The Oppo Find X3 Pro’s Microlens Camera Takes Wild Photos

Oppo announced its flagship Find X3 Pro smartphone earlier this week and focused the attention on its two 50-megapixel 10-bit cameras and billion color curved display. Those are great, but its 3-megapixel “microlens” camera might be the real star of the show.

While it doesn’t boast much in the way of resolution, the kinds of images that the Find X3 microlens can capture are really unusual not just from the perspective of smartphones, but all cameras. While the idea of a 60x zoom microscope camera sounds extremely gimmicky, this might be one gimmick you’ll actually enjoy using.

Digital Trends and PetaPixel mobile phone specialist Andy Boxall has been test-driving the Oppo Find X3 this week and published a few of the images he made using the microlens. While he fears many “camera snobs” will immediately turn their noses up at the low-resolution microscope of a camera, he’s pretty excited about what he was able to capture.

While obviously not the highest resolution and they seem to have a tendency to show significant noise in anything less than perfect lighting, the perspective that you can get with a 60x microscope zoom is really eye-catching. From left to right above, Boxall shows how the camera sees fabric, a card, moss, and a phone screen.

Boxall wasn’t the only one who was impressed with this feature. YouTuber Michael Fisher praised the microlens camera as able to push phone camera capabilities into a new realm.

“It’s incredibly fun to re-experience mundane objects through a 60x “‘pocket microscope’,” he writes on Twitter. “I love having a new sensor with which to re-experience the world around me.”

The photos above are not only beautiful but are also extremely hard to identify because of the unique perspective — gimmick or not, that’s amazing.

PetaPixel’s full review of the Oppo Find X3 is coming later this month.

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