I’ve never quite seen anything like it. I’m standing under the glow of a red neon light shining down on a room fashioned after an American diner. I step two metres away and suddenly find myself in a perfume store. Two paces more and there’s a fine-dining sit-down Chinese restaurant with plates of scrumptious looking chow. And so it goes. A full fledged bookstore, a well-stocked bar, even a children’s room replete with posters and a bunk bed. No, I’m not in some weird fantasy mall, nor am I tripping. I’m traipsing down a long line of real-life setups that constitute the OPPO Imaging Lab in Dongguan, China.
Set up not too long ago in 2021, the small yet comprehensive facility is used test the camera capabilities of OPPO’s new smartphones. A self-driven robot systematically shuffles through each room, on the clock, taking snaps of the various layouts - from afar and up close.
Each smartphone goes through 150 rounds of tests in an attempt to calibrate and deliver the intended colour accuracy, brightness, sharpness and noise reduction on that particular smartphone. What earlier took the team a day and a half to shoot - about 75,000 photos - takes the robot about 2 hours.
A hundred imaging engineers then pore over the photographs to check the consistency of images. If a smartphone camera fails to meet the desired standards during testing, the engineers get down to identifying the underlying cause. Once identified, the engineers then refine the algorithms responsible for image processing and enhancement.
Slideshow | Inside Oppo Imaging Labs
The lab is also equipped with a human face replicas to improve on the quality of selfies and beauty shots. From samples in artificial light to natural light across lifelike replicas of hotel lobbies, karaoke rooms, supermarkets and more, the ultimate aim is to develop an objective standard of mobile camera tests by converting the colour balance, style and other markers into technically quantifiable indicators. The main goal is to make sure that the photos we click on OPPO smartphones as consumers, give consistently good results.