OPPO’s newly launched camera tech at MWC may just kill the point-and-shoot for good

While most smartphone vendors announce their latest phones for the year at Mobile World Congress, up and comer OPPO’s modus operandi is rather different. Last year, they announced their take on fast charging tech dubbed Super VOOC Flash Charge that sought to address the perpetual problem facing every smartphone on the planet – charging it fast enough in as little time as possible so that you needn’t have to twiddle your thumb for hours sitting at the plug point waiting for it to charge. At the show, they demoed the ability to juice a smartphone from zero to full in 15 minutes. That’s quite a feat. While it hasn’t exactly rolled out to their latest devices like the R9s and R9s Plus, OPPO implemented more stable versions of their VOOC charging tech that, while not as fast, were still able to juice their phones to 75% in half an hour.

At MWC 2017, they’ve opted to tackle an entirely different bugbear bedeviling smartphones – decent optical zoom. While it isn’t an impossible task to implement a camera array with optical zoom, the challenge here is making it thin enough that your average smartphone doesn’t resemble a brick in your pocket. The concept has been attempted before quite a few times with varying levels of success: some have opted to cram it in as a separate modular array with magnetic attachments while others have attempted to integrate it as part of the phone itself but all of them were, for lack of a better word, chunky affairs. The slimmest efforts currently in the market manage to cram in 2x optical zoom while still keeping it to something akin to a deck of cards in thickness; still quite a feat in something as compact as a phone.

OPPO’s showcase at MWC aims to top that lofty goal by quite a bit. At the showcase, they demonstrated a working 5x lossless optical zoom array that was just 5.7mm thick. While something with 5x optical would usually involve a lens array that would make it stick out a can of pomade out of the back of your phone, OPPO opted for an alternative approach by stacking the lenses periscope-style. Rather than stacked vertically, they’ve put it sideways in your phone.

The idea itself has been done before but OPPO’s implementation is slimmer than prior attempts. Added to this is optical image stabilisation and a precision adjustment mechanism that, according to OPPO, is capable of ultra-fine 0.0025 increments for ultra crisp images. Smartphone cameras have grown immensely in performance in recent years, with performance and convenience that rivals compact cameras. Alas, news from CIPA’s latest figures has confirmed that with sales of compact cameras dropping like a rock with smartphone cameras taking its place.
In the test images, OPPO has zoomed in twice on the model with little loss or noise while retaining crisp details.

In this second test shot, they shot it with introduced wobble and it still retained some pretty darned good results.

There’s no idea when it will see service in any of OPPO’s smartphones but as a proof of concepts, it’s an exciting development for camphones that removes one of the final barriers that may just sound the final death knell of what we know as the point-and-shoot camera. For more details swing by OPPO’s official site here.