Oppo Find X3 Pro lands with the best display on a phone and unique Microlens camera

Well, the Oppo Find X3 Pro was just unveiled, and it rights both those wrongs, and then some, as it introduces insane 30W wireless charging, a unique Microlens camera for the dormant Sir David Attenborough in you, and improves on the best phone display of 2020 to make it the best of 2021 so far. How? Here's the scoop.

One could tell immediately that they are looking at a unique phone by the sloping camera island sides that blend seamlessly with the rear glass back as if crafted from a single piece of glass. And single it has been; apparently, it takes Oppo 40 hours to craft one piece of Find X3 Pro housing with 5x the number of discarded moulds than usual to achieve perfection in a blue frost matte or a shiny black finish.

Moving on to the "billion-color" 6.7" 1440p display, it is not only the second after the S21 Ultra of the frugal LTPO variety, but offers more granular 5Hz-120Hz dynamic refresh rate than Samsung's finest, controlled on a hardware level. What's the "billion-color" display all about, given that phones like the S21 Utra or iPhone 12 Pro Max also offer wide-color HDR10+/Dolby Vision certification?

Well, Oppo calls it a Full-path Color Management System, and it is created for wide-color capture, encoding, storage, decoding, and playback from the camera to the display components. This is supposedly the gold standard of HDR management systems, as it not only captures and displays wide-color content, but also ensures playback or display compatibility for a seamless high dynamic range experience, or, as Oppo told us:

As usual with Oppo displays of late, the panel on the Find X3 Pro also undergoes individual factory calibration on each unit to ensure perfect Delta E numbers, or, in other words, credible color representation out of the box. Oppo is so certain in the ability of its display to show a breathtaking amount of colors, that it has embedded a color blindness test in the display's settings which uses the industry-standard Munsell 100 Hue Test.

Can't see red? The Find X3 Pro will find out, and serve you one of its 765 possible screen calibrations, in this case a reddish hue that you can actually acknowledge, talk about attention to details. The display settings offer several panel modes to choose from, and Oppo has even listed the color gamut percentages they show:

The highest-end Snapdragon 888 chipset with multi-band X60 5G modem?  Check. 12GB RAM? Check. 256GB storage for the base version? Check. Nothing to complain about in the flagship Oppo Find X3 Pro specs, as they'd run the eye-pleasing and versatile ColorOS 11.2 overlay on top of Android 11 like a champ. Besides being incredibly feature-rich, ColorOS now offers the best one-handed navigation abilities of all overlays out there with features like shrinking icons gesture to put them within a thumb's reach, or the Fingerprint Quick Launch set of 5 apps to start directly from the in-display finger scanner.

To top it all off, the Find X3 Pro specs include a large 4500mAh battery with ultrafast 65W charger thrown in for a good measure (yes, in the box), which Oppo claims can bring a dead battery to 40% in 10 minutes. The added bonus of 30W wireless charging coil can fill up the battery from depleted state for just 1.5 hours, less than it takes an iPhone to charge with a cable, neat!

Moving on to the other unique added value of the Fund X3 Pro, its quad-camera set, we find the same attention to detail and to what the customers want (or don't even know yet they want it until Oppo offers it in the form of a Macrolens photography.)

Oppo Find X3 Pro camera specs:

• 50MP wide-angle camera, Sony IMX 766 sensor, 1/1.56" size, f/1.8 aperture, OIS, all pixel omni-directional PDAF
• 50MP ultra wide-angle camera, Sony IMX 766 sensor, 1/1.56" size, f/2.2 aperture
• 13MP telephoto camera, f/2.4 aperture, 5x hybrid zoom, 20x digital zoom
• 3MP Microlens camera, f/3.0 aperture, fixed focus
• 32MP selfie camera, f/2.4 aperture

The Find X3 Pro’s gorgeous sloping camera design elevates the best of what Apple offers on its iPhone camera – two identical sensors doing the main and ultrawide camera work – for a consistent color temperature and resolution no matter which camera you are shooting with at the moment. Could this be the best ultrawide phone camera as Oppo claims? You'll see in a bit.

Oppo also ran the numbers and the focus groups, and determined that most phone users advantage the quality of the ultrawide camera (you know, group people shots or landscapes and all that), rather than the ability to shoot for the moon with 5x-10x periscope zoom. Thus, it used the newest 50MP Sony IMX766 omnidirectional autofocus sensors for both the main and the ultrawide cameras, while ditching the 5x periscope zoom cam of its predecessor for a “regular” 13MP telephoto camera with 5x lossless hybrid zoom.

Instead of shooting for the skies, the Oppo Find X3 Pro was kitted with a unique macrophotography lens that can magnify 30x-60x times the object, allowing us to take pictures of a housemoth's eye, or every intricacy of our sourdough breakfast bread. It's a fun and original addition, and a boon for the aspiring "little world" nature photographer in you.

With today's announcement, Oppo is positioning the Find X3 Pro directly against formidable high-end competitors like the Galaxy S21 Ultra or iPhone 12 Pro Max, but the phone is at once lighter and more elegant than them, and it offers some unique features they don't have. 

Last year, the Find X2 Pro was priced as much as the Galaxy S20 Ultra at launch, and the Find X3 Pro pricing shows that Oppo is pretty confident it can take on the big boys, too, becoming the largest phone maker in the world's largest phone market and all. With good reason, Oppo, with good reason.