Oppo says it will launch a phone with whopping 10X lossless zoom camera by June

Oppo is kicking off MWC proceedings this year with two new announcements – a crazy camera tech that will allow a whopping 10X lossless zoom in smartphones and its first 5G-ready smartphone. While the former will be out in an Oppo flagship phone in Q2 2019, Oppo is not revealing a tentative timeline of release for its 5G smartphone just yet. 

Of course, Oppo won’t be the only company talking about 5G at MWC 2019. Every prominent smartphone player – from Xiaomi to LG – is set to announce their 5G phones at the annual trade event. But Oppo’s 10X lossless zoom camera tech is surely unique - giving a good head start to MWC.   

Oppo says its 10X lossless zoom camera tech is now ready for prime-time. While it did not name any third-party brand that would possibly employ it, Oppo has confirmed that it will itself launch a flagship phone with 10X zoom by June this year. 

Oppo’s 10X lossless zoom camera tech is a gradual progression of its 5X zoom that the company had announced at MWC last year. It basically uses three cameras to achieve the golden 10X zoom figure – a 48MP high-resolution main camera, a 120-degree ultra-wide camera and a periscopic telephoto camera. The camera trio has been designed to cover a focal range of 16mm to 160mm – for a maximum of 10x zoom. 

Oppo is touting two aspects of its new camera tech. Both the main camera and the telephoto camera come with optical image stabilization, with the latter offering up to 73 per cent better stabilization accuracy over its existing 5X zoom tech – that's up to 0.001445 degrees in actual numbers. Moreover, the telephoto camera features two D-cut optical lenses arranged in a periscope fashion that allows Oppo to keep the thickness in check – Oppo says it has been able to fit everything inside a 6.76mm module, while conventional methods would have entailed in at least 15mm of thickness. 

Oppo is also packaging the autofocus motors for the top two cameras into one space – saving up to 13 per cent more space in the process. While we can’t picture the camera bump on this one yet, it’s safe to say that Oppo’s tight compartmentalization of the triple camera module means it can’t say that it skimped down on other things like headphone jack for instance just so it could fit a 10X zoom camera in its future smartphones.  

At its MWC 2019 keynote, Oppo also briefly showed off its first 5G phone. Although it did not share many details, it is certain that the processor inside will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855.  

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