner and a small camera in the top left for facial recognition.

The Find X5 Pro is pre-loaded with Android 12 but also runs Oppo's ColorOS 12. Effectively, the phone runs a stock version of Android and ColorOS is Oppo's redesign of its interface. Oppo is basically modifying Android. It aims to make navigation more intuitive by incorporating more gestures and fewer buttons and menus. You can also customise ColorOS to better suit how you use your phone. For instance, you can set it up to use one-handed.

Some people love ColorOS, and other people hate it. If you’ve not used it before, it does take some getting used to.

While many Android phones look alike, you certainly can't say that about the Oppo Find X5 Pro. With its scratch-resistant ceramic back and large camera bump that looks like it was sculpted out of stone, the phone certainly offers a bold and futuristic design.

It's a heavy phone, but I quite liked that about it. It feels like a premium product and feels like it is built to last. And with an IP68 splash proof, waterproof and dustproof rating, along with a Gorilla Glass front panel, it certainly should be durable.

It's also built to withstand the demands that content creators might put on it. The Oppo Find X5 Pro features a multi-tier cooling system in its design that includes a vapor chamber over the battery. There's also a 3D graphene film covering the phone's motherboard and charging coil, and a dedicated ultra thin graphite film covering both the screen and the display. This is all designed to help the phone efficiently dissipate any heat caused by filming video or high-intensity gaming.

The Find X5 Pro's massive 6.7-inch screen is also a delight to use. It's bright, and the colours really pop. Playing back your images, you can really notice the wide tonal range.

One thing I didn't like about the Find X3 Pro is replicated on the Find X5 Pro, unfortunately. The Volume Down and Power buttons sit at the same level on opposite sides of the handset. Pressing both at the same time takes a screenshot. With both phones, I found myself inadvertantly taking screenshots every time a press the power button. It's not a huge deal, but it's a minor annoyance.

I also found ColorOS a little strange to use to begin with. For instance, if you’re in the camera app – or any application – there is no back or home button. Simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen with your thumb, and the screen you were viewing explodes and you return home. Similarly, to go back within a menu or series of screens, swipe from the very edge of the screen.

This all sounds simple enough, but when scrolling through your photos I would often inadvertantly close the slideshow because I swiped too close to the edge of the screen rather than towards the middle, which is the motion for scrolling rather than going back a page.

Likewise, just by readjusting my grip on the phone I accidentally returned to the home screen. It's not a huge deal, but there were a few times where I missed a shot because I had closed the camera app. It was also a bit of a nuisance when trying to scroll through the photo mode options along the bottom of the frame in the camera app. I often closed the app altogether. It feels like the sensitivity of ColorOS probably needs some refinement.

I will just come out and say that using the Find X5 Pro is the first time since the Huawei P20 Pro several years ago that I’ve noticed a real, demonstrable jump in image quality in a smartphone. Yes, sensor technology and AI computing power improves every year, but these improvements upon already good systems seem slight when comparing them to their predecessors. When I first used the P20 Pro in 2018, I hadn't seen a phone that could shoot images in night mode quite like it could. I had the same feelings when using the Oppo Find X5 Pro.

From my first images, I was blown away by the colour and detail I could capture. Colours had punch, without being too in-your-face. And even the finest details in a scene were sharp and clear. I snapped the simple portrait below of my son on a trip to Paris. I marvelled at skin tone and the colours in the background, but when I zoomed in I was also impressed at the fine detail the phone captured in his hair and eye lashes.

What's more, if you zoom into any of the areas of high contrast in the images I took on this sunny day, you can see there is no fringing at all. This is often a problem with smartphone cameras, but the glass lenses in the dual-flagship cameras really do keep chromatic aberration at bay.

As these images were all taken good light, I wanted to see how the Find X5 Pro performed in mixed lighting and in the dark. In the image below, we were sat at a table next to a large glass window letting in lots of sunlight, and underneath a big light fixture. The Find X5 Pro coped just fine with this lighting and still managed to produce nice colours and skin tones.

A little later I wanted to capture the diners and onlookers crowded behind the Musee d’Orsay's large clock, as they gazed out at the Seine. Again, the phone coped with this harsh contrast and produced accurate colours. I decided, though, that I wanted to take more control and create a more artful silhouette of the scene. Switching to Pro mode, I tweaked the exposure and rendered the diners in black, allowing the strong window light to create a rim light effect and outline their profiles.

The Paris Catacombs was to be my final test of image quality. It's near dark in those tunnels down below the city streets, and I wanted to see how the Find X5 Pro's OIS could cope and if it could still capture sharp details.

The Catacombs, of course, are lined with the bones of more than 2 million Parisians, excavated from cemeteries that got swallowed up by the city's expansion over the centuries. Shooting in Night Mode, I got images that are evenly lit and captured detail on the surface of the bones. It wasn't quite the same level of detail as I got in good lighting, but it was still very impressive.

Down in the depths of the Catacombs, I was shooting stills and filming video in near total darkness. And because flash photography isn't allowed, it was the perfect test for the Find X5 Pro's low-light capability and I have to say I was blown away. The short video clip I shot using the 4K Night Video mode was crisp and clear, and captured an impressive range of tones. When I look back at the video, I question myself if it was really as dark as I remember. It's almost like the phone gave me more light to work with.

There are a lot of other hidden gems on the Find X5 Pro, as well, besides the big headline specs. For instance, it has a Long Exposure mode, within which you can set it to shoot moving vehicles (traffic trails), light painting or water and clouds. It works brilliantly. Shooting many of the fountains and water features across Paris handheld with the device, the Find X5 Pro perfectly blurs the water while keeping the subject sharp.

There's also a High-Res mode for capturing scenery with lots of detail, slow motion video capability, and for those content creators out there who want to make reaction videos, there's a Dual Screen Video mode that films from the selfie camera and the main cameras.

I shot with the Find X3 Pro, and it was fine. My images were crisp and clear, and the colours were usually nice. Sometimes they’d get washed out in bright scenes. That doesn't happen with the Find X5 Pro. It feels like a significant jump in camera quality. Whatever magic Oppo and Hasselblad are working behind the scenes with their AI, computational technology and glass lenses is clearly paying dividends.

Priced at more than £1,000, the Oppo Find X5 Pro is not cheap. It's a serious investment. But if you take your photography and video seriously, it's worth it. If you aspire to be a content creator on YouTube or Instagram, you can do everything you need to do from this one device.

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