A camera-forward smartphone is a thing of joy. Especially if you love photography. In recent years, Shenzhen-based OPPO has not only been focusing on delivering great optics at the hardware level and pleasing aesthetics at the software level with its Hasselblad collab but also has been upping the game with its unique design elements. I’ve been using the OPPO Find X8 Pro, which has just been launched globally, and here are my first impressions of the product.
Design
OPPO has kept it simple with two colour options - space black and pearl white. I’ve got the latter - a pearlescent, prettier variant to review. If you want to feel truly unique you should know that no two handsets in the Pearl White variant will look the same, thanks to a multi-layer texture process for the rear panel.
The Cosmos Ring camera system, as OPPO calls it, houses the main starrer of this smartphone - the HyperTone Camera System, which I’ll get to in a bit.
The alert slider rests on the top left of the bezel and includes functions such as a special VIP mode which when enabled immediately turns off the camera permission, location access, and microphone for a more secure experience.
A brand new addition is the Quick Button, similar to the Camera Control on the iPhone 16 lineup. Designed to lay flush with the right-side bezel, the Quick Button can be easy to miss when you’re feeling around for it the first time around. However, it’s definitely handy for a quick two-pushes to access the camera in a jiffy.
Display
The massive 6.78-inch AMOLED display is super bright and legible under the bright Bali sun. The display offers refresh rates of up to 120Hz, so scrolling and animations are rendered smoothly. The brand has also been focusing a lot over the last couple of years on improving PWM dimming which minimises eye strain during smartphone use. I watched a couple of episodes of A Virtuous Business on Netflix, a South Korean comedy-drama and the colours really popped on scree, along with really punchy audio.
Camera
The starrer on this smartphone is a fairly unique four 50 MP camera set up, that includes two periscope telephoto lenses. That’s pretty unheard of. There’s the usual HyperTone Image Engine, OPPO’s computational photography chops, that improves photo and video quality post-capture. The OPPO Find X8 Pro is one of those smartphones that you’d love to take along on a holiday or use daily if you love capturing life’s simpler moments. In daylight, the smartphone delivers some stunning well-saturated stills. Colours are vivid, not overblown, with some excellent dynamic range. Capturing some billowy white clouds on an otherwise clear day results in a dramatic photo, where the edge of the clouds does look a little over-exposed, but overall do not detract from the impact of the photo. The same goes for indoor stills with limited light during the daytime. The smartphone does a great job of balancing the highlights and shadows resulting in some really striking photographs. Sometimes the colour tones change a bit while switching between 2x to 3x zoom in photo mode. There’s also a difference in the overall tone when I snap the same frame in Photo as well as Portrait mode, which is due to the Hasselblad-tuning designed especially for the Portrait mode. Skin tones look perfectly accurate, although the default beauty setting does erase most pores and fine lines.
There’s a special Stage Mode, which helps you capture clear shots at 20x-30x zoom in concerts or shows, however, I’m yet to have a chance to try this out.
I didn’t really use the Quick Button much except to click a photo or occasionally just launch the camera. The slide-to-zoom feature kicks in only when I’m using it in landscape mode. A bit of a bummer considering most photos snapped these days are in vertical mode.
While shooting videos, you can use three distinct filters added - Fresh, Emerald and Clear - which add to the overall mood and atmosphere of the footage. Of these three, Emerald was my favourite style. These film styles can be applied to both photos and videos.
In portrait mode, there are now three soft lighting-style filters to use - Misty, Glowing and Dreamy. It delivers some lovely looking 90s nostalgia-style portraits, the likes you’d see in movies when the protagonist is reminiscing the past in hazy, soft visuals.
OPPO Find X8 Pro camera samples
Tech Specs
The smartphone runs on MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and has 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage on my review unit. The chipset makes multitasking feel easy and smooth and is adept at post-processing images. Casual gaming is also great on the smartphone with no lags or heating issues. The device runs on ColorOS 15 (based on Android 15). The smartphone introduces three new AI-driven photo editing features. There’s AI ‘Reflection Remover’ feature which does what the name states. It erases all reflections it finds in a particular image, whereas you might want to retain one but not another, but overall it does a decent job of improving the picture quality. There’s also AI Clarity Enhance, and AI Unblur which works really well across photos taken.
In terms of productivity help from AI, you can get summaries of existing text as well as voice notes, generate written captions or emails, and have it read out a gist of information to you. The only thing is the AI toolbox containing these features pops up in the sidebar only when a compatible app /text is onscreen and remains inaccessible otherwise. There’s also Circle to Search from Google, on this device along with Google Gemini for quick assistance with information or idea generation.
One standout feature, coming to the handset by December, that users might love is the Find X8 Pro’s ability to share media directly with iPhones and iPads, something that Android users struggle with to this day. A quick NFC-driven tap will do the job.
The smartphone is powered by a 5,910mAh battery and is thankfully slow to drain. I used it extensively with mobile data on, hotspot on, took a bunch of photos throughout the day, used car ride and food delivery apps, and the smartphone had barely dropped below the 50 per cent battery level by the end of the day. 3. The smartphone also ships with a 80 W SUPERVOOC charger and is also compatible with 50 W AIRVOOC chargers for wireless charging.
Verdict
The Oppo Find X8 Pro, priced at INR 99,999 for 16GB RAM + 512GB storage. Keep a tab on the Thursday print edition of Technophile to know more.