Oppo Reno 10x Zoom camera test: affordable superzoom

Oppo has prided itself on its focus on imaging in its smartphones for years now and while Huawei may have beaten Oppo to the superzoom punch with the release of the P30 Pro, Oppo is hot on its heels with the Reno 10x Zoom. I recently traveled to Switzerland for the international launch of the Reno line, which basically everyone other than those of us in the U.S. should have a shot at picking up in the coming months.

While I was there I had the opportunity to test out the Chinese version of the Reno 10x Zoom running pre-production software, so while you should expect to see some improvements when we get our hands on the international version in the future, this should help give you an idea of what to expect from Oppo’s latest.

While the rest of the device is flagship quality in its own right, the cameras are certainly the most interesting aspect of the Reno 10x Zoom. With three cameras on the rear of the phone and the distinctive pop-up “shark fin” front-facing camera there’s just a lot of hardware to talk about.

The primary camera (26mm equivalent) is the 48MP f/1.7 Sony IMX 586, you have to drop into the camera settings menu to deliberately take a full resolution photo from that sensor given that the file sizes would be a bit ridiculous for daily shots. Next up we have the ultra-wide lens (16mm equivalent) which is an 8MP f/2.2, while telephoto gets the most attention we love having this option to open things up for you creatively and take in an entire scene. The final rear-facing camera is the periscope style (130mm equivalent) 13MP f/3.0, which is leveraged along with the primary lens to capture the 6x (160mm) and 10x (260mm) photos. The aforementioned pop-up selfie camera is a 16MP f/2.0, a very interesting piece of engineering.

Realizing that the majority of people have been relying on their smartphone as their only camera for a number of years now, the possibilities that are opened up with this kind of focal range is going to really blow minds. As you’ll see in a number of the samples, you can turn what would probably be a throwaway snapshot into a keeper with just a couple taps of a button to adjust the zoom. Again anyone that has used a real camera will be nodding their head of course, but putting that same power in a smartphone that can be with you at all times remains astounding to me after spending a couple of days with it.

We’ll explore some of the additional features in the camera more completely in the full review on final software, but you’ll find some samples of night mode photos in the gallery below. As tested I would say it comes up short of some of the amazing results we’ve seen with the Pixel 3 and P30 Pro, but again until we have final software I don’t want to give any final judgments on it.

If you are interested in some of the video capabilities of the Reno 10x Zoom you should also check out our video on the Reno 10x Zoom camera test below. We’d love to hear what you think of the results in comments.