OPPO to launch smartphone with 10x lossless zoom in Q2 2019

OPPO today demonstrated a new technology which allows for up to 10x lossless zoom in its smartphone cameras. This is done via a three camera setup, including a 120-degree ultra-wide angle lens with an equivalent focal length of 16mm, a 48MP standard primary lens, and a telephoto lens with an equivalent focal length of 160mm. 

Both the primary lens and telephoto lens have optical image stabilisation.

While OPPO has yet to announce a smartphone featuring the technology, it plans to do so in the second quarter of this year. 

Not too long to go.

"With 10x lossless zoom, our mission was to develop a camera technology that would bring customers closer and let them capture content in a way that no other smartphone manufacturer has to date," said OPPO Australia Managing Director, Michael Tran. "We believe we’ve achieved that."

OPPO's 10x lossless zoom design makes use of a periscope design where the angle of the telephoto lens is rotated by 90 degrees. This allows for a deeper zoom without making a phone much thicker - OPPO says the module is only 6.76mm thick. A periscope-style prism is used to adjust the path of the light entering the camera to match that of the lens.

For comparison, standard smartphone telephoto lenses typically provide 2x or 3x optical zoom when compared to their primary camera. Some manufacturers - such as Huawei - use these lenses in combination with software tricks to achieve 5x hybrid zoom. In OPPO's setup, software  will be used to achieve the images that sit in between the three primary focal lengths. 

It's also worth noting that the 10x moniker refers to the amount of zoom between the telephoto lens and ultra-wide lens, rather than the telephoto lens and primary lens. Most other manufacturers use their phone's primary lens as the baseline for claims regarding zoom capabilities.

The company unveiled similar technology for 5x lossless zoom at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow back in 2016. This used a 3x optical zoom lens and software to achieve the 5x image. It never made it into a phone.

High-resolution zoom increasingly sounds like it will become a key part of the smartphone hardware battleground this year. Huawei is set to announce the P30 Pro at the end of March, and initial teasers all point to aggressive zoom capabilities. At this stage, we're not sure how Huawei intends to achieve this.

But for now, here are some camera samples OPPO shared from its 10x zoom camera. The first is from the wide-angle lens, the second is from the telephoto. 

WhistleOut travelled to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress as a guest of OPPO Australia

Alex Choros

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Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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