It’s good to see the Oppo Find X8 Pro in Singapore this week, after the phone maker skipped the Find X6 and X7 phones here and focused on the mid-range Reno and foldable Find N3 phones in the past two years or so.
The Find N3 foldable phone’s camera capabilities are quite impressive, but for fans of the Chinese brand who prefer a regular candybar smartphone, the newly launched Oppo Find X8 Pro will now be their main focus.
The new phone has all the bells and whistles from a flagship model. Under the cover is a Dimensity 9400, the latest processor from MediaTek using the 3nm manufacturing process.
This impressive chip promises to improve performance in AI, gaming and camera capabilities while utilising lesser power from the phone’s Silicon Carbon battery.
My experience bears that out. A full day of photo and video taking did not drain the smartphone’s 5,910mAh battery totally – I still had more than 40 per cent left at the end of the day. If you still need to charge the phone overnight, Oppo’s 100W or 80W wireless charger quickly fills up the power pack before you leave for the office.
Interestingly, the Dimensity 9400 holds its ground against the more popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in performance benchmarks.
I ran 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test, which simulates actual games, on the Oppo phone and it came back with a score of 11,554. This is very close to the Qualcomm chip’s 11,727 on the Honor Magic 6 Pro phone.
I also ran PCMark, which measures performance in everyday productivity tasks. Here, the Qualcomm chip edges ahead with a score of 16,558, slightly ahead of the Dimensity’s 16,022.
What about actual apps? The Oppo Find X8 Pro did not lag during my tests with graphics-intensive games such as Call of Duty Mobile and while I was shooting high-resolution videos.
These results highlight the competitive nature of MediaTek’s latest chip. It is able to deliver good performance while balancing power efficiency with the phone’s 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space.
On the Find X8 Pro, other flagship features include a 6.78-inch low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) AMOLED screen at HD+ resolution with an adaptive refresh rate of 120Hz. Its peak brightness of 4,500 nits makes it easier to use the smartphone under the bright mid-day sun in Singapore.
Looks-wise, the Oppo Find X8 Pro resembles the iPhone’s squarish profile, which I prefer over the curvy sides for a more assured grip. The matte glass back leaves no fingerprints, which gives the phone a clean look.
Despite having two telescopic zoom lens systems, the camera bump does not protrude as much as the Honor Magic 6 Pro. The overall feel of the 215g Oppo phone is understatedly luxurious yet comfortable to hold for long periods because of its sleek 8.24mm thickness.
Like most flagship phones, the Find X8 Pro’s camera system is quite promising. Thanks to a partnership with renowned Swedish camera maker Hasselblad, the phone has an impressive array of four cameras—an ultrawide, a normal wide, a 60mm full-frame-equivalent periscopic zoom and a 120mm full-frame equivalent periscopic telephoto zooms.
All are paired with 50-megapixel capabilities. While the main sensor is still a 1/1.4-inch sensor, the image quality does not suffer as much thanks to good image processing.
With two zoom options, the Find X8 Pro lets you shoot faraway objects well. Even when the phone’s digital zoom was engaged, the AI image processor sharpened and introduced details into the photos that made them pop.
To be sure, this is still not as good as a proper or optical zoom lens on a mirrorless camera, but the phone is certainly something you can use to get very good images.
The camera’s portrait mode is good, too, with accurate skin tones, precise subject extraction, and a natural-looking background blur.
You can add more pizzazz to portrait shots using the camera’s film filters and lens effects for that dreamy 1980s look. Just make sure not to zoom out too much in portrait mode as the phone has trouble extracting the subject and it could look unnatural.
Speaking of filters, the Hasselblad’s XPan mode is back on this Oppo phone – you get more zoom options at 15mm, 23mm, 73mm, and 135mm focal lengths. The XPan is my favourite mode for shooting black-and-white photos.
If you are a fan of the new iPhone’s Action Button, Oppo has introduced its version on the Find X8 Pro. Zooming in and triggering the shutter using my index finger is easy with it.
That said, the button’s zoom function can only be used in Photo and Night modes, and only when you’re holding the phone horizontally. It does not change any shooting modes or camera settings, either.
Not only has Oppo thrown in good hardware for the Find X8 Pro’s camera, but it also has included the AI editing tools you will find in the premium apps such as Photo Director.
During my tests, I have found the AI Eraser useful in removing people or even a wheelchair in a picture. It may not be perfectly accurate sometimes if you nit-pick but it does the job.
In Singapore, the Oppo Find X8 Pro is now available in White of Black for $1,649. It is not the cheapest phone around but for what it has to offer, it is a fair price to pay, especially if you are an avid content creator or part of the photography cognoscenti.
