Oppo F9/F9 Pro review

All-round camera experience

The Oppo F9 packs a dual camera on its back, although the 16MP primary sensor behind bright f/1.8 lens does all of the lifting with the 2MP secondary unit being a mere depth sensor. Phase-detection autofocus is available, and there is a single LED flash next to those cameras.

The main sensor is nothing to phone home about really - 1/3.1" in size with 1.0µm pixels. In fact it's smaller than the 25MP selfie snapper with its 1/2.8" size and 0.9µm pixels.

The camera app offers 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 identified mostly correctly.

The interface of the camera app has borrowed a lot from the iOS app. Most settings are on the left (or top, depending on the orientation), while different modes are selected on the right (or bottom) next to the shutter key.

The app offers two trendy modes - 2x telephoto zoom and blurred background. The 2x mode have a dedicated shortcut on the viewfinder, but the zoom is purely digital zoom. The Portrait Mode is on the rolodex and it uses the secondary 2MP cam for depth information.

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. At first glance it's unclear which aspect ratio is native to the sensor, and you have to go through some trial and error until you see that 4:3 shots give you the most resolution.

Camera app UI

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 offers fine adjustment and it's 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.

Image quality

In good light the Oppo F9 images turned out nice with enough resolved detail, excellent contrast, and accurate colors. The dynamic range is slightly above average - there are clipped highlights here and there, but nothing that the Auto HDR can't fix. The noise is all well controlled - an improvement over the Oppo F7. The foliage presentation also got better since the F7, but the grass is still often smudgy.

Oppo F9 16MP camera samples

The Oppo F9 offers you a 2x zoom shortcut in the camera app, even if it doesn't have a telephoto lens. This means the 2x samples are just cropped and then digitally upscaled to 16MP, which means they have poor detail and are generally useless.

Oppo F9 16MP 2x zoomed 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

The 16MP camera on the Oppo F9 has bright f/1.8 lens and it does help the pictures at night but the lack if stabilization is taking its toll. Half of the low-light samples we took with the F9 came out blurry, while the usable ones are still far from spectacular - the noise-reduction algorithm wipes away most of the fine detail.

Oppo F9 16MP low-light shots

If you have a tripod or you can stabilize the Oppo F9, then you can snap pictures like these using the manual mode.

Oppo F9 16MP photos shot in Manual mode

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 from the drop-down menus.

Oppo F9 against the Oppo F7 and the Honor Play in our Photo compare tool

Portrait mode

The Portrait Mode spits high-res 16MP images. The photos are very good - subject separation works 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.

Oppo F9 16MP portraits

The F9 offers a few Portrait Lightning modes if you are into that kind of effects.

Oppo F9 16MP portraits with lightning effects

Selfies

Oppo F-series phones used to go be self-named Selfie experts, but the company has dialed down on the use of that particular title. Despite this, the F9 features a high-res 25MP selfie cam identical to the one on the Oppo F7. It doesn't have autofocus, which is rather disappointing though.

The Oppo F9 supports the so-called 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 good job.

The 25MP resolution might sound impressive, but the actual resolved detail is hardly great and if you miss 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 F9 25MP selfies

The F9 may lack a secondary selfie sensor for the bokeh shots (and those are saved in 8MP), but it still does an acceptable in detecting and separating the person from the background.

Oppo F9 8MP portrait selfies

Video recording

Disappointingly, the Oppo F9 records videos in 1080p and 720p at 30fps. There is an always-available digital stabilization which does an excellent job in stabilizing the footage. Unfortunately, there is no option for 4K video capture.

The standard 1080p/30fps mode is encoded at about 17Mbps. Audio is recorded in stereo at 128Kbps - an improvement over the F7's mono recording.

The resolved detail is low, and even if the colors and dynamic range aren't bad, this is far from a stellar video recording phone.

The Oppo F9 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.

As usual, we've provided unedited samples straight out of the camera for you to download - 1080p@30fps (10s, 22MB), and 1080@30fps telephoto (11s, 23MB).

You can also head over to our Video compare tool and see how the Oppo F9 stacks up against the competition.

1080p: Oppo F9 against the Oppo F7 and the Honor Play in our Video compare tool