This Might Be the World’s Best Phone Camera

It is not exactly a Edge Samsung Galaxy S25But Oppo’s declared objective with Find X8 Ultra design was to make “the thinnest photo phone”. 8.78 mm thick compared to its 9.5 mm thick predecessor, search X7 Ultra, Oppo has indeed reduced X8 ultra search beyond one of its advanced competitors. But due to its square and square design, it does not necessarily seem much thinner in the hand. This year Xiaomi 15 UltraFor example, a thickness of 9.48 mm but has tapered edges that do not dig as much in your palms.

This does not mean that X8 Ultra research is heavy. Oppo has mainly realized what he started here; It is essentially like a very slightly thicker iPhone 16 pro maxWhich is a strong achievement given the equipment. But the design is extremely simple and austere, which can be to your liking. Curiously, the Find X8 Ultra looks almost identical to the Find X8 base, while the level of level X8 Pro is more elegant and more flashy than both.

The display is as good as you will find it on any premium phone. It is a 6.82 inch flat sharing panel with a variable refresh rate (1 to 120 Hz) and a 1440p resolution. Find X8 Ultra obtains up to 1,600 brilliant nits in regular external use and peaks at 2,500 nits with HDR content. The glasses are also thin on the four sides. It has a vision support for Dolby and, more unusually, the Splash Touch technology of Oppo to limit unwanted entries when it is wet. I wanted to test this in a whirlpool, for science, and the phone remains really or less usable even when covered with water drops.

I will also mention the fingerprint sensor with ultrasound fingerprints, not only for its speed improvements compared to the optical reader of X7 Ultra, but for the way Oppo has improved the way you configure it, now you can record your thumb by simply doing it by driving in a circle a few times rather than typing the sensor several times with each part of the point. Not the biggest deal in the world, but a welcome improvement if you are a weird like me that goes through this process tens of times a year during the test of new phones.

Another design oddity is the Oppo shift away from a silent cursor switch, a popular differentiation function on the phones of its OnePlus subsidiary. There is now a customizable button at the top left of the phone called the shortcut button, and yes, it works more or less in an identical way to the action button of the iPhone – at the top of the complete user interface which appears when you choose its function. I agree with the material change, but the implementation is a bit cheeky.

Elsewhere, the Find X8 Ultra specifications sheet includes what you expect from the upper shelf of Android flagship products in 2025. The processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite And the phone can be equipped up to 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. (The basic model has 12 GB and 256 GB respectively.)

This is the first ultra-Claire phone of Oppo to include technology of silicon-carbon batteries, after its beginnings in the X8 Pro and a subsequent appearance in the folding find n3. Basically, this allows Oppo to obtain much more capacity in a smaller physical space – despite its thinner setting, the Find X8 Ultra battery weighs 6,100 mAh against 5,000 mAh on the X7 Ultra. As for the load, the Supervooc 100W adapter of OPPO can make you go from zero to 100% in less than 40 minutes, which is impressive given the increased capacity of the battery. The X8 Ultra search also supports the wireless load up to 50W with a compatible owner charger. Between the fast load and the large battery capacity, I found that the phone would die little about me in regular use. I’m not going to say that it will never happen with a long day of shooting in the sun, but it was as solid as any comparable phone that I could name.

This brings me to the camera system, which – as with “ultra” Chinese flagship products – is the main point of differentiation here. The Find X8 Ultra does not necessarily have the best equipment in each category, but there is a strong case to do so that it is the most complete and most versatile camera system.

Find X8 Ultra’s main camera uses a 1 inch type sensor, which is the leading standard for Chinese flagship phones; This is the same size as what you will find on RX100 from Sony RX100 Camera Point-And-Shoot Or The new X half of Fujifilm. What it means in practice is that the objective you use gives you much more depth and dynamic beach than you get from an iPhone or galaxy. The light collection capacity is simply on another level, and you are able to separate the subjects by the shallow bokeh (background blur) without resorting to the portrait mode, which often shows imperfections between the foreground and the background.

X8 Ultra – yes, there are two – are also a particular force. The 3X Periscope camera has a 1 / 1.56 in -in -inch sensor unusually large associated with an F / 2.1 lens with a close focus capacity, allowing excellent mid -range and macro plans with a natural natural field depth. There is also a 6x f / 3.1 lens with a 1 /95 inch sensor. The only drawback is the ultra-large camera of 1/2.75 inch, which is not necessarily weak alongside the competition but resembles a compromise in the name of slimming; The previous flagship products of the OPPO worked much better.

Oppo has also adopted a thoughtful approach to camera software. The ordinary photo mode is revealed images in the direction of what you expect from a high -end smartphone, with crunchy clarity and an HDR detail kept with each plan. I think Oppo has the best color science in this direction, which is why phones like The Find N3 can surpass their equipment. But if you are not in the typical smartphone photo look – which I am not – you can slide towards the Master Master Hasselblad mode, which gives you much more natural results when leaving the box. Although the master mode is fully customizable, its default settings tend to line up with what I would aim for when modifying the files from a dedicated camera.

This year, OPPO’s image processing is helped by what the company calls a “real chroma camera”, a low resolution sensor dedicated to the capture of precise colors information as part of a better automatic white balance. It is difficult to test exactly how the camera system would work without this additional material, but I saw impressive results in difficult situations such as low -light portraits.

The shooting experience is also helped by the “fast button”, which is roughly a facsimile for the control of Apple’s camera. It gives rapid access to the application and the shutter version of the camera, but it is fully capacitive and much easier to press; I found myself using it much more often than on my own iPhone 16 Pro.

Find X8 Ultra has a much more competent camera system than you can get on any smartphone sold in the United States, and it exchanges with the best available from national competitors like Xiaomi and Vivo. That said, I can’t really recommend anyone to do everything possible to buy it unless it is based in China. I personally found that it worked on my SIM Docomo NTT card in Japan, but I can’t talk about groups or cover wherever you could read this.

The version of Coloros focusing on OPPO is usable enough and is delivered with integrated compatibility for Google Mobile Services via a switch to settings, which means that you can use the Play Store and Google applications as well as any third -party software that is based on Google APIs. However, an uninitiated Western user can feel blinded by a bunch of Bloatware and Chinese services that they will never be able to use. The ESIM support of Find X8 Ultra is only accessible via the integrated oroaming application, for example, and you can only pay for data via WeChat or Alipay.

But the situation as a whole is that the Find X8 Ultra shows how Chinese phones manufacturers are simply kilometers ahead of what is available in the United States and Europe. Whether you buy a galaxy, a pixel or an iPhone this year, you get a raw affair with regard to pure hardware capacity and the camera performance. This phone was launched at 6,499 yuan in China, which corresponds to around $ 900.

Given the current political climate, it seems less likely that the Chinese OEMs find a way to sell their most upscale devices in the United States which are unhappy for anyone interested in the best available equipment. The Oppo Find X8 Ultra will be my essential camera phone until something better happens, and I have the feeling that something will not be available in the United States either. It’s not like this particular phone necessarily changes the game – Chinese companies have jumped Apple and Samsung for years.

Overall, the Find X8 Ultra is a great phone that is a example as good as any of what is capable today with modern mobile technology. I think it’s clearly better than Apple, Samsung or Google sell in the United States today. Does that mean that you have to import it? Probably not. But that means that you should increase your standards for the next time these companies are trying to sell you on new equipment.