Oppo R5 review: One to remember

Very good 13 MP camera shoots stills up to 25MP stills

The camera of the Oppo R5 looks to be one of the phone's key selling points. The camera uses the same tech found inside the Find 7 and Find 7a - a Sony Exmor IMX214 BSI 1/3.06" CMOS sensor of 13MP resolution. The lens has a bright, F/2.0 aperture. The camera is capable of producing 25MP interpolated shots, RAW images, HDRs and Panoramas.

Oppo R5 is quite in tune with the world's fixation on the selfie genre and comes equipped with a 5MP front snapper, which takes some nice photos as well.

A 5MP selfie sample

The camera interface has two control sidebars in the viewfinder, the right one holding the still and video buttons and a gallery shortcut, while the left one is for settings, flash and front 5MP camera switch.

The right sidebar is expandable and it holds shortcuts for the different shooting modes - Beauty, Panorama, HDR, HD Picture, RAW, Expert, Macro, Slow Shutter and Normal. The Expert mode gives you control over the exposure compensation, shutter speed, ISO, white balance and manual focus.

Camera app • Expert mode • More modes

There is Add apps key, which takes you to a dedicated repository for camera applications. This is where we found the RAW and HDR modes, they weren't initially pre-installed on our unit.

All available shooting modes for download • Additional settings

The Slow Shutter mode allows for longer than usual exposures - from 1 up to 15 seconds actually (the Lumia 1020 can only shoot reach a shutter speed of up to 4 seconds, while the Find 7/7a duo supports up to 32s).

HD Picture is an intriguing feature, advertised as Super Zoom. It snaps a few (probably 13MP) photos in a flash and then merges them to create a pixel-perfect rendering of the scene and then upscales that to 25MP, giving you plenty of room for zooming and cropping afterwards. You will find a sample image further down.

The Oppo R5 camera captured very good photos. The image processing is nicely mature, bringing noise levels down without sacrificing much high-frequency detail.

There is plenty of resolved detail, the colors look accurate with spot-on white balance. Contrast is good too, but the dynamic range could have been better. Still, we are really happy with the 13MP photos, taken with the R5. Check them out.

Oppo R5 13MP camera samples

Next, we come to the Panorama shooting mode. You can capture a field of view of up to 180 degrees and the resulting image is up to 18MP. Note that if you hold the phone vertically, you'll be getting those 18MP pano shots (7400x2550px), while the horizontal shooting will output images only up to 13MP (7000x1900px).

The panoramic images are quite good, too, the stitching is fine most of the time as are the colors and contrast. The resolved detail isn't on par with the regular still images, but it is more than enough to please most of the users. Here are two sample Panorama photos.

Oppo R5 panorama samples taken in portrait and landscape modes

There is also an HDR mode available for the Oppo R5. It snaps several shots of the same scene with different exposure settings and then combines them into a single image. Unfortunately, there is something very wrong with the HDR post processing and the produced images are hardly usable.

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

Of course, we just couldn't miss the opportunity to snap a long exposure shot. As we mentioned already the Oppo R5 is capable of slower shutter speeds, ranging from 1s up to 15s.

Slow Shutter camera sample (2s)

We snapped a few 25MP HD samples, too. While the 25MP samples all have good colors, contrast and little noise, the resolved detail is quite uninspiring.

Oppo claims the HD Pictures 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 25MP, 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 otherwise very good 13MP Normal mode most of the times.

Oppo R5 25MP HD Picture camera samples

Photo quality comparison

The Oppo R5 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. There are no visible defects of whatsoever, pink spots or oversharpening.

Oppo R5 in our photo compare test

1080p video recording at 30fps, 4K videos to be implemented later

Oppo R5 was announced as a 4K-capable smartphone, but we couldn't find the 4K recording mode anywhere. The Full HD at 60 fps was missing as well.

We contacted Oppo and as it turned out those modes are still to come for the Oppo R5 - they are in the final stages of development, but needed more optimizations. We guess Oppo will release them when they are ready via the Camera Apps repository.

So, for now the Oppo R5 is stuck with 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second plus 720p slow-mo videos at 120fps. The 1080p videos are far from perfect though, with uninspiring level of detail and dynamic range. The colors and white balance are good though.

The samples came out with 10 Mbps bitrate, which explains the low level of resolved detail. Thanks to the second microphone, the recorded sound is stereo with 96 Kbps bitrate and 48 KHz sampling.

Here is a video sample we've uploaded on YouTube.

HDR video shares the same credentials as the still HDR mode - pretty much unusable. Here is an HDR video sample.

You can also download an untouched 1080p@30fps and HDR 1080p@30fps video samples.

Video quality comparison

The Oppo R5 faces quite a tough 1080p competition in our video compare tool and does unimpressively most of the time.

Oppo R5 1080p in our Video quality comparison tool