Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14715/the-oppo-reno-10x-zoom-review
The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom Review: Bezeless Zoom
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 18, 2019 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Oppo
- Snapdragon 855
- Oppo Reno 10x Zoom
The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom is another Snapdragon 855-based phone that was released earlier in the year, and while we did a quick hands-on test of the device back in May, we never really got to fully reviewing the unit until now. Beyond putting the Reno 10x through our usual testing suite, what’s interesting is that in this time Oppo has had the opportunity to refine the software, and we’ve seen particular improvements on the side of the camera with the introduction of a new low-light photography mode.
Over the years, Oppo has been traditional viewed as being a China-only vendor, concentrating on its home market where it’s positioned as one of the top brands and smartphone vendors. This year, we saw Oppo up-end this strategy as the company started to officially release its flagship devices overseas, officially entering European markets in this category. The Reno 10x Zoom alongside its smaller Reno sibling (same design, different internals) thus becomes the first experience among many western costumers.
The device has two key characteristics: A full-screen minimal bezel display which is enabled by housing the front-camera in a mechanical motorised slide-out mechanism, and a triple-camera setup amongst which we find a “periscope” zoom camera module. Both of these features separately aren’t unique to the Reno 10x, however their combination is unique to Oppo.
| OPPO Reno 10x Zoom | ||||
| Reno 10x Zoom | ||||
| SoC | Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 1x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A76) @ 2.84GHz 3x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A76) @ 2.42GHz 4x Kryo 485 (Cortex-A55) @ 1.80GHz Adreno 640 @ 585MHz |
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| DRAM | 6/8GB LPDDR4X | |||
| Display | Full-screen 6.6" AMOLED 2340 x 1080 (19.5:9) |
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| Size | Height | 162.0 mm | ||
| Width | 77.2 mm | |||
| Depth | 9.3 mm | |||
| Weight | 215 grams | |||
| Battery Capacity | 3975mAh (Design) 4065mAh (Typical) |
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| Wireless Charging | - | |||
| Rear Cameras | ||||
| Main | 48MP IMX586 0.8µm pixel w/PDAF f/1.7 w/ OIS |
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| Telephoto | 13MP "Periscipe" f/3.0 130mm eq. 5x zoom |
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| Wide | 16MP f/2.0 16mm eq. |
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| Extra | Laser AF | |||
| Front Camera | Mechanical Module 20MP 0.9µm f/2.0 |
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| Storage | 128 / 256GB UFS 2.1 | |||
| I/O | USB-C no 3.5mm headphone jack |
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| Wireless (local) | 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.0 LE + NFC |
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| IP Rating | none | |||
| Other Features | In-screen optical fingerprint sensor | |||
| Dual-SIM | 1x nanoSIM + microSD or 2x nanoSIM |
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| Street Price: | 6+128GB: 579€ 6+256GB: 609€ 8+256GB: 649€ |
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As many other flagship devices this year, the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 system-on-chip, promising high-end performance both on the CPU and GPU side, whilst offering the latest connectivity options. We’ve covered the chip extensively this year, and summed up how the device performs amongst other implementations in our recent S855 round-up article.
The Reno 10x comes with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM – with the 8GB version reserved as a separate second 256GB SKU above the standard 6GB 128GB and 256GB variants.
Key to the phone is the Reno and Reno 10x’s fullscreen display design, featuring no large bezels, notchces or camera cut-outs. The display is an AMOLED panel featuring a 2340 x 1080 resolution and comes at a rather large diagonal of 6.6”. The phone is indeed on the larger side of the scale with a width of 77.2mm.
Earlier this summer we reviewed the OnePlus 7 Pro which featured a similar design solution to the full-screen display as the Reno: both phones come with a mechanical motorised slide-out camera. While on the OP7Pro the camera module was of a smaller rectangular design, the Reno opts to go for a wedge design, and alongside the front-camera it also houses the rear flash as well as the earpiece speaker.
I think the one negative aspect of such designs, shared by both the OP7Pro and the Reno 10x, is the fact that the internal actuator mechanism as well as the extra housing for the moving module cause increased weight and thickness of the phones. At 9.3mm the Oppo isn’t quite as thin as some of its competition, and the hefty 215g weight certainly is attributed its design choice. The good news is that like on the OP7Pro, we find a large battery capacity of 3975mAh in design, with a typical capacity of 4065mAh.
The rear of the phone is defined by a central vertical design highlight consisting of the cameras as well as Oppo’s branding band.
The cameras are actually flush with the back glass of the phone. Again, it’s not the first phone to employ this design, however Oppo was at least forward-thinking here in terms of longevity and draw-back that comes with such a design; earlier this year I commented that I had durability concerns with the LG G8’s choice to go with a flush back glass & integrated camera design, solely on the reason for that it would more easily get scratched and appear in camera captures. Oppo alleviates this concern by including a small raised nub below the cameras, causing the phone to never actually be flush against any surfaces and thus vastly reducing possible scratches of the back glass near the cameras.
In terms of cameras, the main camera sensor of the Oppo Reno 10x is again the familiar IMX586 from Sony, which comes with a native resolution of 48MP, however offers a quad-bayer colour filter layout with an effective resolution of 12MP. In effect, daily photography with the phone is done at 12MP with an effective pixel pitch of 1.6µm. The camera comes with an f/1.7 lens and features OIS. The ultra-wide-angle module features a 16MP sensor and features a 16mm equivalent focal length, along with f/2.0 optics.
Oppo wants to differentiate the Reno 10x with the inclusion of a “periscope” telephoto module that is able to capture pictures with an up to 5x optical magnification, relative to the main sensor. The sensor here is of a smaller 8MP variant, and the optics are also a quite limited f/3.0 aperture. Again this isn’t the first time we saw such a design as we covered Huawei’s P30 Pro with the same feature. I wasn’t too convinced of the daily viability of such a module, as it comes with large compromises due to the small aperture, as well as just being relatively unpractical at magnification levels between 2.5x to 4.9x (use of the telephoto only starts at 5x). Oppo naturally also advertises a 10x hybrid zoom mode, which is what gives the phone its namesake.
The sides of the phone are straightforward – with power button on the right side as well as two volume buttons on the left side of the unit. The front display is of a flat design, but Oppo maintains curved back edges. This gives the phone the feel of being thinner and helps with its ergonomics albeit its size.
On the bottom we find the hybrid dual-SIM/microSD tray, the USB-C charging port, bottom microphone hole as well as the main speaker grill. The phone features stereo speakers, with the earpiece unit also being used for general playback. Unfortunately, the quality is only adequate as there’s clear bias in favour of the main speaker, making it not all that suitable for landscape listening. The phone doesn’t have any IP rating.
Overall, if I would describe the Reno 10x design in one word I would choose “hefty”. It’s the compromise the company had to make in order to integrate the front camera slide-out mechanism, thickening the body of the phone as well as increasing its weight. Although not quite aesthetically similar, it did remind me of the OnePlus 7 Pro, which shouldn’t be all that surprising as both companies are owned by BBK Electronics and thus likely have the same or similar design & manufacturing processes. Let’s move on onto how the Reno 10x performs, both in terms of literal performance as well as its camera performance.
System Performance
Following our Snapdragon 855 device overview, we should be relatively familiar with how the Xiaomi Mi9 performs. The chipset is by now a very well known component and various devices with the silicon will only ever differ by the software stack implementation by the vendor.
In Xiaomi’s case in the Mi9, I didn’t see anything particularly standing out for the phone, performing quite well but also not particularly distinguishing itself as being among the best nor worst performers amongst its Snapdragon 855 siblings.
Unfortunately, in the default mode in PCMark, the Reno 10x didn’t quite keep up with some other Snapdragon 855 devices, ending with actually some of the worst scores amongst its competition, something particularly visible in the web browsing and writing sub-tests. Here it looks like Oppo chose to tune the software quite conservatively compared to other vendors.
In the JS browser performance tests, we also find that the Reno 10x lands amongst the lower performance devices, although the absolute differences here are more minor.
In my subjective experience with the phone, it’s again much like on other Snapdragon 855 phones: Whilst the Oppo does feel ever so slightly slower than other flagship devices, the difference isn’t all that big and it’s still a plenty fast phone. I suppose it’s a balance Oppo chose to make in order to improve the battery efficiency of the phone, which we’ll get back to in a later section.
Machine Learning Inference Performance
AIMark 3
AIMark makes use of various vendor SDKs to implement the benchmarks. This means that the end-results really aren’t a proper apples-to-apples comparison, however it represents an approach that actually will be used by some vendors in their in-house applications or even some rare third-party app.
In AIMark, the Oppo Reno 10x ends up quite adequately amongst the Snapdragon 855 devices who come shipping with the corresponding Qualcomm libraries to make the benchmark work. We do note that other S855 phones have a slight edge here, likely due to their more optimised software stack.
AIBenchmark 3
AIBenchmark takes a different approach to benchmarking. Here the test uses the hardware agnostic NNAPI in order to accelerate inferencing, meaning it doesn’t use any proprietary aspects of a given hardware except for the drivers that actually enable the abstraction between software and hardware. This approach is more apples-to-apples, but also means that we can’t do cross-platform comparisons, like testing iPhones.
We’re publishing one-shot inference times. The difference here to sustained performance inference times is that these figures have more timing overhead on the part of the software stack from initialising the test to actually executing the computation.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI CPU
We’re segregating the AIBenchmark scores by execution block, starting off with the regular CPU workloads that simply use TensorFlow libraries and do not attempt to run on specialized hardware blocks.
In the CPU accelerated workloads, we see that the Oppo Reno 10x absolutely stands out compared to all other Snapdragon devices, having nothing in common with the rest of the pack in terms of the resulting performance figures. The phone ends up with one performance regression, one test that didn’t complete, but otherwise the performance looks to actually be better than that of what’s available on other Snapdragon 855 phones.
The only explanation that I can offer here is that it looks like rather than using Qualcomm’s NN driver stack, the phone is falling back to the default Android Tensorflow libraries. The interesting thing here is indeed that the phone looks to be performing better with these libraries than that the ones that are shipping with the Qualcomm BSP, something the company should certainly look into.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI INT8
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP16
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP32
Unfortunately for the rest of the AI Benchmark tests which make use of NNAPI acceleration for INT8, FP16 and FP32 models, the Reno 10x just didn’t have the correct drivers and thus wasn’t able to perform the tests.
If there’s one thing that’s worse than bad performance, it’s not able to perform a task at all. I’m not sure if the Reno 10x performs any differently in a global firmware version of if this issue is solely a characteristic of the Chinese variant. In any case, I find it quite disappointing for the machine learning ecosystem as Oppo is a major vendor, and the Reno is its flagship device. How are application developers supposed to embrace machine learning when we the software situation still has such enormous draw-backs?
GPU Performance
Device gaming performance, or better said, SoC GPU performance, is dictated by a trifecta of characteristics: First of all, the actual GPU microarchitecture and how performant and efficient it is, in this case the Adreno 640 of the Snapdragon 855 should fare very well. Secondly, the device vendor needs to employ a good physical design of the phone, able to dissipate heat away from the SoC to the body of the phone, enabling the GPU to operate at higher frequencies without throttling. Lastly, it’s a question of how the vendor actually tunes the software and the throttling levels of the phone, choosing target limit skin or silicon temperatures.
As a prelude to the test results, I’ll outright say that the Oppo Reno 10x behaves near identical to the OnePlus 7 Pro which we tested earlier this summer, meaning it has nearly no thermal throttling at all on the GPU.
Whilst the OnePlus 7 Pro was able to maintain peak performance metrics for long durations, at a cost of quite high device body temperatures, the Oppo’s long-term performance came with the gigantic caveat that it hit device thermal limits and shut down the tests.
I’ve become increasingly wary of this behaviour as I’ve encountered it in the past with several devices, Huawei in the past ended up in this situation by disabling their thermal throttling mechanisms when detecting benchmark applications, essentially cheating the behaviour and score. I’ve also encountered it early on last year on the Galaxy S9+, although Samsung claimed this was a bug and the behaviour disappeared with subsequent firmware updates.
The problem for me is that I can’t accurately determine if this is just a lack of oversight and software optimisations on the part of Oppo, or rather something that’s more malicious. I’m using benchmark suites with altered application IDs in order to avoid the more common benchmark detection by vendors, but that’s not to say they haven’t found more sophisticated ways to detect the tests.
Whatever the reason might be, the scores for the Reno 10x come with a big asterisk – being that they might not accurately depict the real performance of the device, and if they indeed are valid, then the device might simply shut down the app on you at some point if you overstress it too much or are in a very hot environment.
The one test where we don’t see any issues is in the 3DMark Physics test, here the phone and CPU do actually throttle correctly. The Reno 10x’s result isn’t too fantastic here in terms of performance compared to other devices, but we have to keep in mind that the device allowed itself to reach much higher temperatures than other phones, and that might be the reason as to why the CPU is throttling more.
In the GPU-centric workloads, we see that things are quite straightforward for the Reno 10x. It just doesn’t throttle, and the phone is able to maintain the best peak and sustained performances of any other Snapdragon 855 device. Again, this come at a cost of very high device temperatures and the risk that it’ll simply overheat and close your app if you do end up overstressing it in a real scenario.
Display Measurement
In terms of display, the Reno 10x plays it relatively safe with a 6.6” AMOLED panel at a resolution of 2340 x 1080. Aside from the now more common 19.5:9 aspect ratio, and the fact that it’s a bezel-less, cutout-less and notch-less design, there’s nothing particularly interesting about the display panel itself from a technical perspective.
From a software standpoint, things are also quite straightforward. Oppo offers two display modes, “Vivid” which targets a P3 gamut, and “Gentle” that aims for sRGB. Aside from the gamut choice which changes the colour saturations, there’s also a global colour temperature slider that is adjustable from “Cool” to “Warm”, with a default snap-in in the middle. I noted that the default colour temperature was quite cool, and the extreme “Warm” setting actually targets near 6500K, which is what I used for the accuracy testing of the display in this section, and what I recommend people to use if they wish for more accurate whites.
We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Reno 10x Zoom screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.
In terms of brightness levels, the Reno 10x reaches a maximum manual brightness of 417cd/m². The result is average for this generation of OLED panels and is quite adequate. While the phone does have an adaptive brightness mode, I didn’t encounter any brightness difference in the panel when subjecting the phone under bright environmental conditions, so it doesn’t seem to have any brightness boosting mechanism.
I mentioned that I’m testing the phone with the colour temperature slider to its far end “Warm” setting, however it does seem that this setting is ever so slightly too red, resulting with reds being ever so slightly stronger. Adjusting the slider 1-2mm to the left likely resolves the issue.
The bigger issue in the greyscale accuracy test is the fact that the phone looks to be calibrated with higher gamma targets in mind. At a target 200cd/m² brightness setting with a constant APL50 and 50% window size, we’re seeing an average gamma of near 2.4 instead of the expected 2.2 for regular content. It does look like the phone has a non-linear brightness compensation based on APL and window size, however this is night impossible to accurately measure aside from using a static image with the target measurement patches.
Overall, the higher gamma will result in slightly darker tones in the image, giving off a sense of more contrast.
The greyscale accuracy dE2000 against a standard gamma target of 2.2 thus is relatively average with a deviation of 2.57. It’s still not too bad compared to what other phones exhibit, but it’s also not great.
In the “Gentle” mode that targets the sRGB gamut, we see that the screen here has a few issues. The saturations points being too saturated are result of the higher gamma calibration of the display, so that’s expected, however the bigger issue is the hue shift in the magenta and cyan secondary channels, which show larger deviations than the relatively hue accurate primary channels as well as yellows.
The saturations deltaE2000 ends up at 2.34, also not quite the best out there but at least not utterly disastrous.
In the “Vivid” P3 gamut colourspace mode, the Reno 10x behaves largely the same, again showcasing the hue-shift in magentas and cyan. The dE2000 here is near identical at again 2.34.
In the Gretag Macbeth chart of common colour temperatures, we see an overall dE2000 of 2.99. Some colours have the expected luminosity and saturation errors due to the gamma, but the hue errors are also more evident in some colour patches.
Overall, the Oppo Reno 10x’s screen isn’t nothing too much out of the ordinary. As usual for an OLED panel, the viewing angles and contrast are great. The 1080p resolution on a screen of this size is a bit stretched out, so if you’re after a sharp screen I’d recommend looking elsewhere.
In terms of calibration, things were adequate enough, however there’s clearly much better options out there on the market if one values colour accuracy.
Battery Life
Battery life of the Reno 10x should be quite good, thanks to the more conservative screen as well as the large 3975mAh battery. It will be interesting how Oppo has balanced out the SoC’s DVFS behaviour given that the phone is amongst the more conservative Snapdragon 855 phones out there.
In the web-browsing test, the Reno 10x ends up averagely in the upper half of devices. In terms of comparisons, we can contrast the Reno 10x to the Galaxy S10+ - both have the same SoC and battery capacity. The S10+ seems to leads the Reno due to the fact it’s employing a newer generation display panel that manages to be more efficient, even though it’s higher resolution.
In PCMark the Reno 10x takes the lead and really showcases its more conservative performance turning, which directly translates into more power efficient operation on the part of the SoC.
Overall, the Reno 10x is amongst the longest lasting devices out there. Oppo’s choice to tune down the DVFS and scheduler performance a bit paid off in terms of power efficiency of the phone, largely counter-acting the fact that it doesn’t quite have the newest generation or most efficient screen out there.
Camera - Daylight Evaluation
We’ve had the Reno 10x in past camera hands-on and other device reviews, but since then the phone has had numerous software updates which may have altered the results. Of course, key aspects of the phone are its triple-camera setup with a wide, ultra-wide and the unusual periscope telephoto module. The “periscope” name refers to the fact that the sensor lies at a 90° angle to the body of the phone with its lenses, and “looks out” the phone via mirror/prism.
[ Reno 10x ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ] - [ G8 ]
[ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]
In the first shot here in the forest, I noticed that a lot of phones have issues with colour temperatures, and the Reno 10x is amongst those devices. The main problem here is that it’s veering off to a too blue colour temperature, resulting in quite a lot of greyness of the picture. Phones such as the Mi9 with the same sensor or Samsung’s S10’s have a more accurate representation of the colours relative to the actual scene.
In terms of exposure and HDR, the Reno 10x does well. It still maintains highlights such as seen in the sky – which in this scenario is the correct processing choice. Dynamic range towards the shadows lacks a bit and that’s something typical of the IMX586 that we’ve encountered on almost every phone that employs the sensor.
The ultra-wide angle does slightly better on the colour temperature. Exposure and HDR are quite good in my view. Detail is also adequate, although not quite the best in class.
The phone doesn’t have a dedicated 2x zoom camera, however the phone still offers this discrete magnification step. The camera here uses the main camera sensor, however it’s not a crop of the 12MP shot but rather a crop of the 48MP native resolution of the sensor. I actually like that Oppo chose to expose this mode as a dedicated zoom button, and it does close the gap towards its 5x optical zoom module.
[ Reno 10x ] [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ] - [ G8 ]
[ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]
In the next scene, the Reno 10x does well on its main camera and wide angle.
It’s in zoom scenarios like this one where the 5x optics of the Reno 10x make sense. The problem however is that when comparing the shot to Huawei’s P30 Pro 5x zoom module, the Reno just looks blurry. Rather than the optics being out of focus, to me it looks like the camera is employing excessive noise reduction – either that or the OIS isn’t nearly as performant as what we see on the P30 Pro.
[ Reno 10x ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ] - [G8 ]
[ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
On the main and wide sensors, the Oppo are a bit lacking in colour. The sensors also don’t have sufficient dynamic range and DTI to properly capture the petal detail of the flowers. On the zoom lens, although differentiating itself to other phones, it largely lags behind the P30 Pro when it comes to exposure, colour as well as detail.
[ Reno 10x ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ] - [G8 ]
[ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] [ iPhone XS ]
Even in more friendly scenarios such as this one, the telephoto lens of the Reno doesn’t match up to Huawei’s implementation. The result is just blurry and lacks sharpness.
[ Reno 10x ] - [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ] - [ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ]
[ Mi9 ] - [ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ] - [ iPhone XS ]
In indoor shots, the Reno 10x does ok, although we’re again seeing some dynamic range limitation of the IMX586 such as clipped blacks.
Daylight Camera Conclusion
The OPPO Reno 10x daylight camera performance doesn’t particularly stand out much compared to the competition. It’s got the same IMX586 camera sensor as many other phones we’ve tested in the past, however I feel that Oppo’s post-processing calibration isn’t quite the best out there. I vastly prefer Xiaomi’s Mi9 results in terms of colours and HDR, albeit Oppo has the hardware advantage of having OIS on the main sensor. The processing differences also translate to the wide-angle lens, it’s a good unit and behaves relatively well, it’s quite good but also doesn’t particularly stand out too much.
The periscope telephoto lens of the phone has disadvantages. The first aspect is the same I’ve encountered on the P30 Pro a few months ago – and that’s the question of exactly how useful 5x optical magnification is. The problem isn’t the magnification itself but rather levels before it, there’s a notable quality gap between 3x and 5x that isn’t covered well by the hardware. The other disadvantage is that this is meant to be a selling point of the phone and is the very namesake of the device, yet Oppo very much lags behind Huawei and the P30 Pro in the quality of the shots that the module is able to product. The P30 Pro just has significantly better results in terms of sharpness, colour and exposure.
Overall, the Reno 10x is a relatively non-eventful camera experience in daylight. It’s not bad, but it’s also not great. For a camera focused phone I had expected a bit more out of the unit.
Camera - Low Light Evaluation
We’ve had the Reno 10x in camera comparisons in previous articles, but as mentioned in the introduction of the device, Oppo was able to update its software over the last few months. The one area where there has been significant advancements in is in terms of low-light photograph and an apparent new night mode.
Previously, the original Night mode on the Reno was a dedicated mode one had to select to use. In newer firmware updates, the Reno now will automatically select a new kind of night mode in lower light conditions, and this is characterised by the camera app doing three quick shutter animations and sounds. We’ll see how this has changed, and how the new mode compares against the competition.
[ Reno 10x ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ]
[ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
At first glance, the one thing that pops out in this shot is that it feels relatively flat. Indeed looking at the histogram of the image, it looks like the phone 20-30% of the highlights even though there’s a bright spotlights in the scene.
However looking closer at the rest of the shot, we’re seeing some actual impressive levels of detail retention that in fact rivals the best we’ve seen from Google, Huawei and Samsung.
[ Reno 10x ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ]
[ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
In the next shot the Reno’s new night mode is again extremely competitive. The one issue in this shot is that the phone is getting the colour temperature quite wrong, not properly capturing the orange light of the sodium street lamps. There are different levels of pure detail and noise reduction between all the different phones with night mode here, but the Oppo does belong amongst the group of phones that now produce quite detailed night shots.
[ Reno 10x ] [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ]
[ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
In the next shot again, I think that algorithmically in terms of producing a brighter image out of several low-light results, the new Oppo firmware is extremely competitive. There’s still issue such as again the colour balance being off here.
[ Reno 10x ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ]
[ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
The next shot is something we’ve tested in the past with the Reno 10x, however at the time the phone couldn’t capture very much of this scene. Today, at least when looking at the thumbnail, the Reno is able to capture significant amount of light rivalling other phones. When looking into closer detail however we see the result is extremely noisy. Investigating the EXIF shows that the shot seemingly was done at ISO1408, which I didn’t even know was possible out of the IMX586.
[ Reno 10x ] [ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ Xperia 1 ] - [ P30 Pro ] - [ Mi9 ]
[ G8 ] - [ BlackShark 2 ] - [ RedMagic 3 ] - [ Pixel 3 ]
Finally, going even lower light and indoors, the phone abandons any attempt to get a good capture. It seems it’s at this point where the sensor’s physical capabilities have reached an end and the software doesn’t know how to improve things anymore.
Low-light Conclusion
The one thing we came to a conclusion to today is the fact that Oppo has now itself onto the list of vendors who have proper computational photography night modes. Oppo’s implementation seems to be able to retain a lot of detail of the natural scene, in this regard competing against what we’ve seen from Google, Huawei and Samsung. It’s still lacking in terms of colour balance, and in certain conditions it does fall behind. These latter scenarios is I think just a limitation of the IMX586 – although again Huawei/Honor has also shows that’s possible to get more out of the sensor.
Overall, the Reno 10x does adequately in low-light, which is something great to see as it means that future devices from the vendor will only continue to iterate and improve upon the current results.
Conclusion & End Remarks
The Reno 10x Zoom the is the first Oppo device we’ve reviewed here at AnandTech, and frankly I wasn’t too sure what to expect going into this review.
The one aspect where the Reno 10x does stand out in is its design. The full screen display without any notches, bezels or cut-outs does make it one of the unique devices in 2019, but much like the many other implementations of this design this year, it comes with compromises in terms of the build of the phone. I don’t have any concerns on the build quality of the design, but it’s just an overall thicker and heavier phone, all of that just for the sake of eliminating a few millimetres of display notch for the camera. For some people who put more value into aesthetics, this might work, but I personally put more value into the practicality of a phone as well as its ergonomics. In the end, it’s the same compromises we found on the OnePlus 7 Pro and its retractable camera module.
The display of the phone is good, but nothing really that makes the Reno 10x stand out compared to the competition. It’s a large display, but at 1080p, it’s a bit stretched out in terms of resolution. Colour accuracy and calibrations were adequate, but falling in below average. There’s nothing particularly bad or good about it.
Performance of the phone was good, but at the very lower end of what you’d expect of Snapdragon 855 devices. On the CPU side of things, Oppo has configured the phone to be quite conservative in terms of its scheduler and DVFS scaling. It’s by far not a slow device, but below other S855 phones. On the GPU side of things, the phone behaves exactly like the OnePlus 7 Pro in that it doesn’t showcase any thermal throttling at all. However, unlike the OP7Pro, the Reno 10x heats up unevenly enough that the phone’s software thermal panics and closes the running app.
The one benefit of the more conservative CPU tuning of the device is in its battery life. Again, the Reno 10x doesn’t have the most recent or most efficient display, but thanks to the larger battery and its decision to be a bit slower in terms of ramping up the CPU, it performs very well in our battery tests, especially in PCMark. It’s also doing well in the web test, however because of the less efficient screen it just shy of the best devices out there.
On the camera side of things, the one thing I was more impressed with the Reno 10x in this review was the new Night Mode. I’ve had the phone for a few months now, but it really breathes some fresh life into the camera in low-light conditions. In terms of detail it’s now amongst the limited group of vendors who have working computational photography algorithms, even if it still needs more tuning.
In daylight pictures, the phone is versatile. The main camera in daylight is good, albeit the processing does lag behind the best results that the camera sensor is able to achieve; Xiaomi still seems to be the one vendor that had the best calibration for the IMX586. The ultra-wide angle was good and consistent with the mains sensor, although it didn’t have any obvious weaknesses it’s also lacking any kind of clear strengths.
The periscope design 5x optical zoom of the phone seems to be a gimmick to me. We already saw the feature on the P30 Pro, and like on that phone, in most situations it’s not quite as useful as some lower magnification lenses. The problem for the Reno 10x Zoom is the fact that it loses out in quality compared to the P30 Pro – sometimes quite significantly, producing blurrier pictures than its sole competitor.
In Europe, the Reno 10x Zoom can be found between 579 to 649€ depending on storage configuration. The issue I had with the Reno 10x is that I don’t feel like it had any one defining feature that put it ahead of the competition. Everything was relatively passable or adequate, not shining in any one area. For being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none phone, I feel it doesn’t convince me enough to actively recommend the phone over a competing solution. The phone has a cheaper sibling in the regular Reno, and the Reno 2 will also be released soon, but again I don’t feel like those phones substantially change the formula to make them worthwhile phones. Let’s hope Oppo continues to iterate in future designs, and better optimise and improve upon the core aspects of its phones.
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