Oppo F11 Pro review

A trendy 48MP + 5 MP dual-camera

The Oppo F11 Pro comes with a familiar dual-camera setup - 48MP + 5MP for depth sensing. There is phase-detection autofocus and a single-LED flash for low-light closeups.

The 48MP sensor is likely to be Samsung's Bright GM1. It's pretty big - 1/2.25" and has 0.8µm pixels and f/1.79 aperture. It's a type of sensor that grows in popularity day by day and has been used in various smartphones including high-end handsets such as the Honor View 20 and Xiaomi Mi 9. Xiaomi Redmi Note 7, Note 7 Pro and the Vivo V15 Pro also use such sensors for their main cameras.

Of course, that also means that the camera software uses Quad-Bayer-like technology that combines four adjacent pixels into one. This results in a sharper 12MP photo with plenty of light, detail and less noise. The secondary 5MP camera is used only for depth information when taking portraits, for example.

And as for the selfie cam, it's on a pop-up module and uses a 16MP sensor with 1.0µm pixels and a f/2.0 lens. No LED flash here, and no autofocus.

The camera app offers AI scene recognition - you'll see a small icon when a scene is successfully recognized, and the software will tweak all settings accordingly. Food, snow, pets (dogs and cats), sunsets, grass, among other scenes, are caught mostly correctly.

The app has three major modes - Photo, Portrait and Video - and you can swipe between those. The new Dazzle Color (also known as Chroma Boost) toggle is on the other end, accompanied by the HDR and flash settings. The Dazzle Color is an advanced HDR mode, which stacks a couple of images and offers even further improvements in the dynamic range and occasionally - better color saturation.

Camera app

There is also a hamburger menu with a few more shooting modes - Expert (manual settings), Pano, Time-lapse, Slow-mo, and Ultra Night Mode (also known as Nightscape). The latter is the so-called long-exposure handheld mode for night photos, which is the thing to have these days.

There is also a 2X zoom toggle, but it does a simple digital zoom when shooting stills but does work for loss-less magnification in the 1080p videos.

Image Quality

The default photos come from the 48MP sensor, and after the phone works its magic on them (including some frame stacking), they end up in 12MP resolution. And the ones we captured during the day are excellent. There is plenty of detail, high dynamic range, lively and accurate colors, superb contrast, and, overall, very nice processing. The images have just the right amount of sharpening applied so detail is highlighted, but there are not too many sharpening halos.

We found only one issue and it's in areas of uniform colors - there are noticeable traces of noise. And looking closely it does appear to have some pattern to it, so those grainy objects might be artefacts due to some algorithm oddities during the 48MP to 12MP conversion. We can't know for sure, but it's there and you've been warned.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP photos

The HDR effect is not over the top and most people will be happy with the improved dynamic range it provides.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP HDR photos

The 2x zoom is purely digital, there is no telephoto lens on the Oppo F11 Pro. But Oppo still opted for a toggle on the viewfinder, so here is what you'll get if you use it.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP 2x zoomed photos

Then there is the Dazzle Color (also known as Chrome Boost) mode, which you must enable from the viewfinder. You should use this only for improving even further the dynamic range and if you think the colors are somewhat duller than they should be. It indeed improves the dynamic range further than the HDR thanks to some more advanced image stacking, but you may lose some intricate detail in the process.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP Dazzle Color photos

If you really need to shoot in 48MP you can do it, but the samples you'll get are far from impressive and there is a reason for that. While you can save 48MP images, the Helio P70 can't handle such and the result is just an upscaled 12MP photo. The Xiaomi Mi 9 and Honor View 20 do get real 48MP photos when using this option because of their flagship hardware, but the F11, as well as the Vivo V15 and Redmi Note 7 just do upscaling and nothing else. So, you can have a 48MP picture, but it doesn't provide any more detail than the 12MP photos.

Oppo F11 Pro 48MP photos

The main camera on the Oppo F11 Pro has a bright f/1.8 lens, and it does help the pictures at night. The photos we took with the F11 turned out excellent, way beyond what we expected for the class. There is a significant amount of detail, low noise levels, balanced highlights, and good contrast. While we did have photos come out blurry due to camera shake, they are not as frequent of an occurrence as on the budget phones.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP low-light images

The Ultra Night Mode does clean the noise even further at the expense of some smeared intricate detail. It also captures much more light thanks to all those frames it snapped (it takes up to five seconds) and the photos are pretty nice with well exposed highlights and shadows, boosted contrast and saturation. This is not a thing you should use for every scene, but when a suitable occasion arises - the Ultra Night Mode won't fail you - it's very close in quality to Huawei's Night Mode.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP Ultra Night Light

Once you're done examining the real-life samples you can have a look at our Photo compare tool for some studio shots. We've pre-selected the Vivo V15 Pro and the Xiaomi Mi 9. You can, by all means, pick any other set of phones to compare once you're there. The 48MP versions of the scenes can also be found there.

Oppo F11 Pro against the Vivo V15 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 9 in our Photo compare tool

Portrait Mode

The photos we took in Portrait Mode are excellent - subject separation works very well, there aren't many abrupt transitions from sharp to blurred, the bokeh is nice, and overall - those are among the better portraits we've seen, flagships included.

Oppo F11 Pro 12MP portrait shots

Selfies

The Oppo F11 Pro has a pop-up 16MP selfie camera sitting behind a f/2.0 lens. It's a fixed-focus lens; there is no AF, or a dedicated flash or anything else fancy of the sorts.

The 16MP selfie cam does a very decent enough job. The dynamic range is pretty good for a selfie shooter and we suspect some image stacking is happening in the background. There is more than enough detail, the colors are nice, and the images are sharp enough.

Oppo F11 Pro 16MP selfies

In contrasty light, you will see the Auto HDR engage. The HDR image quality drops a bit, mostly the resolved detail, but you will get a good boost in the dynamic range and those selfies remain very usable, especially if you downsize them.

Oppo F11 Pro 16MP HDR selfies

The selfie cam also offers the simulated bokeh, just like many other Oppo selfie snappers. It saves the images in 8MP, but other than that (and a few smeared ears) it does a pretty fine job of shooting portraits for the social networks.

Oppo F11 Pro 8MP portrait selfies

Oh, and a Beautification mode is available as well, including an AI-powered one, but those are just not our thing to test, sorry.

Video recording

The Helio P70 can do 4K videos, but for some reason, the Oppo F11 Pro can't - it maxes out at 1080p@30fps. EIS is present all the time and you can't opt out of it.

The 1080p video is captured with stereo sound and have plenty of resolved detail for the class. The dynamic range is about the average. The colors are accurate, and noise is handled well. Overall, we are happy with the videos we got from the Oppo F11 Pro.

Thanks to the high-res sensor you can also shoot loss-less 2X zoomed videos and their quality is on par with the regular 1080 clips.

You can also download the 1080p@30fps (10s, 22MB) or the 2X zoomed 1080p@30fps (10s, 22MB) video samples taken straight off the Oppo F11 Pro.

The last stop is, of course, our Video compare tool where you can compare the Oppo F11's output against other phones we've tested. We've pre-selected the Realme 3 and the Oppo F9, but a different set of devices is only a few clicks away.

1080p: Oppo F11 Pro against the Realme 3 and the Oppo F9 Pro in our Video compare tool