Oppo Find 7 review: Dark horse

13 MP camera can shoot 50MP stills

Like on the Find 7a, Oppo has put a lot of neat tech into the Find 7's 13MP camera, all the while keeping the interface as unobtrusive as possible.

The camera is based around a Sony Exmor IMX214 BSI 1/3.06" CMOS sensor of 13MP resolution. The lens has a bright, F/2.0 aperture, and is capable of producing 50MP interpolated shots, RAW images, HDRs and Panoramas.

Oppo Find 7 is quite in tune with the recent selfie fixation, and comes equipped with a 5MP front snapper, which takes some nice photos as well.

Beside the regular flash mode, the dual-LED flash can work in fill light mode, producing a natural looking image without any color shift or strong shadows.

Camera app

On the screen there's a little three dot toggle, which will guide you through the different shooting modes - Beauty, Panorama, HDR, Ultra HD Picture, RAW, GIF, Audio Photo, Slow Shutter and Normal. Our unit's RAW mode produced files which were a bit rough around the edges at best. Whether Oppo has yet to finish this feature or they intentionally made the resulting .DNG files look like they came out of 1970 we'll leave for you to decide - here's a sample (25.0MB) directly from the device.

The Slow Shutter mode allows for longer than usual exposures - from 1 to 32 seconds. It lets you take some great long exposure shots, but you'll need to use a tripod for best results.

Ultra-HD mode is a very interesting feature advertised as Super Zoom. It snaps ten (probably 13MP) photos then post-processes them to create a single 50MP sample using the sharpest pixels from them, giving you plenty of room to zoom in or crop the image.

When it comes to image quality, the Find 7 does several things well. Colors and contrast tend to be spot on, and the white balance is accurate with good sharpness across the entire frame. Dynamic range tends to vary across images, however, and shadows tend to be underexposed in most circumstances. Resolved detail is great, and Oppo has kept image processing to a minimum so there's not a visible oil painting effect when looking at images up close.

There is a fair amount of noise - something that Samsung, Sony, and LG, among others, address through post-processing - but the resulting images here are sharper than those of the Samsung Galaxy S5, for example.

Oppo Find 7 13MP camera samples in good weather conditions

HDR mode helps a little in resolving the dynamic range issues the Find 7 camera encounters, but this comes at a huge expense to color accuracy. Greens and blues in particular become overly vibrant, which is a hair better than being oversaturated, but ultimately results in images that don't reproduce the scene accurately - although this also comes down to personal preference.

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

The Find 7 features the capability to shoot long exposure images like on the Find 7a, capable of variable shutter speeds ranging from 1s to 32s. It provides results similar to the one seen below, taken from the identical camera on the Find 7a.

Slow Shutter camera sample from the Find 7a

We snapped a few Super Zoom 50MP samples side-by-side with our Lumia 1020 in 38MP mode.

While the 50MP samples all have good colors, contrast and some noise, the resolved detail doesn't stack up. The side-by-side comparison with the Lumia 1020 38MP shots shows Nokia's top cameraphone does a better job, but that was expected since it does boasts a 41MP camera sensor instead of relying on software post-processing.

We even tried downscaling those to 38MP and see if they are on par with the Lumia's. They are not.

Oppo claims the 50MP Ultra HD Picture should be used for high-quality prints. It's worth noting the samples are indeed better than anything we could have achieved by upscaling the regular 13MP to 50MP, so they certainly have their use, especially if you would like to crop and keep only a portion of the image. But we'd still use the excellent 13MP Normal mode most of the time.

Oppo Find 7 50MP • Nokia Lumia 1020 38MP

Finally, here is a 5MP shot snapped with the front-facing camera.

5MP front camera sample

The Find 7 is also capable of panorama shots, with no resulting problems with the stitching. The quality is comparable to the normal shooting mode.

Oppo Find 7 Panorama sample

Photo quality comparison

The Oppo Find 7 enters our Photo quality comparison tool to compete against the latest flagships. It definitely does a great job on all three charts - the resolved detail is top notch, the colors are quite accurate and the contrast is good too.

Oppo Find 7 in our photo compare test

2160p and 1080p video recording at 30fps

The Oppo Find 7 is capable of 2160p and 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second plus 720p slow-mo videos at 120fps. Oppo's specs sheet claims the smartphone is capable of 1080p@60fps recording too, but this mode was absent on our unit (like it was one the Find 7a, as well).

To compensate, both 4K and 1080p video samples turned out great - there is lots of resolved detail and the quality is similar to the stills - accurate colors and very good contrast, although shadows are again on the dark side. Both modes produced samples with a steady 30fps frame rate. Check out the samples below.

You can also download the untouched 2160p@30fps(0:11s, 53.5MB) and 1080p@30fps(0.15s, 15.4MB) video samples.

Video quality comparison

The Oppo Find 7 is among the growing number of 2160p-enabled cameraphones in our database. See how it stacks up to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5 and LG G3 through our dedicated comparison tool.

Oppo Find 7 2160p in our Video quality comparison tool

We did our video compare tests in 1080p, too. The results are quite good.

Oppo Find 7 1080p in our Video quality comparison tool