Similar to the last year, Oppo, the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer in the world didn’t unveil any new hardware at Mobile World Congress event this year but shook the world just by announcing its new 5x Smartphone photography technology — the first of its kind in this world.
The new 5x dual camera zoom technology make use of a unique periscope-style setup to divert light from the wide-angle lens through a prism into another telephoto lens, placed at a 90-degree angle to the rear-facing wide-angle lens. The entire setup consists of 50 individual parts which have been stacked with an only 5.7mm height that could easily fit on a smartphone with a tiny bump giving you a flushed back. The company does not call it optical zoom but claims that the result is lossless 5x zoom, and utilizes Oppo’s “priority image fusion technology for digital zoom.”
In practice, by offering precise rotation increments of 0.0025 degrees and refracting light in such manner, Oppo must be able to zoom in far beyond than iPhone 7 Plus’s 2x secondary camera and get non-blurry photos even if your hands are shaking. This is important because when you shoot with any sort of magnification, even slight vibration become more recognizable.
Oppo has not announced when we’ll be able to see its new technology in phones, but if it works as advertised, it will bring a dramatic change in smartphone photography. However, it’s highly possible that Oppo could use the new 5x dual camera zoom system on its upcoming flagship smartphone.
