Honey, I shrunk the world with Oppo Find X3 Pro
Oppo Find X3 Pro with SuperVooc 2.0 65w charger.
The latest flagship from Oppo Ireland will launch here in May and there’s a lot to get excited about. The Oppo Find X3 Pro is a premium device with the latest cutting-edge hardware, space-age design and innovative camera tech and I’ve been using it for the last few weeks to see if it’s worth the premium price you’ll have to pay for it.
All phone makers are pushing the boundaries of physics to put larger lenses and sensors in their cameras. Larger means more space is required and hence, the all too familiar camera bump. Finding new ways to make the bump more aesthetically pleasing can’t be easy but I can appreciate Oppo’s approach which manages to seamlessly encapsulate it into the design by curving and smoothing it into the rest of the glass back.
Using 2000 UV point mapping to create the perfect curve and over 40 hours to create a single piece of curved glass for the back of the Find X3 Pro is a marvel of modern engineering. I know not everyone will be as impressed but it shows the lengths a company will go to accomplish a design teams vision.
The Find X3 Pro will be available in both a polished or matte finish. My review unit was the latter and doesn’t show any fingerprints. The phone comes with a softshell case that does an excellent job of protecting the phone and thanks to the four raised corners, the front is safe even when you lay it flat on a desk along with the pre-installed screen protector.
The sides are curved on all sides and on the back and front with round corners and round edge rails. The result is a phone that feels really comfortable to hold in the hand.
Sporting a 6.7-inch display, the Find X3 Pro isn’t a small phone but still manages to be relatively light and thin at 193 grams. By comparison, the iPhone 12 Pro Max with its 6.68-inch display weighs 228 grams or the Samsung S21 Ultra is a hefty 229 grams with a 6.9-inch display.
The Find X3 Pro has an elegant design although the front has a 92.7% screen-to-body ratio, it looks like so many other flagships. There’s a small punch-hole cutout for the front camera and an impressively fast in-display fingerprint reader near the bottom of the screen.
On the left edge are the volume up and down buttons, the right a power button and a dual-SIM tray, USB-C 3.1 port, a bottom-firing speaker and another speaker on the top of the display for an impressive stereo sound setup with Dolby Atmos support. A nice feature of the volume buttons is that you can set them to control either media or ringtone volume.
The 6.7-inch display is simply stunning. It features a quad-HD (3216 x 1440 pixels) with an adaptive refresh range of 5~120Hz which you can set to both high-refresh and high resolution. The contrast is vast (5,000,000:1) and the peak brightness of 1300 nits makes reading the screen outside on a bright day as easy as reading a newspaper.
One of the key features of this particular display is that it has a 10-bit colour depth capable of reproducing one billion colours. That’s 64 times more than your typical 8-bit display found in almost every other phone. This was a big selling feature at the launch of the Find X3 Pro but I’m not convinced that the average user will appreciate it.
You can capture and playback video and photos in 10-bit which is unique but this can introduce an incompatibility with software and playback afterwards. You can also save photos in HEIF file format which has better image quality than JPEG. Thanks to a full-path 10-bit colour management system, you can capture, edit and display 10-bit video and photos on the Find X3 Pro. Thankfully, 10-bit and HEIF are optional and you can also convert 10-bit images to more compatible JPEGS when and if required.
The display is colour accurate with 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, as well as fully supporting HDR10+ in apps that have HDR content like Prime Video, Netflix and YouTube.
The screen is nice and big and a joy to use from scrolling through social feeds like Instagram to playing games and watching movies.
The refresh rate is independent of the resolution so you can set the display to 120Hz and quad-HD. For maximum power savings, you can choose a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. Both the 120Hz and 60Hz option will dynamically adapt the refresh rate from 5Hz to the upper limit you set but you can’t set the refresh to a set rate. However, during my time of testing, I never noticed any glitches or frame rates dropping so the adaptive refresh works seamlessly.
The Find X3 Pro is packed with all of the latest tech including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage.
Apps load fast and switching between them is smooth and quick with no noticeable slowdowns. In general use, it’s hard to see the speed improvements in the CPU over the previous generation of Snapdragon. However, I could see a massive boost in performance in gaming thanks to the updated GPU.
By default, the system runs in a balanced mode but there is a performance mode that boosts the performance at the expense of battery life. I never felt the need to use this other than for testing. Oppo Game Space allows you to enable three performance modes while playing a game from low power mode to full-on competition mode for maximum performance.
Gaming on the Find X3 Pro is excellent thanks to the stereo sound which is expansive, the 120Hz refresh rate for games that support it and the vibrant screen. The only thing I didn’t like is the rubbery pre-installed screen protector which made it difficult to move smoothly.
wifi connectivity has been solid during my testing. You get wifi 6 but even using standard wifi I was able to reach maximum upload and download speeds from my router (500mbps down/50mbps up). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test 5G speeds due to current lockdown restrictions but 4G speeds were excellent.
256GB of memory is generous but those who like to expand via microSD will have to look elsewhere since the Find X3 Pro doesn’t come with that option. Personally, I haven’t used a microSD card in a phone in years, so I don’t see it as a deal-breaker. The only reason I can see a use for a microSD card is in a budget phone with small storage.
By default, the Find X3 Pro is set to balanced mode and even at 120Hz, I was able to get a full day on a single charge. The 4,500 mAh battery isn’t the largest but manages to outperform others with larger batteries in my experience. With light use, two days are possible thanks to a frugal and efficient standby mode.
The power adaptor that comes in the box is Oppo's proprietary charging technology SuperVooc 2.0. Thanks to 65 watts of power and some Oppo magic, I was able to charge the Find X3 Pro from 1% to 100% in 30 minutes. However, if you use a non-SuperVooc charger, you’re limited to 10 watts of charging power.
There’s also reverse wireless charging at 10 watts. I was able to charge an iPhone 12 Pro Max from 48% to 55% in 15 minutes which drained the Find X3 Pro from 82% down to 77%.
Although I wasn’t able to test it, using Oppo's new AirVooc you can fully wirelessly charge the Find X3 Pro in just 80 minutes.
By default, night charging is set to optimised. This feature learns from your daily charging routine to avoid overcharging and reduce battery ageing. If you plug your charger in at night, it will only charge it fully just before you typically take it off the charger in the morning.
As you’d expect in a premium device, the Find X3 Pro comes with IP68 water and dust resistance. The in-display fingerprint reader is fast and reliable and the best of its type I’ve used. There’s also the less secure but even faster face unlock.
Although it seems strange to call the power adaptor an extra, some companies are choosing not to include one in the box. The one that comes with the Find X3 Pro is pretty special but more on that later. You also get a set of decent USB-C headphones that sound pretty good and come in handy.
One of the best things about the Find X3 Pro is its camera system. Gone is the apparently excellent zoom lens from its predecessor and instead, Oppo has gone the complete opposite direction with a 3MP microscopic lens that can capture the threads in the fabric of your clothes in great detail. The microlens is far from a gimmick and lots of fun to use although it is niche and not for everyone.
I love macro photography but the new microlens on the Find X3 Pro allows you to get even closer to a subject with a magnification of 60x whereas my dedicated macro lens which costs as much, can only get me 1x.
One of the biggest hurdles with macro cameras on smartphones is light because as you get closer to your subject, the phone will block out all the light. Oppo's solution was to build a macro ring light around the lens which illuminates your subject so you always get a perfectly lit subject.
One of the disadvantages of the micro camera is the narrow depth of field. You have to be within 3mm of your subject to get it in focus. There’s no autofocus or image stabilisation so you have to move the camera back and forth to find the perfect plane of focus. This is often easier said than done especially if your subject is moving too but the end results are astonishing. It’s a way of seeing the world around you in a completely new and wonderful way.
In other smartphones, the ultra-wide lens generally gets an inferior sensor but not so on the Find X3 Pro. The main and ultra-wide cameras use the same 50MP Sony, 1/1.56-inch size, IMX 766 sensors. The real beauty of using the same sensor for your two main cameras results in colour, contrast, detail and sharpness being very similar. This consistency makes a big difference to those who care about image quality.
The main lens is f/1.8 and has optical image stabilisation (OIS). The ultra-wide lens isn’t as bright at f/2.2 and lacks OIS which isn’t as important on an ultra-wide but also features macro capabilities allowing you to focus closer to subjects. The 13MP f/2.4 2x optical zoom camera has OIS and 5x hybrid zoom and up to 20x digital zoom.
Overall, the image quality, colour rendition and details captured are excellent on the two main lenses. Night mode is good but I found using a tripod and turning on the tripod option in the camera app resulted in vastly better photos due to longer exposure times.
Pro mode allows full control over your ISO, shutter speed, white balance, focus and exposure offset as well as the ability to shoot in RAW and RAW+. The latter encapsulates all of the computational photography into the RAW file for greater flexibility when you go to edit your photos later.
Both the main and ultra-wide cameras do an excellent job of handling challenging conditions with good HDR processing. Taking a portrait against a strong backlight showed good contrast but sometimes the aggressive HDR algorithm would create colour casts in skin tones. However, compared to a lot of other phones which produce a flat image, I’d prefer the more contrasty results from the Find X3 Pro because it’s easier to correct colour than contrast.
The weakest camera in the quad-array is the 2x optical zoom. This isn’t to say it’s bad but compared to the competition which offers up to 10x optical zoom, the range from telephoto to ultra-wide isn’t as versatile as some of the offers from Samsung and Huawei.
Long zoom lenses aren’t seen as essential and all iPhones, bar the iPhone 12 Pro Max, have a max zoom of 2x. However, it’s still worth noting if you miss a long zoom.
Video tops out at 4K @60fps however, the lack of an 8K option does feel strange considering the hardware but I feel it’s a sensible omission. 8K on a smartphone is a nice to have but more of a gimmick that few will actually use. Find X3 Pro takes advantage of its 10-bit capabilities with BT.2020 colour gamut support, HDR and log recordings, features pro videographers will appreciate along with manual controls.
Video quality is excellent although it can get pretty grainy in low light conditions. I do love the pro mode which is excellent for those who are interested in adjusting ISO, shutter speed and colour when shooting video.
Image stabilisation in video is excellent and there’s an ultra stead pro mode that uses the ultra-wide lens but crops in to 1x to enable software to stabilise any shakes.
In normal video mode, you can zoom from 0.6x up to 20x digital and although there is a noticeable jump between lenses like from 0.6x to 1x to 2x, colour reproduction stays consistent.
At €1,149 the Oppo Find X3 Pro isn’t an inexpensive phone but you absolutely get what you pay for. The SuperVooc 2.0 charging is incredibly handy and a lifesaver at times. The Snapdragon 888 has a cool number and makes everything, especially games, feel smooth and ultra-fast. The premium design and feel in the hand is great and the stunning display and stereo sound make it one of the best phones I’ve used for media consumption as well as video and photo editing. Available in May.
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