Oppo announces the flagship of the Find X3 Pro with microscope camera

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

The most captivating visual element of the Find X3 Pro is the protrusion of the camera, which almost looks organic in the way it rises perfectly from the same piece of glass as the rest of the phone’s back panel. Combined with the finish, which in my unit is aggressively shiny and glossy, the phone looks like it was forged in Terminator 2-liquid metal style.

The camera system itself is no less unusual. There is a primary and an ultra-wide camera using Sony IMX766 50 megapixel 1 / 1.56 inch sensors, which means that the image quality must be comparable in both, although we have to see how it works in practice.

There are also 3 megapixel microlenses, which should not be confused with the useless macro cameras found on 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 things like sub-pixel layouts on screens, and there’s even a ring of light to illuminate the subject. I’m not sure if this will be a selling point for many people, but in my first tests, I can confirm that it is very cool. Here is a quick photo of my computer monitor:

You will notice that the whole scene is not well focused, and that is because the depth of field is extremely shallow when shooting so close – you need to reach millimeters. I probably need more practice with the microlenses, but my first impression is that it can be more useful for seeing things in real time than capturing them for sharing.

A notable omission is a periscope zoom lens, although Oppo has done more than anyone to popularize the technology. There’s a telephoto lens here, but it’s just a 13-megapixel sensor with 2x optical zoom over the main camera. This is not necessarily a downgrade, as it can improve image quality over medium-range shooting distances, but it does mean that the Find X3 Pro will not have as much zoom range as its predecessor equipped with a 5x telephoto lens.

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

The Find X3 Pro typically has major internal components: a Snapdragon 888 processor, 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The 4,500 mAh battery can be charged quickly up to 65 W, and Oppo has finally adopted wireless charging in a flagship with a 30 W system that can fully charge the phone in 80 minutes. The lack of wireless charging was my biggest blow to the Find X2 Pro, so Oppo started right here.

We don’t have pricing or release details for Find X3 Pro yet; Oppo plans to announce this next week. Stay tuned for more information and a complete review.