Oppo’s new Find X3 Pro packs a microscopic camera

Oppo has lifted the lid on the Find X3 series, with three phones on their way to the UK and Europe led by the Snapdragon 888-powered flagship Find X3 Pro.

The X3 Pro is a £1,099 monster of a phone, with a 10-bit 120Hz display, 65W fast charging and 30W wireless, and 12GB of RAM paired with 256GB storage by default. Despite all that, it’s the camera that’s really exciting.

For starters, Oppo is pitching this as a ‘dual primary’ camera setup, with the exact same 50Mp IMX766 sensor behind both the regular and ultra-wide lenses, and careful colour-tuning to ensure that results out of each lens are as consistent as possible.

Unusually for a phone like this, there’s no periscope lens – you’ll have to settle for a 2x zoom telephoto. Instead, Oppo has included something genuinely new: a 3Mp microlens, capable of taking microscopic photos at up to 60x magnification. Check out this photo I took of the cell walls on one of my houseplants during my Find X3 Pro review:

The phone’s exterior is just as exciting as its interior, with a space-age rear design that sees the glass body curve up towards the camera module for a seamless unibody design. Oppo says it takes more than 40 hours to make each rear panel, which sees the glass heated to over 700°C in order to achieve a perfect curve.

On the front, the AMOLED display uses the same dynamic refresh rate tech as Samsung’s S21 Ultra, varying from 5Hz up to 120Hz depending on what you’re doing. It also supports 10-bit colour depth, with Oppo now extending 10-bit support throughout the phone, from the camera to file encoding, storage, and decoding, so there’s no loss of quality at all for 10-bit photos and videos.

The Find X3 Pro isn’t launching alone. It’s joined in Europe by the Find X3 Neo and Lite. While these share a few specs with the Pro model, the design is totally different: that’s because these are in fact re-branded versions of the Reno 5 Pro+ and Reno 5, which never launched in Europe.

Still, both offer OLED displays and match the X3 Pro’s 65W charging. The Neo also shares the Snapdragon 888 and uses the same main camera as the Pro, while the Lite drops to the Snapdragon 765G and offers a different 64Mp main shooter.

There’s actually no regular Find X3, though this model is expected to launch in China. Oppo says it didn’t want to launch all four phones in Europe to help differentiate the phones in the range.

All three phones will be available to buy in the UK from 14 April, and will be available to pre-order from Three and EE from 31 March. The Lite will cost £379, the Neo £699, and the Pro £1,099.