It’s 2 pm on a summer afternoon in Shenzhen, China. I should be sweating and looking for shade to run to. Instead, I pause. I pause to take in the greenery. In the middle of China’s Silicon Valley, I’m surrounded by tall trees, luscious gardens, and bountiful flowering bushes. I’m here to test out the new flagship, the OPPO Find X7 Ultra.
Design
The blue and white colours on the rear panel remind me of sailing. No wonder this colour variant is called Ocean Blue. The blue vegan leather wraps around the bottom of the not-so-subtle camera island. The Cosmos Ring camera system, as OPPO calls it, houses the main starrer of this smartphone - the HyperTone Camera System, which I’ll get to in a bit. There are also Sepia Brown and Tailored Black colourways to choose from.
There’s renewed focus on privacy with the “alert slider” hardware button on the left bezel. It offers a special VIP mode which when enabled immediately turns off the camera permission, location access, and microphone, making using the smartphone safer, as and when needed.
Display
I love big displays and the massive 6.82-inch AMOLED leaves me impressed. It offers a peak full-screen brightness of up to 1,600 nits in direct sunlight. Only when I’m going through specifications while writing the review do I realise it never occurred to me to amp up the phone’s brightness levels when I was out during afternoons. The display offers refresh rates of up to 120Hz so scrolling and animations are rendered smoothly.
Camera
The OPPO Find X7 Ultra has a camera setup that you won’t easily find on any other flagship smartphone. It has the first-ever Quad main camera setup which brings together
four powerful 50 MP cameras, and married that with OPPO’s proprietary computational photography to create the HyperTone Camera System.
I spent almost a week trying out the camera system extensively and it’s a photographic powerhouse. During post-sundown strolls in downtown Shenzhen, I took photographs of skyscrapers in the background and busy streets in the foreground. There was almost little to no grain in the photo captured well into the night. With complex lighting situations within one frame, neither the light from lampposts close by nor from office buildings far away was blown up unnaturally. When I hit the pool the next morning, the indoor pool looked pleasant with aqua tones with warm pendant lights overhead. The AI tweaked the colour saturation and overall tone just a little bit to make it look a little more warm and welcoming than it was with the naked eye. Outdoors, during the daytime, bringing the exposure down a couple of notches gave me the nicest results. This is not to say that the default exposure isn’t ideal. Turning it down just a bit, made the colours look just a bit deeper and not washed out. The bokeh effect on portraits was stunning on the OPPO Find X7 Ultra. I took portraits of my golden retriever lazing like the adorable freeloader that he is. And apart from having his face in sharp focus, the camera also did a decent job identifying his whiskers and keeping those in sharp focus while blurring the background just around it.
I also loved using the Master Mode, which is designed to match the image aesthetics of the iconic Hasselblad X2D 100C lens. I love the granular control it offers, alongside an ‘Auto’ Master Mode if I want to snap something in a hurry.
In addition to control over ISO, shutter speed, exposure value, focus and white balance, Master Mode also lets me adjust saturation, contrast, sharpness, and vignette.
I had the chance to catch a traditional Chinese cultural performance and the snaps I took with 10x zoom gave me some sharp-enough results with minimal noise and no artefacts.
With regards to video, users can capture sharp 4K resolution video at up to 60fps on both the primary rear setup and even the selfie camera. The front camera also brightness up selfies well in low-light conditions, and gives accurate skin tones and texture once the inbuilt filters are turned off.
The ProXDR display technology, usually found on OPPO and OnePlus phones, tweaks the overall dynamic range as I view the photos in the gallery. While this does deliver some dramatic contrasts, it can also blow up the highlights a little too much for my liking in certain shots. Thankfully, now, there’s a way to turn the ProXDR mode off in the Gallery settings.
The one thing that didn’t work too well is OPPO’s AI Eraser, which is proprietary. Trying to erase a microphone from an office desk left mismatched patches on the table instead. This feature could do with a bit of fine-tuning.
Tech Specs
The OPPO Find X7 Ultra runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform which a lot of flagships such as the Samsung S24 series and the Xiaomi 14 series have adopted.
The review unit I received had 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. The smartphone is powered by a large 5,000 mAh battery powering which is not only slow to discharge but takes just about an hour to charge fully from zero.
Verdict
The OPPO Find X7 Ultra holds a lot of appeal in terms of design, camera prowess, display and battery life. Hence it’s all the more disappointing that this particular model isn’t being launched in India. However, in having us take this smartphone for a spin, the brand wanted to showcase the possibilities of smartphone photography it has unlocked. I’d definitely say the quad-camera setup breaks multiple boundaries within the limitations of what can be packed into a smartphone and ends up delivering some of the most authentic, noise-free, high-def images I’ve seen on a flagship device. I’m hoping before we get too much FOMO, the technology that the OPPO Find X7 Ultra showcases, trickles down to the next set of devices being made available in the Indian market.
Pros - Stellar camera setup, unique design language, great battery life
Cons - AI Eraser needs more accuracy