Oppo Reno12 Pro review

A triple-camera setup with all the essentials

Oppo markets the handset as having two portrait cameras. The company refers to the 2x zoom and the selfie cameras as portrait-specific. And we can see why.

The 2x zoom unit has a wide aperture for good low-light portraits and 2x optical zoom, while the selfie unit is also 50MP with f/2.0 and autofocus. A rare finding on the smartphone market as a whole.

• Wide (main): 50 MP, f/1.8, 26mm (wide), 1/1.95", 0.8µm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS; 4K@30fps
• Ultrawide: 8 MP, f/2.2, 16mm, 112˚ (ultrawide), 1/4.0", 1.12µm, fixed focus; 1080p@30fps
• Telephoto: 50 MP, f/2.0, 47mm (telephoto), 1/2.75", PDAF, 2x optical zoom; 4K@30fps
• Front camera: 50 MP, f/2.0, 21mm (wide), 1/2.75", PDAF; 4K@30fps

It's evident that Oppo is targeting the younger user base as the camera system is fully equipped to produce nice photos and videos for social media.

The 8MP ultrawide camera, on the other hand, is a bit of a letdown, but let's see whether our concerns are unwarranted.

Daylight photos

Main camera

The main camera produces nice and vibrant photos that are adequately sharp but lack fine detail when viewed from up close. The saturated colors and high contrast create some lively photos though they can be go overboard at times. The dynamic range is but we've seen better.

Main camera daylight samples

Portraits: Normal • Portrait mode

Taking the camera indoors results in softer and less detailed stills, but at least the noise suppression algorithm does a pretty good job. Oh, and the portraits are indeed impressive.

The same cannot be said about the full-resolution 50MP samples, though.

50MP samples

2x zoom camera

The 2x zoom camera is a pretty competent shooter. It captures clean, sharp and detailed images with slightly warmer color temperature compared to the main camera. Additionally, the zoom unit prefers to take it easy with the exposure. Some scenes look a bit underexposed in stark contrast to the main camera.

2x zoom camera daylight samples

There's also a dedicated 5x zoom toggle, which crops from the 2x zoom camera. Rendition is practically the same, but the loss in detail is quite apparent. Sharpness suffers too, but not as much as we expected.

5x zoom daylight samples

To be frank, the 5x zoom photos aren't so bad for what they are. One could make a case that depending on the scene (if it doesn't require rendering fine detail), they are perfectly usable for casual social media posting.

Ultrawide camera

The ultrawide produces surprisingly detailed photos with punchy colors but tends to go for lower exposure and compensate for the narrow dynamic range.

Just like with the zoom camera, the exposure here is a bit darker - probably in an effort to save the highlights from clipping.

There's also an apparent attempt to boost sharpness with some additional post-processing sharpening, but the results are a mixed bag. Sometimes, things look artificially rendered. Indoor samples look noisy too.

Ultrawide camera daylight samples

Low-light photos

Main camera

The software favors the Night mode more often than not, so the vast majority of the scenes below were taken with Night mode. In any case, the photos look pretty good for the most part. Sharpness and detail are well preserved without introducing any noise at all. Light sources are well contained and colors are rich.

Low-light main camera samples

Although not necessarily bad, we noticed that the contrast is slightly higher than normal. Even though the dynamic range is wide, the shadows often appear darker than what we are used to.

One could argue that this approach maintains some authenticity as overly bright shadows often look either overexposed or just artificially rendered due to the aggressive Night mode.

2x zoom camera

The 2x zoom camera also favors the Night mode in almost all scenarios and the results are surprisingly good. The overall rendition is similar to that of the main camera, but there's a noticeable drop in sharpness, which is to be expected, and considerably more noise in darker scenes.

The fourth and the last sample below are crops from the main camera as the phone clearly prefers to use that one in darker scenes.

2x zoom camera low-light samples

The 5x zoom samples, on the other hand, are hard to recommend at all. They are quite soft.

5x zoom low-light samples

Ultrawide camera

As expected, the nighttime ultrawide samples are nothing to write home about. Since the dynamic range is limited, the system prefers a lower exposure to conserve the highlights, but crushes the shadows in the process. There's no fine detail and sharpness is subpar. At least colors come out nicely saturated.

Low-light ultrawide camera samples

We also noticed that only the first photo we took of each scene had the Night mode icon active, each consecutive picture was without Night mode. So it might be advisable to force the Night mode when using the ultrawide camera in poorly lit conditions.

Selfies

The selfies come out really good. Detail is plenty, sharpness is good, dynamic range is wide and the autofocus guarantees sharp rendition. The viewfinder provides three toggles - 0.6x, 1x, 2x. But don't be fooled, it's just one camera with different crops. Social media power users will find this feature quite helpful.

Selfies

Video recording

The device can record 2160p videos at 30fps using its main and 2x zoom cameras, but due to the limited resolution on the ultrawide, it can only go up to 1080p@30fps with it. EIS seems to be available on all modes and cameras, but there's also the so-called Ultra Steady mode, which caps the video recording to 1080p@60fps and mimics an action camera's stabilization.

You can check out the playlist below, which includes multiple video samples.

Let's begin our analysis with the 4K footage from the main camera. Dynamic range is wide, sharpness is excellent, fine detail is aplenty and there's quite a bit of detail in the shadows too. Colors are vivid but still close to natural.

Either there's something wrong with the camera software, or Oppo decided to use the main camera for the 2x zoom videos. The footage you see below is actually a crop from the main camera and not a clip from the dedicated 2x zoom camera. As a result, the video looks soft and upscaled.

The ultrawide camera's video recording capabilities aren't great either. Since resolution is 1080p, sharpness isn't amazing and fine detail is virtually non-existent. It does have a very well-balanced tonal range and there's some obvious boost in colors.

The nighttime performance of the main camera is quite good.

We also tested out the stabilization capabilities of the main camera. The EIS, when recording 4K videos, looks unimpressive to say the least. We do notice some sort of stabilization, but it's not nearly enough to compensate for normally-paced walking. And to our surprise, the Ultra Steady mode didn't impress either. It looks way shakier than it should.