Review | Oppo Find X7 Ultra review: first phone with 2 periscope lenses takes zoom photos that leave iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro in the dust

Oppo’s Find X7 Ultra, with two periscope zoom lenses and a new 1-inch Sony main camera sensor, is the best phone camera on the market in terms of hardware
It takes better zoom photos than Apple or Android rivals, at a time when other phone makers have slowed camera hardware innovation to focus on AI and software

Smartphones

Ben Sin

Published: 4:15pm, 12 Jan 2024

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Huawei launched it in 2019, and Samsung is better known for it worldwide. Yet the periscope zoom lens – an L-shaped camera placed sideways inside a phone’s casing to allow more room for light to travel – is, in fact, an Oppo innovation.

The company, headquartered in Dongguan, southern China, first teased the technology with a prototype back in 2017, more than two years before Huawei and Samsung launched phones with periscope zoom cameras.

Fast forward to today, and the periscope zoom lens is a must-have in every flagship smartphone. Even Apple’s “Prism” zoom lens that debuted in the iPhone 15 Pro Max uses similar design philosophy.

Oppo is back to show that it is, indeed, the zoom lens king. The Chinese brand’s new flagship handset, the Find X7 Ultra, features two periscope zoom lenses – a world first – that cover the 72mm and 135mm focal lengths, paired with a brand new Sony LYT-900 1-inch wide main camera sensor.

The Oppo Find X7 Ultra is the first phone to feature two periscope zoom lenses. Photo: Oppo

This means the Find X7 Ultra has the best phone camera hardware on the market right now by some distance.

But in 2024, there’s more to smartphone photography than hardware. Software and machine learning play a big role, and it is here that Oppo stills falls short of the best.

The Find X7 Ultra continues the design language introduced by Oppo in 2023, with a two-tone back design with a glass top, vegan leather bottom, and a gigantic circular camera bump in between. Photo: Ben Sin

Design and hardware

The Find X7 Ultra continues the design language Oppo introduced in 2023, with a two-tone back featuring a glass top and vegan leather bottom and a gigantic circular camera bump in between. The glass and camera module have been given a metallic paint job for a more striking visual contrast.

All the components are top notch: the phone runs on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, the screen is a 2.5K OLED panel with refresh rate of up to 120Hz and maximum brightness of 4,500 nits when viewing HDR content. The RAM and storage are the latest configurations.

(From left): 1x, 3x and 30x zoom pictures taken from the same spot using the Oppo Find X7 Ultra. Photo: Ben Sin

These components and their specification are all cutting edge – but we can expect to find them on virtually every flagship phone coming out this year. What makes the Find X7 Ultra stand out are its cameras.

Software and features

The Find X7 Ultra runs Android 14 with Oppo’s ColorOS software on top. ColorOS is among the most fluid and customisable phone software around, and even though I tested the China model without Google apps pre-installed, setting up the full suite of Google services was easy. Oppo’s app store has the required Google apps to get started.

A photo taken at 15X zoom by the Oppo Find X7 Ultra (left) and one taken on the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max (right). Photo: Ben Sin

For the most part, the Find X7 Ultra is staying away from “AI” features, of which we will see a lot more in releases this year, including Samsung’s S24 series.

Performance and battery life

The phone’s overall performance is top notch, with the latest and best components. The Find X7 Ultra’s main camera has a second-generation 1-inch sensor from Sony and it is more efficient and intelligent at adjusting exposure in real time. It also has a fast shutter speed.

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The two zoom lenses completely trump the competition in terms of hardware. They have significantly larger sensors – in some cases, nearly double the size of competitors’ – and faster apertures which take in more light, the most crucial part of digital imaging.

If I take 10x zoom photos in less than optimal conditions, the Find X7 Ultra produces images that are clearly superior to the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro. Having two optical zoom lenses also gives the phone more versatility when zooming in and out during videos.

However, I do not love the Hasselblad colour science of the cameras. Shots seem a bit brighter and warmer, and with less contrast, than I like. Of course, this is purely subjective, but I generally prefer the colours produced by the cameras of the Google Pixel 8 Pro or Vivo X100 Pro.

The Find X7 Ultra’s screen is a 2.5K OLED panel with a refresh rate up to 120Hz and a maximum brightness of 4,500 nits. Photo: Ben Sin

The good news is that I can tweak photos after taking them to get them more to my liking. The important thing is that Oppo’s hardware is superior, so the resulting image has more raw details for editors to play with.

The 5,000 mAh battery can top up at 100W with the included charger. This means the phone can go from a flat battery to fully charged in around 20 minutes.

Conclusion

At a time when Google and Samsung have slowed down camera hardware innovation, reusing years-old sensors because they consider software and AI improvements are more important, Oppo continues to push the newest and biggest smartphone camera sensors around.

At the hardware level, packing two periscope cameras into one phone body is an impressive feat of engineering.

The Oppo Find X7 Ultra is available in mainland China from 5,999 yuan (US$845). A release outside China has not been confirmed.

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