[OPPO Find X5 Pro General] keebfox:
Intro​

Welcome to Part 2 of my OPPO Find X5 review! In this part I will be covering the camera performance and battery of the device.

Table of contents​

Part 1: Build Quality & Design, Performance & Gaming, Display

Part 2: Camera, Battery (Currently reading)

Part 3: ColorOS Features

At the end of each part I will also include the conclusion of the part and the index for navigation.

Camera review​

Using the Find X5’s camera has been a great time, especially with a wide array of features, Hasselblad co-development and the MariSilicon Neural Processing Unit.

Wide and ultrawide both have a 50MP sensor, while the Tele lens has 13MP. The front facing camera has a 32MP sensor.

View all of my sample photos: ​

https://photos.app.goo.gl/UmkNFFEq3G5QYY6S7

Over 100 photos!

​

Selfie camera​

Starting with the selfie front facing camera: built into the bionic display as a small holepunch in the top left corner.

The camera has been quite impressive with high resolution selfies that capture a lot of light and natural colours, thanks to the hasselblad tuning.

I did enjoy using portrait mode with the selfie cam a lot more than usual this time around. It has also been fun, and is pretty convincing with its bokeh effect. The corner detection did work well in my testing, even in low light, without using the night mode. What’s nice is that you can adjust the aperture, the amount of blur, directly while shooting.

If the light is too low, you can switch over to night mode, which is also available for selfies.

Main and ultrawide camera​

Shooting with both wide and ultrawide has been a solid camera experience. Both lenses are sharp and allow for huge 50MP photos, when enabled. These are around 10-20Mb saved to the device and retain a lot of detail. While I wish the photos were a tad bit punchier without the AI scene detect, I do appreciate the more realistic colours, which can always be adjusted in editing later on.

Example of portrait mode:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/QvsuLMrSxGjtudVw7

The main shooter also has a great amount of natural bokeh, thanks to its large sensor. This can be great for more dramatic close ups, food photography or pets. If you need more bokeh, you can switch the camera over to portrait mode and use the aperture slider to increase the blur. Getting things into focus was also always very solid, the camera generally always identified what I would have wanted in focus. There were only a very few times I had to tap a couple times to get the subject in focus.

Switching things over to the ultrawide camera, it has a 0.6x view, and what I really enjoy about the lens is that it keeps lines straight, where some cameras tend to warp the image. This allows for a quite unique ultrawide look and makes the lens much more versatile.

I did notice the colours were a bit different than the main shooter, being a bit more on the cool side but also sometimes warmer colour temperature. You can see this quite noticeable when comparing the photos I took of the same scene with the different lenses. Needless to say the photos did turn out still very good when looking at them individually.

The only downside of the camera I could find while testing some more difficult scenes such as backlit or fast moving was that the processing sometimes did encounter a sort of edge ghosting effect.

Although it only happens very rarely in some exceptional cases (I checked with the other ambassadors and they did not experience it yet) I found it still important to highlight, and hope it can be fixed in a future software update. Examples: Ghosting, Edge 1, Edge 2

Comparison against OnePlus 9 Pro:​

My main phone of the last year was between the OnePlus 9 Pro and an iPhone. So I made sure to capture some comparisons between both the 9 Pro and the X5 as they both feature the hasselblad codevelopment.

What I could notice was that the OnePlus did brighten up the image more and did produce a more “punchy” looking photo. But also it generally turned out to be a bit more blurry on the OnePlus, especially when zooming in on text for example.

The X5 did a better job at retaining details, such as fabrics and text was very sharp. Especially when shooting in darker environments you could see much sharper details on text and a less grainy image but at the cost of less highlights.

The colours were a bit more natural, capturing the scene a bit better like I saw it in real life. I had a feeling the processing was toned down a bit.

Another thing that I noticed was that the X5 handled edge fringing much better than the 9 Pro, where things could easily get out of focus on the 9 Pro around the edge of subjects.

Samples (9 Pro vs. X5):

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mymu2gMureRDYt3C6

Night mode​

The dedicated night mode utilises the NPU to process the image, retain highlights and reduce noise. The duration of how long a night mode photo takes to capture can vary from a second, all the way to 7s in my testing depending on the lighting situation. The results are really worth it and do speak for themselves.

What I really liked is how colours are kept, with a low noise and clear blacks. Also lights do have a good amount of brightness without being overpowering. Another favourite feature of mine is the long exposure, which takes some great shots without the need of a tripod.

Example long exposure

Video mode​

Coming to the video aspect of the camera, which has always been a difficult part for most Android devices. In my opinion the main camera produces the best video footage, which is clear, has good stabilisation and only a small amount of crop factor. It allows for 4K capture up to 60fps.

If you need a large amount of stabilisation the camera app also has a mode called “Ultra-steady-mode”. This makes the video feel buttery smooth, and in some situations where you want that gimbal style footage this can be great, but does come with the downside of having quite a lot of crop factor.

Another feature is the video portrait mode, which allows for bokeh style video in 1080p. In my testing this effect has worked pretty well and has been able to track subjects well even in low light situations.

Example of portrait mode in video during low light:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/e6QoXVtJdrB3C5FBA

https://photos.app.goo.gl/HzGt5dntHz8B2ARo7

Battery review​

Battery life in a day​

The battery life has been very solid! After about a week of usage the battery has adapted to my usage and on average has always given me a full day of battery life lasting into the noon of the next day. The X5 also features reverse wireless charging, which can be great to top up wireless earbuds if they have a case that supports it.

After a day of photography, playing some games casually and watching youtube with general usage my screen on time resulted in 4:25h and 4% battery remaining. This is for me quite good, considering I had always enabled the full 120hz of the display and did keep it at a relatively high brightness setting.

Also thanks to the included SuperVOOC 80W charger, I never had to worry about needing to wait a long time during charges. Usually it was enough to top up my Find X5 within 15 min for an entire day if I was worried it might not last.

Charging speed​

With the 80W charging speeds being insane (I never experienced a phone charge this fast other than the OnePlus 9 Pro) I went from 4% to 100% in just 30 min!

Conclusion Part 2​

And with this I would like to conclude my second part of the review. Overall my camera tests have been really solid, I especially loved the colours the camera captured, and the large sensor allows for some really nice natural bokeh. Having a wide and ultra wide lens as primary sensors is a good combination, as they are super versatile. The zoom was lacking a bit, producing images that were still viewable but for my taste too blurry or processed. Battery life has been also quite solid. Especially considering I used the device always in 120Hz mode it easily did manage around 4.5h screen on time.

Continue reading​

Part 1: Build Quality & Design, Performance & Gaming, Display

Part 2: Currently reading

Part 3: ColorOS Features