Oppo F7 review

New selfie snapper, old main gear

The Oppo F7 is touted as a great selfie master, but it can do regular pictures quite well, too. And while the F7 has that impressive 25MP to show off, its main snapper remains unchanged since the F5.

The lack of change isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. The camera on the back employs a 16MP sensor with bright f/1.8 lens. There is a single-LED flash and phase-detection autofocus is available.

The camera app got the so-called AI-boost, which is a fancy name for 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 interface of the camera app has borrowed a lot from the iOS app, of course. Most settings are on the left (or top, depending on the orientation), while different modes are selected on the right next to the shutter key. Strangely, the left-hand side also has a few additional modes that didn't find a spot in the carousel on the right.

The app offers two trendy modes - 2x telephoto zoom and blurred background. Those have dedicated shortcuts on the viewfinder, but you can imagine they are both simulated as there is no secondary snapper to help. The telephoto zoom is basic digital zoom, but the blurred background works rather well for not-so-complicated subjects.

There are a few settings, including location tagging and guidelines, separated out in their own menu in the phone's settings. There is a total lack of any clear resolution control for stills. All you get is a choice of aspects, between the standard 4:3 one, 1:1 and 16:9. It's not clear which aspect ratio is native to the sensor, and how choosing any of the other affects the resolution of the images.

The camera app

Expert mode is available for those seeking more manual controls. It comes with a handy horizon level and can change most settings on the primary camera (this mode doesn't work with the selfie cam). The shutter speed control lacks fine adjustment, good mostly for very low-light shooting - it starts at 1s and increments at full stops to a maximum of 16s. Manual focus adjustment is present as well.

Selfies and stickers

Image Quality

The regular samples turned out good with enough resolved detail, excellent contrast, and accurate colors. The dynamic range is about average - there are clipped highlights here and there, but nothing that the Auto HDR can't fix. The pictures are noisy though, and the foliage is more often smudgy rather than not.

Those are not among the best samples we've pixel-peeped but are about what we'd expect for the class.

Oppo F7 16MP samples

The 2x pictures are just cropped and then digitally upscaled to 16MP, and you can tell right away.

Oppo F7 2x telephoto samples

As we said, the Auto HDR mode is pretty good at catching the contrasty scenes and will fix those blown highlights for you at the expense of a minor decrease in contrast.

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

While the F7 has a bright aperture that should help the pictures at night, the lack of stabilization is getting in the way big time. Most of the low-light samples we took with the F7 came blurry, noisy, and the resolved detail - rock-bottom low.

Oppo F7 16MP low-light samples

If you have a tripod or you can stabilize the F7, then you can snap pictures like these using the manual mode.

Long-exposure low-light samples

Feel free to pixel peep in our Photo compare tool - we've pre-selected a couple of phones we found relevant, but those can easily be replaced in the drop-down menus.

Oppo F7 against the Oppo F5 and the vivo v7+ in our Photo compare tool

Panorama

The 180-degree panoramic images are flagship-worthy. The maximum height is 3,200px. There is plenty of detail, excellent colors, and contrast, the exposure is even, the dynamic range is rather good.

Oppo F7 panorama

Blurred Background

The F7 has just one camera on its back, but it can simulate blurred background for some portrait shots. Unfortunately, the samples are nothing to talk about, and what's worse - the front camera does a better job of blurring the background than the main one.

Blurred background samples

Selfies

Oppo phones usually deserve their self-proclaimed Selfie Expert tag and come with an impressive snapper at the front. The F7 features the first-ever 25MP selfie cam. It doesn't have autofocus, which isn't an issue in and of itself - it's just that the focus plane is all too close to the phone.

The Oppo F7 offers company's new 3-HDR tech for the selfie camera. It's a combination of tricks that results into better HDR selfies with the HDR effect applied in real-time and visible on the viewfinder. You can turn that off if you like (disable the HDR Auto), but we'd recommend leaving it on - it does a nice job.

3-HDR • HDR off • 3-HDR • HDR off

Despite the high resolution, the resolved detail is not awful lot and if you don't hit the sweet spot of the fixed focus, you'd get slightly blurred images. The colors and contrast are great, though. And whatever the shortcomings, those pictures would look perfect once downsampled to any other size thanks to the impressive 25MP resolution.

Oppo F7 25MP selfie samples

The F7 may lack a secondary selfie sensor for the bokeh shots (those are saved in 8MP), but it still does a good job in detecting and separating the person from the background. Sure, you can notice the processing tries to mask the borders with some forced blur, but sometimes this improves the effect instead of hurting it.

We wouldn't recommend using this mode unless really necessary, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Oppo F7 25MP selfies samples with blurred background

Finally, there are lots of stickers available to apply to your selfies. The sticker-enabled selfies are also captured at 5MP.

Sticker selfies

Video recording

The Oppo F7 records videos in 1080p and 720p at 30fps. There is no digital stabilization available on any resolution. Unfortunately, there is no option for 4K video capture.

The standard 1080p/30fps mode is encoded at about 17Mbps. Audio is recorded in mono at 128Kbps - far from impressive.

The resolved detail is enough, but not impressive, as are the dynamic range and contrast. The audio quality is above average, even though it's mono.

The Oppo F7 has a 2x telephoto switch for videos, too, and it captures those with the same quality as the regular ones. The sensor is big enough to allow for lossless zoom in the 1080p videos.

Finally, here is a short video we took with the selfie camera.

As usual, we've provided unedited samples straight out of the camera for you to download - 1080p@30fps (10s, 21.5MB), and 1080@30fps telephoto (11s, 24.5MB).

You can also head over to our Video compare tool and see how the Oppo F7 stacks up against the competition.

Oppo F7 against the Oppo F5 and the vivo V7+ in our Video compare tool