Oppo Find X2 Pro Complete Walkthrough: Oppo’s Ultra

I said in my walkthrough of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra that Samsung had decided to create a phone with the highest specs they could to try and appeal to the smaller, but very passionate demographic of creators, early adopters, etc. and that the Ultra did that, for sure.

It seems they weren’t alone.

This is the Oppo Find X2 Pro and as we’ll see in a sec, at least on paper, it’s trying to go toe to toe with the Ultra.

So first, let’s try and do a complete walkthrough on the phone.

If you aren’t familiar a complete walkthrough on this channel is where I try and go through every feature I possibly can on a new device so you guys are better prepared should you be in the market to actually go buy one.

With that said, there is a lot to go through so let’s get started with the hardware.

Firstly, the Find X2 Pro has a 6.7″ AMOLED 3168×1440 resolution 67.8-degree curved display with an interesting 19.8:9 aspect ratio.

That screen is also capable of 120hz. This means that the screen can refresh the image on it up to 120 times a second (which makes for smoother scrolling, gameplay in games that can support it, etc.).

Something to else to note is that they have the ability to do this 120hz even at that top QHD+ resolution and there is a setting on the phone to auto-select the 120 vs 60hz depending what is on the screen as well as a similar option for changing the resolution between FHD+ and the full QHD+.

That screen is also HDR10+ certified, covers 100% of the P3 color gamut, and has a separate chipset dedicated to it that Oppo calls the O1 Ultra Vision Engine. The benefit of this is that it can use that to convert SDR to HDR content as well as make content that is at a lower frame rate appear to be playing back at 60 or 120fps (and only currently works in the YouTube app, Tencent Sports, Amazon, Netflix, etc. for now with more to come according to Oppo). If you don’t like this you can easily turn it off in the settings.

In that screen, we have a 32MP selfie camera with an f2.4 aperture that has a pixel size of 0.8-microns that surprisingly are not binned by default. Most cameras with that many megapixels will combine groups of them together to get a lower resolution but larger pixel sizes to get better low light performance, but Oppo has chosen not to for the front camera and so in the real-world test coming later (subscribe and ding the bell to be notified when that goes live) we’ll see how that affects selfies in darker environments.

The phone itself comes in two variants: a black ceramic and an orange vegan leather-like I have here and sort of love. It feels super nice to hold and has the added benefit to me that it’ll not scratch and since I’m not a person to use cases, I also like how it combined with the gold accents definitely make the phone stand out.

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We have Gorilla Glass 6 on the front of the screen by the way and the phone is rated for IP68 water and dust resistance (which means it can be submerged underwater for up to 30 mins at a depth of 1.5 meters).

Moving around the device we have our volume buttons on the left.

We have nothing at the top.

Our power button is located on the right side.

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And we have our dual SIM card tray, one of our two speakers that are Dolby Atmos capable (the other speaker is in the earpiece), and our USB-C port. That port is capable of using the 65W SuperVOOC charger that comes with the device to charge the 4260mah battery in it from 0-100% in 38 mins.

While we’re talking about charging, there is no Qi or wireless charging by the way.

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Under the hood, we have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset paired with 12GBs of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GBs of UFS 3.0 storage.

For security, we have an optical fingerprint sensor under the screen that’s pretty responsive and we have the option to use facial recognition from the front camera, as well. Oppo also added an interesting feature to allow you to enable both the fingerprint and facial recognition at the same time to further speed things up with is clever.

For connectivity, we have WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC for use with Google Pay, and sub-6 5G support built-in.

Moving around to the back, we have our pretty interesting triple camera system.

Firstly, we have our main 48MP f1.7 aperture optically stabilized camera which is the first phone I can think of to use the new Sony IMX689 sensor.

Now, unlike the selfie camera, this one by default bins the pixels to get lower resolution but much better low-light sensitivity. It takes collections of four of the 1.12-micron sized pixels it has and combines them to get a 12MP 2.24 micron-sized image.

That sensor is also 1/1.43″ in size and so this combined with those large pixels in binned mode means much better low-light images, but also means you can get a lot more bokeh (the blurred separation between a subject and the background) without using the software-enabled live focus mode.

For those keeping score, by the way, that sensor and pixel size is very similar to the new S20 Ultra (just slightly smaller) but considering the original pixels being binned are larger than the 108MP .8 micron ones (being binned in sets of 9 instead of four on the Ultra), I’m very curious to see how it holds up against the Ultra in that real-world test coming ASAP.

The main camera also sports dual native ISO meaning that it is optimized to shoot at a specific “high ISO” and a “low ISO” (which is something my cinema camera I’m shooting this with has as a feature frankly). This allows the camera to choose the lower native ISO when things are brighter but then switch to the higher native one when things get dark to reduce noise in the image.

Another thing that’s interesting about this sensor is that it supports all pixel PDAF (instead of the more traditional Dual-Pixel AF). The general idea here is that the sensor can use 100% of the pixels to detect focus as well as has some changes to the sensor’s micro-lens layout and without going too far down the rabbit hole here, that means it can detect edges better and focus faster as well as focus better in low light.

By the way, let me know if you guys want me to do a deep dive into either of these technologies in my new Decodr explainer series that I’ll link to here.

Now, in addition to the main sensor, we have a 48MP ultra-wide camera that has a 120-degree field of view and an f2.2 aperture. The interesting thing about this camera is the fact that Oppo put a Sony IMX586 in here which is basically the flagship sensor most phones launched with last year as their main sensor. It’s a 1/2 inch sensor with 0.8 micron-sized pixels so it’s nice to see them put in an already proven sensor as their ultra-wide–hopefully, that should mean it’ll mean switching to the ultra-wide won’t mean a much worse quality image.

Something else to note about this ultra-wide camera is the fact that it can automatically switch to a macro mode when it detects you are 10cm or less from a subject so you can get close-up shots. You can also zoom in up to 8x while in macro mode but past 4x it starts to get a bit pixelated in my opinion.

And finally, we have a 13MP telephoto camera with an aperture of f3.0 that is optically stabilized. Apparently, it’s about a 5x optical zoom and can do a hybrid zoom of up to 10x. You can also push past that to up to 60x using software but personally 10x is where I’d stop personally but at least with the initial testing the 10x is pretty darn usable actually which is cool.

Now the one thing interesting about the telephoto is that it’s folded zoom lens that actually sits sideways in the phone and uses a set of mirrors to get the length needed without protruding out the back of the phone like a traditional mirrorless camera lens would need to.

For video, it can record in 4K in up to 60fps and has what they call Live HDR increasing the color gamut to 10-bit and helping with backlit or very bright environments.

We also have what they call Ultra Steady 2.0 (there’s a lot of Ultra things aren’t there?) to make the videos appear more stable. You can switch to Ultra Steady by tapping the icon at the top of the viewfinder and then there is an ultra-steady pro mode that apparently switches to the ultra wide camera to further stabilize the video.

They also call out a new microphone system that supposedly isolates your voice better so here’s what that sounds like vs a professional Shure microphone plugged into the phone sounds like.

Besides that, let’s quickly dive into the various camera modes that Oppo has included.

• Portrait: Uses software to blur the background behind a subject to create a faster aperture look from a mirrorless/DSLR camera.
• Slo-Mo: Records in either 720 or 1080p and plays the video back in slow-motion.
• Expert/Pro: Allows you to control camera settings manually like ISO, Shutter Speed, etc.
• Sticker: Their version of Snapchat/Instagram filters.
• Text Scanner: Recognizes text in the viewfinder and automatically tries to crop it and adjust the contrast to make it look more like a scan.
• Pano: Standard panoramic mode to let you start taking an image and pan the camera to have it stitch multiple images together to capture a wider, panoramic shot.
• Time-Lapse: You can record a video and it’ll automatically play it back sped up.
• Night: Uses AI and multiple shots of various exposure levels (including long exposure shots) to create a much better lowlight image (check out my Decodr episode on Night Mode and how it actually works here).

Moving on to the software, the Oppo Find X2 Pro is running Android 10 with Oppo’s own UI on top called ColorOS 7.1. Because of this, it’ll have very similar functions to any Oppo Android device but for someone who isn’t familiar, let’s just touch on a few of the more standout features that Oppo has added.

Firstly, I just want to say that Oppo’s ColorOS has come a long way in a short amount of time when it comes to the look and feel. It’s gotten much more minimalistic and frankly less bubbly and cartoony than is has been in the past and in my opinion seems to be taking at least some cues from their subsidiary OnePlus–which is a very good thing.

Besides the overall look and feel that’s been greatly improved they added a “Smart Sidebar” feature that allows you to add shortcuts to screen recording and screenshot as well as app shortcuts to be able to swipe in on the floating icon to get to them quickly.

They also have multi-user support and parental controls that allow you to customize what your kid can do on the phone including supervising the phone remotely with a Family Link app, set limits, and add restrictions to the Google Play store, etc.

There’s dual wifi acceleration that lets you connect to two wifi networks at once to increase the speed of the connection.

We have Private Safe which lets you section off different photos/videos and other files to be encrypted and can only be accessed with a fingerprint.

There’s the ability to clone any messaging apps to let you have more than one account on the device for that app (i.e. two WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger accounts, etc.)

The Oppo Find X2 Pro will be available in May for 1199 euros which is a lot, but is at least a few hundred euros cheaper than the S20 Ultra which is between 1349 and 1549 euros depending on the storage and RAM. Interestingly enough, even though the original Find X was 999 euros when it launched it ended up being about $850 in the US which made it very reasonable at the time. I was hoping that meant that this device would also see a similar US price and make it much more competitive to the Ultra, but, apparently, it’s not coming to the US so there goes that hope.

Either way, though it’s still priced less than the Ultra regardless of where you are (and if you wanted to import it to the US you could–it even has Google services) so I for one am super curious how the camera and battery hold up against the S20 Ultra but we’ll check that all out when get to do the real-world test. Stay tuned and make sure to subscribe and ding the bell to be notified when that goes live.

And there you go.