Oppo details what makes the Find X5 Pro's screen special

A phone's screen is incredibly important because it's your main point of interaction with it and all its innards. Your handset might have the best chipset and the best cameras, but if the screen isn't very good, you'll definitely notice - after all, you are looking at it every time you use your phone.

There are two main screen technologies on the market currently as you may know, and IPS panels have mostly lost traction in favor of OLEDs, especially at the high end. But not all OLEDs are the same - yes, they all have the inky blacks, thanks to the way the pixels work, but other than that, one OLED isn't necessarily equal in quality to the next.

Oppo knows this of course, which is why it chose to equip its latest flagship smartphone, the Find X5 Pro, with a very high quality OLED panel, one very much befitting its still-anything-but-affordable price point. We have the numbers in our specs pages but they only tell half the story - sure, this is a 120 Hz panel with 1440x3216 resolution, so it's got the most mainstream refresh rate and one of the highest resolutions around.

And yes, you may have heard of LTPO2 and may have an idea that it's about dynamically varying the refresh rate, but to what exact extent? Similarly, what's up with the fact that this panel can show 1 billion colors? How does that affect your day to day experience of using the Find X5 Pro? We were curious and thankfully Oppo provided us with some answers.

Going beyond the mere number, 1 billion colors means the Find X5 Pro can show you naturally rendered skin tones, undiluted by shades that make people appear unrealistic. But that's not all - your perception of color changes based on the color temperature and intensity of the ambient lighting around you. So the Find X5 Pro automatically shifts its color reproduction to match even minute changes in ambient light, while also adapting the array of colors used to match the content.

The panel is capable of showing 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, which is significantly wider than the previous standard, sRGB. Careful calibration ensures the target is hit very accurately, as our lab tests can confirm. The Find X5 Pro has multi-point color calibration, so its screen isn't made to look its best only at a specific brightness level, but can adapt to all conditions and still deliver outstanding quality.

Speaking of brightness, there's plenty of that on offer too, as I was able to test in real-world conditions during a trip to Paris last month. It may "only" peak at 1,300 nits, but that's still unmatched by most phones ever produced, and it's also enough to make the screen visible even on the sunniest of days.

At the other end of the spectrum, in a dark room at night you want your phone's screen to go as dim as possible, so that it's not painful to look at. This display goes down to 20 nits, which allows for comfortable reading or video watching even in pitch darkness, without any eye-searing sensation. Adding to all this is the blue light filter, which works well to suppress harsh cold light and offer you a warmer tone that doesn't affect your sleep.

Auto brightness has 8192 levels to go through, which in practice means you'll never feel it jump too much in either direction - the number of levels allows for plenty of fine tuning. The panel is even tuned to match the way our eyes perceive light, which is logarithmic - in a dim room any very slight change is perceived as huge, while outdoors on a bright sunny day much bigger jumps aren't even registered.

There are 12 scaling modes to brightness alteration, every one of which shifts the rate at which the display power changes depending on the current level. The end result to all of this science packed into the screen is that you'll always perceive it to be smoothly adapting to your surroundings, never offending by being too bright or too dim when it shouldn't be.

Now let's dive into that LTPO2 tech. The dynamic 120 Hz refresh rate can drop down to 1 Hz for static content, use 60 Hz for apps that want that refresh rate specifically, and go up to the full 120 Hz for ultra smooth scrolling wherever possible.

Since it's not always stuck at 120 Hz, you're not consuming the associated power when you don't need to - and this, paired with the 5,000 mAh cell, results in very good battery life. And it's without any compromise in perceived smoothness, as even with all this power saving, the Find X5 Pro remains one of the smoothest feeling smartphones of the year. All of this refresh rate switching going on in the background is not something you'll ever notice.

This is, unsurprisingly, the best screen Oppo's ever had in a phone, and it's also the got one of the most adaptable refresh rates on the market right now. It supports HDR10+ too, as well as HDR upscaling for non-HDR content if you're into that. And on top of it sits a sheet of Gorilla Glass Victus, the toughest screen glass available to Android device makers, protecting the gently curved screen from drops and scratches.

If you want to learn even more about the Oppo Find X5 Pro, don't miss our in-depth review.