The new Oppo Find X8 Pro Android phone is a fast flagship device with a great camera system

After the worldwide launch in Bali, Oppo suggested I give their new Find X8 Pro a spin. For that is the role of a technology journalist with an unhealthy obsession with trying things out. It is a certain way to spend an inordinate amount of time on Figuring Things Out and one reason I try not to think about my hourly earnings.

To start with, Oppo might be a newish name in this part of the world, but it is no plucky smartphone underdog. It was part of China’s giant electronics conglomerate BBK which has now faded away, and which nobody knew a great deal about. Apart from BBK brands like Vivo and Oppo and its subsidiaries OnePlus and RealMe making and selling millions of smartphones worldwide. 

Analyst firms such as IDC and Canalys place Oppo and Vivo in the top five global market share charts, after familiar names such as Samsung, Apple and Xiaomi. Oppo is gunning for market share in New Zealand too, sitting at 10 to 15 per cent, depending on where you look.

How does the new Oppo Find X8 Pro flagship device rate then? Read on, and I apologise in advance for getting carried away with the detail, but it is a reminder of how complex and capable smartphones are these days.

Don’t want to read on? Fine; the Oppo Find X8 Pro is very well-made, a premium device with a very good camera system, good software and artificial intelligence (AI) features, and no major flaws.

Oppo New Zealand has dropped the cost of the Find X8 Pro from an ouchie $2299 to a little less painful $1999, which is still premium pricing. You’re getting a good mix of high-end tech for the money though.

In your hands

The Find X8 Pro looks… you know, like a smartphone. An expensive one. It’s fairly slim, with a 6.78-inch screen (measured diagonally) which is big enough to display lots of information and comfortably view movies and pictures on, without being gigantic and heavy at just 215 grams.

Well; there are two things that are a bit different: the Quick Launch haptic button to start the camera, zoom and trigger the shutter. It’s not quite like Apple’s Camera Control which is a button, and which shows what it does in the user interface on the phone but Quick Launch is easy to use. If you remember it’s there that is, and don’t tap the screen instead to use the camera.

At the back, there’s a big round camera bump, and the phone is made Ingress Protection (IP) 69 proof and can survive short and not too deep dunks in water. The case is made of Corning Glass 7i; I’m not a fan of the pattern at the rear of the camera, which is white and looks like it has protective plastic film on it with an air bubble. In fact, that’s what I thought it was and I tried to peel it off to no avail.

Inside the Find X8 Pro, a somewhat unusual system on a chip takes care of business. It’s not from Qualcomm as is the norm for high-end phones, but from Mediatek: an eight-core Dimensity 9400. Rattling off further tech specs at this stage tends to make most people’s eyes glaze over and click away to somewhere else, but it’s a modern chip set made with an advanced 3 nanometre process by Taiwan’s TSMC. 

As a result, the Dimensity 9400 ticks all the boxes for a 2024 Android smartphone buyer.

• Our review phone came with 16 gigabytes of memory and 512 gigabytes of storage.
• It’s fast: Geekbench 6 benchmark testing shows the phone has plenty of performance, and is able to keep up with other flagship devices. In the Geekbench AI benchmark though, the numbers weren't impressive; getting a handle on artificial intelligence acceleration for hardware is difficult though.
• A chunky 5770 milli-Ampere hour (22.33 Watt hours) battery has ample capacity for the powerful computing capabilities of the Find X8 Pro, and the device easily lasts over a day, sometimes two even.
• Fast-charging is supported, with Oppo’s SuperVOOC technology. You need to know that that stands for "Super Voltage Open-Loop Multi-Step Constant-Current Charging”. Well, maybe you don’t but it does and there’s an 80 Watt wall-wart included with the Find X8 Pro that tops up the battery in minutes.
• The chipset supports 5G (naturally) but Wi-Fi 7 as well, so you get over 2 gigabits per second connect speeds.
• It can drive a very good display with active matrix organic light emitting diodes (AMOLED) that provides a billion colours, high dynamic range support, is very bright at 800 to 1600 nits (yes, that’s the unit, although you can go with Candela per square metre too) and if the application used supports it, up to a very fast 120 Hertz refresh rate. The display can also drop down to 1 Hz to save energy.
• A combo camera system at the back with 15, 23, 73 and 135 mm focal lengths, with a mix of Sony and Samsung sensors that provide a high 50 megapixel resolution.
• There’s a 32 Mpixel selfie camera as well.

When it comes to gaming, the Find X8 Pro put in scores of just over 6400 to 6535, with 38-42 frames per second, in the 3Dmark Wild Life Extreme test. Which is rather good, better than the iPhone 16 Pro Max in fact.

When using the stress test variant of the same benchmark program which loops twenty times, the Find X8 Pro got quite hot and slowed down.

What about the software?

Oppo’s customised version of Android is called ColorOS. Version 15 of both Android and ColorOS is included with the Find X8 Pro. It’s the full Google Android experience, unencumbered by geopolitical rowing. 

ColorOS is nicely organised and clean, with nothing that grinds your gears. Full marks to Oppo overall, although I’m not sure what the benefit is of having a separate App Market along with Google’s official Play store - and using your Google account to sign into Oppo to access some of the vendor’s custom stuff.

The Smart Side bar that you slide in from the right is cool however, providing quick access to different features.

Being Android, it’s worth checking to see how long operating system support lasts and Oppo’s pretty good here, promising to provide five operating system releases and six years’ worth of security updates. 

It is illegal to ship a phone in 2024 without artificial intelligence features. OK, I made that up about the legality, but the Find X8 Pro has a few AI bits and bobs worth mentioning. Android is Google, so you get Big G’s Gemini Assistant, Screen Recognition with summaries and content, generative features like the AI Toolbox that has a writing app, and which can read out text, and the usage-limited AI studio to create images.

Google Lens for object recognition with the camera is also included, and it’s pretty quick and accurate.

AI is infused into the image editing, with Eraser, Unblur, Reflection removal, and Clarity enhancements. Using some of them removes the Pro XDR high dynamic range feature in pics though, and the AI Editor tools are not available for videos.

A famous photography name from the past

If you’re into photography, you’ll see from the above that the rear quad-camera system provides a very useful range of focal lengths. The cameras go from ultra-wide to wide angle, and unusually, provide two telephoto lenses.

Three of the cameras have optical image stabilisation (which works well); the ultra-wide one doesn’t, but you don’t usually need it for that lens. The main camera (23 mm wide angle) is the one that you’ll use most of the time; it has a bright f/1.6 lens that lets in lots of light. However, the 135 mm telephoto that gets you the six times optical magnification is just f/4.3. 

To put that into perspective, Apple’s 120 mm 5X telephoto camera on the iPhone 16 Pro has an f/2.8 aperture. The long and short of that is that a brighter lens lets you use a lower light sensitivity setting and higher shutter speed. That can get you better image quality, and sharper pics.

A wider aperture also provides shallower depth of field which is desirable in some situations like taking portraits when you want to blur out the background, although this can be done in software nowadays with good results. Having focal lengths from a wide 15 mm (this is 35 mm film equivalent, a by now archaic measure) going all the way to 135 mm tele on a smartphone is great.

All of that is photo-nerdy, and that is the market Oppo targets with the Find X8 Pro; the smartphone maker is trying to further entice enthusiasts with the camera system being tuned by famous photography brand Hasselblad of Sweden.

That of course relies on the name Hasselblad ringing a bell, like brands such as Zeiss, Leica, and Schneider-Kreuznach do for a select audience. But, mentioning Hasselblad and the other famous photography names to a small and statistically insignificant coterie of acquaintances produced blank stares and “how do you spell that?” questions. I guess they’re not famous brands anymore then. Maybe Hasselblad needs to fire its cameras into space again?

Let’s carry on with the Hasselblad photo-nerd stuff: Oppo says to use the 1X wide lens that mimics Hasselblad 30mm glass, the 2x zoom for 65 mm, and the 3x tele for the 90 mm V unit. Along with the medium-format camera body, those three Hasselblad lenses would set you back tens of thousands of dollars.

Is a $2k smartphone as good as a hugely expensive camera with central leaf shutter digital lenses, a big sensor and what have you? That would be amazing if true, but such a comparison will have to wait until Hasselblad sends some gear my way (and Oppo lets me hang onto the Find X8 Pro).

That said, the Find X8 Pro is very capable and takes great photos and videos in most situations, including night time. Here are some samples, taken during the recent storm.

As I've noticed on other smartphones, a system with multiple different sensors can produce inconsistent results as you switch between cameras. The Oppo Find X showed colour shifting when you go from the wide to the tele lenses, which is fixable after shooting but it'd be great not having to deal with that.

There are some good present modes, like a nice Portrait one with aperture control (sort of, you're not changing a physical aperture but a digitally mimicked one) which drops you into the 3X telephoto camera for best results. Using the full 50 MPixel resolution of the sensors is pointless; stick to the 4096 by 3512 pixel-binned pics instead.

Oppo has slightly confusing pro modes for photo- and videographers that want more manual control over the picture taking. 

For stills, this is called Master: leave it on Auto, and you can preset saturation, contrast, sharpness and vignetting with auto white balance and exposure. Switch to Master Pro, and parameters such as ISO sensitivity, shutter speed, exposure, and focusing become available. Unfortunately, the mode you've selected resets to the default Photo one after a while.

On the other hand, for videos, you need to tap on More in the camera app, and pick Movie mode to access the full set of shooting parameters. Videos can be shot at 4K (2160p) resolution and 60 frames per second maximum, if the light permits.

All the pics and videos for this review were shot in full auto. Here's a sample 4K clip that I won't embed and which is handheld with the UltraSteady stabilisation active and doing an OK job.

Slo-mo can be as fast as 480 frames per second, but only at 720p resolution; the default is 240 fps and 1080p which is the maximum resolution for slo-mo. Long exposure video is very cool, and you can have a vlogging good time with the dual-view video that puts you into 1080 clips with the selfie-cam, while also shooting with the rear cameras at 1.2, 3 and 6 times magnification.

The longest tele lens could be a bit brighter, and selfie fanatics might miss auto-focus on the front 32 Mpixel camera (which can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second!) but otherwise, smartphone snappers have every reason to check out the Oppo Find X8 Pro. 

There are rumours of an Ultra version of Find X8 arriving next year, with a larger sensor (again, photo nerds will be interested in that) and we'll see if it appears. As it is though, the Pro goes a long way for photos and videos, particularly at night, for the discerning smartphone snapper.