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OPPO’s 10x lossless zoom camera samples

Written By Diangson Louie
Published • February 24th, 2019
FeatureMobile
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OPPO has unveiled and demonstrated its new “10x lossless zoom” technology here in Barcelona, Spain. It offers a more versatile shooting experience thanks to three cameras that operate in tandem to capture good images at various zoom ranges. How did OPPO achieve this? Read on to find out.

One of the first things you need to know about OPPO’s 10x zoom technology is that it doesn’t work with a single lens alone. In this case, OPPO developed a triple-camera solution consisting of a 48MP main camera, a 120-degree ultra-wide (16mm equivalent), and a telephoto (159mm equivalent). These cameras form the hardware foundation of the company’s “10x lossless zoom” technology.

Then comes the design challenge. Traditionally, a 10x zoom lens module would be 15mm thick. That kind of dimension is not something you would like to see in a smartphone. So OPPO used a periscopic to keep it thin. They placed the originally upright-structured lens in a horizontal layout, then used a unique optical prism to refract light into the lens system. So instead of 15mm, OPPO was able to reduce the module to just 6.76mm thick, as thick as the lens on the R17 Pro.

To further save space, OPPO also used a “D-cut” optical lens (that’s why it looks squarish) to reduce the thickness of the telephoto lens without sacrificing optical performance and placed two AF motors for the main and wide-angle camera, in the same module. The latter enabled OPPO to save 13% of space, allowing OPPO to place a larger sensor on the telephoto lens for sharper images.

As we all know, shooting subjects in telephoto is a challenge as it is prone to shakes that can blur the final image. To solve this, OPPO used Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) on both the main camera and telephoto lens. According to OPPO, the anti-shake accuracy on the telephoto lens is 0.001445-degree, a 73% improvement compared to their previous 5x zoom technology.

When it comes to durability, OPPO says that it uses the industry benchmark-level drop tests to ensure the reliability of the camera module. This includes two rounds of drop tests for the prism, with each round consisting 10,000 times on the front and back sides, and 2,000 times on the remaining four sides, adding to a total of 28,000 drop tests.

We were able to try their demo units during the event, and we can say that it works. The camera interface, although still not final, is easy to use as you can easily zoom by using either the pinch-to-zoom or via a slider. It’s almost smooth and automatically transitions to different lenses depending on the focal length. From a wide-angle frame, we were able to zoom in to 10x, then further to 20x but in digital zoom.

We can’t make a final judgment on quality as the software is not yet final and still need some optimizations. You can check out the samples below. Note that these are grouped in threes – the first one is wide-angle, the second is the 10x zoom, then the third is 20x digital.