Oppo Find X8 Ultra review: the new king of phone photography

I’ve seen smartphone camera wars heat up year after year, yet few devices have landed on my desk that have the spec list of the Oppo Find X8 Ultra.

Its quartet of 50‑megapixel rear cameras, headlined by a huge 1‑inch main sensor and flanked by dual periscope zoom lenses, had me salivating to try it. Oppo is endeavoring to sell this as the phone equivalent of the 'holy trinity' of lenses, and I can see why. This phone covers everything from 14mm to a software‑aided 668mm equivalent. Add a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a 6.82‑inch QHD display, and a 6,100 mAh battery that tops up at 100W, and on paper, it checks every box I could ask for in a photo‑centric flagship.

Of course, this isn't the only Ultra phone in town, and Oppo has some tough competition from the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, which, only weeks ago, I was declaring the new reigning champion of smartphone photography. There is also the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra as the go‑to “pro” camera phone.

But the Oppo Find X8 Ultra comes with one major catch – it is limited to the Chinese market. But let's not let global availability stand in the way. Does the Oppo Find X8 Ultra have the goods to take the podium for the best camera phone you can get right now?

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Specifications

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Price & Availability

Unfortunately, like most of the best Android phones for photography, this is another Chinese phone that is not making it outside of the country. I have pleaded to Oppo for a worldwide release, but currently, the brand has no plans to ship this in the US or even Europe, where Oppo is more established.

It is likely possible to import the Find X8 Ultra from China, where the phone costs CN¥6,499 (~$890) for the 12GB+256GB version, CN¥6,999 (~$955) for the 16GB+512GB version, or CN¥7,999 (~$1095) for the 16GB+1TB version.

However, unlike the Oppo Find N5, which is available with a global ROM despite not being released globally – for the Find X8 Ultra, you will be stuck with the Chinese ROM. You can make the phone more global by changing the language and downloading the APK for Google Play, but you’ll still come across compatibility issues with Google apps and services such as Google Wallet, Android Auto or WearOS, and features like Oppo’s Breeno-AI assistant, which is Chinese-language only can’t be disabled or replaced.

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Design & Handling

The Find X8 Ultra is the slimmest ultra phone yet, at just 8.8mm thick, it is 0.6mm thinner than the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, although it's not really perceptible in the hand, espcially as both phones weigh precisely the same amount (except for the two-tone Xiaomi, which weighs just a few grams more).

The design of the X8 Ultra has undergone a substantial overhaul from the X7 Ultra, ditching the two-tone colorway and leatherette back for a smooth glass finish. The device now fits in more with the Oppo Find X8 Pro and Oppo Find N5 for a cohesive family of devices.

And I love the design. I think this makes the X8 Ultra look like a far more grown-up phone than the previous version; it's sleek and sophisticated (albeit slightly Apple-esque), and I get a little buzz each time I pick it up. If anything, Oppo might have been a touch too modest – on the white version I have (which is lovely), you can barely see the Oppo logo. Perhaps the design might be a little too understated for some, but as I don’t like my phones to be too bright or shouty, the X8 Ultra is a phone I would gladly carry day-to-day.

The phone comes in white, black, or pink; all three colors are subtle and muted, and there are no patterns or fancy textures to be found here. The front and rear glass are now completely flat, which I am just such a fan of, and so glad we might finally be seeing the back of curved edges to screens. The front and rear glass are sandwiched between a silky matte aluminium frame – which does have a slight curve to the edges and makes the phone fit very comfortably in the hand.

What probably won’t come as a surprise if you’ve already read the camera spec sheet – the camera bump is pretty big. But while it might take up over a third of the length of the phone, I can comfortably fit my entire hand around the device without putting greasy fingers over the lenses. Oppo has done a great job of distributing the weight around, and with a surprisingly balanced feel, it certainly doesn’t feel as top-heavy as other phones with these big camera systems.

Like many many other phones right now, the cameras are housed in a circular camera island, which, in marketing speak, Oppo calls the Cosmos Ring. Unlike the X7 Ultra, or even the newer X8 Pro, the four cameras on the Ultra are behind one singular piece of glass, which makes it easier to quickly clean, and as the entire camera island is black, it nicely blends the lenses and provides a strong design contrast to the rear cover color.

One of the big changes to the X8 Ultra is the addition of the shortcut button (i.e., Apple’s Action Button), which replaces the much-loved alert slider. While I am very sorry to see the alert slider gone as it is one of my favourite Oppo/OnePlus features, and one that separated them from the crowd, I do understand the reasoning. The shortcut button is much more versatile and useful – you can set it to do a number of tasks, including opening the camera, turning on the flashlight, recording a voice note, opening the translate app, taking a screenshot and summoning the AI assistant, or, like me, if you miss the alert slider, you can set it to flick between ring, silent and vibrate.

The Find X8 Ultra also continues with the camera button added on the previous version. It is very similar to the one you will find on Apple’s devices – and I find it as much of a pointless addition as I do on the iPhone.

Oppo’s implementation allows you to precisely zoom as well as function as a shutter; however, I assume to minimize unwanted touches, it only works when the phone is in landscape orientation, although its placement makes it difficult to reach in portrait mode anyway.

As a photographer who really enjoys the experience of using a camera, I probably should be the perfect target audience, but I find the camera button is just a slow, fiddly, and unintuitive way of interacting with the phone’s camera. It is just much faster and easier to tap the on-screen icons. I love to see innovation in phone cameras, but this is not it. Camera cases like Xiaomi’s for its 15 Ultra make a lot more sense with added physical controls, and I would love to see a camera case launched alongside the next Oppo Ultra.

Screen

The screen is now a 6.82-inch edge-to-edge flat panel with no curve. The bezels are impressively small at just 1.4mm thick, and are even on all four sizes of the device. The panel itself is gorgeous with a 3168 x 1440 resolution (~510PPI) display that offers really nice, balanced colors in its natural mode. If you want things a bit more punchy, then there is a vibrant mode that ups saturation but maintains white balance, or for pros that need it, there is a D65 color temperature as well. Brightness is certainly not setting any records, but it is solid at 800 nits (typical) and 2500 nits (peak), and I had no issues viewing content outside in bright sunshine.

Under the screen, you'll now find an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, which is lightning fast and accurate – and a big improvement on the Find X7 Ultra.

The X8 Ultra is also capable of surviving the elements with an IP68 and IP69 rating, so it should survive an accidental drop in the bath or cycle through the washing machine. You could also take the phone for a dip in the pool with you, but avoid the salty ocean. The front glass is Corning Gorilla Glass, and there is a factory-installed screen protector. In my extensive testing, including several flights, throwing it in and out of bags, and clashing against other cameras and phones, the X8 Ultra is relatively unscathed except for a few cosmetic nicks in the aluminum frame.

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Cameras

The Find X8 Ultra has what Oppo is dubbing the “Next-Gen Penta Camera System”, with penta referring to the grand total of five cameras you’ll find on the rear including a main wide, ultra wide, and two periscope telephoto cameras – although perhaps the most interesting new addition is the camera you can’t actually use.

The latest addition to the camera lineup is Oppo’s new True Chroma camera. This isn’t a camera you will specifically be taking photos with – but it plays a part in every photo you take. This 2MP camera uses a 9-channel sensor, split into 48 zones, to detect individual color temperatures across an image. Rather than averaging a colour temperature across an entire image, the True Chroma camera can fine-tune different parts of an image for the most accurate color temperature all over the frame.

It's easy for an average-weighted white balance to be swayed by a particularly warm or cool scene, which would then be applied to all the colors in that image. For example, a red dress might look a different shade of red under fluorescent lights or in daylight. What Oppo is proposing in its new system is that it will be able to both perfectly match the ambient color temperature of an environment and also portray the most accurate colors possible throughout the scene. The most beneficial use of this would be in skin tones, with skin often appearing an unnatural color under different lights.

But moving on to the cameras you will be taking photos directly with. The camera makeup consists of an ultrawide camera with a 14mm focal length, autofocus, and f/2.0 aperture. The ultrawide uses a 50MP 1/2.75-inch sensor, which is actually slightly smaller than the 1/1.96-inch sensor used in the Find X7 Ultra, but with 0.64 µm-sized pixels versus the 1.0µm pixels in the previous generation, the newer X8 Ultra has more light-gathering power.

For the main wide camera, Oppo is utilizing a large 1-inch sensor, which is the same size as found in many popular compact cameras like the Canon G7X III or Sony RX100 VII – and is the same as in the last X7 Ultra. This sensor has an equivalent focal length of 23mm, a 50MP resolution, an f/1.8 aperture, and optical image stabilization. This sensor can also switch between popular focal lengths of 28mm (1.2x), 35mm (1.5x), as well as a 2x zoom (47mm) with a tap.

There are two periscope cameras – the first time this has been seen in a phone. The first has an optical zoom of 3x (70mm), and is built around a 50MP 1/1.56-inch sensor with an f/2.1 aperture and OIS. This is also the camera you’ll be using for the best macro shots, with a close focus distance of 10cm.

The second periscope telephoto has a 6x optical zoom (135mm), and uses a 50MP 1/1.95-inch sensor with a f/3.1 aperture and OIS. You can toggle the 6x camera between a 13.4x (300mm) and 30x (668mm) focal length, with the X8 Ultra kicking into AI-assisted zoom beyond 30x – but more on that in a moment.

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Camera Performance

I have used the Find X8 Ultra as my main phone for a few weeks, including a trip to China for the phone's launch, and taken thousands of photos along the way – and I am convinced that this is the best camera phone you can get right now.

Image quality is outstanding in all lights, but let's start with daylight. Sharpness is spot on in good light from all the cameras. The weakest of the bunch (as usual) is the ultrawide camera, with a slightly heavy sharpening layer applied to some images, but it still had an acceptable amount of sharpness so long as I didn't pixel-peep or crop too much. Otherwise, the 1-inch main sensor is superb, and even zoomed in to 2x still produced a lot of detail. The Find X8 Ultra tele cameras at their native focal lengths are also outstanding, and produce a very natural-looking image that doesn't look overly sharpened in processing.

Colors are also pretty perfect time after time (perhaps the True Chroma camera showing its worth), with the phone nailing the color temperature very well, even in complex scenes, and the colors themselves being incredibly accurate with just the right amount of vibrance and saturation.

The cameras also handle high contrast scenes very well. I shot most of my photos with Oppo's ProXDR processing on which maximises the dynamic range. I got some stunning images in scenes that my mirrorless camera struggled with. I don't always love HDR, and even when turning HDR off, the phone still produced images with a really solid balance between highlights and shadows, but just in a flatter image lacking those super bright HDR highs.

The only mark I can give against Oppo here is the lack of customizable photo styles. The standard photos are great, and there is the Hasselblad Master Mode for taking RAW images that I could import into another app and edit. But if I want stylised photos straight out of the camera, I am limited to the few Oppo pre-made filter options. If I could tweak a photo to my own style, and to match the film recipe I use in my Fujifilm camera, then that really would be the cherry on top for Oppo's cameras.

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Zoom

While optically the Find X8 Ultra tops out at a 6x (135mm) zoom, tapping on the icon digitally zooms in even further to 13.4x (300mm) and 30x (668mm) focal lengths before the phone turns to AI once you go above 30x. You can, of course, select any zoom level in between 6x and 30x, but these are just the ones Oppo has pre-decided are the most useful, and I am inclined to agree.

Going beyond 135mm length of the 6x lens, and images are impressive, but do have diminishing returns. At 300mm, images look very clear, but over-sharpening does start to come into play, with lines in images looking a little too bold, while textures start to be smoothed out and lack finer detail. On a phone, this is harder to see, so you can definitely get away with this for social media, but blown up on a large monitor, it becomes more of a problem.

By the time you get to a 30x zoom, a lot of the finer detail has been lost, but it's still kind of mind-blowing how much detail remains considering how physically far away I am from the subject, and how small the sensor is. At 1119mm (the longest distance I could get a steady shot handheld at the location), AI has kicked in, and results are probably not that usable except in necessity, but still – wow.

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This is some of the best digital zoom I have used on a phone, and compared to the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, it puts in a slightly better performance in this department, and makes my usual Pixel 9 Pro's zoom look laughable. Even in very low light (like the samples below), the detail captured is remarkable.

While a bridge camera with a ludicrous lens like the Nikon P1100 is going to capture more detail – for a device that slips into a pocket, the Oppo Find X8 Ultra is special.

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Low light & night

In low light, the Find X8 Ultra excels. The big 1-inch sensor particularly stands out for the amount of detail it can capture once the light drops, but I was also hugely impressed by the 3x and 6x cameras at night, with again only the ultrawide showing a little weakness compared to the others.

Details are sharp and clear, with a decent amount of contrast, although this was sometimes a little washed out. However, I found using Oppo's built-in 'stage' setting for some night scenes gave the contrast more of a punch and better controlled the highlights.

I was also surprised by how infrequently the phone wanted to drop into 'night mode', although it is there if you need it. Yet, not using night mode didn't seem to have any effect on image quality, which, considering a lot of my photos were more fleeting street photography moments, was very useful to not have to hold the phone steady or have blurry subjects.

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Night portrait master

The main aspect that Oppo has chosen as the focus for the Find X8 Ultra is nighttime portraits. Oppo has dubbed the X8 Ultra as the “Night Portrait Master”, and honestly, it's a title that is well deserved.

The detail that Oppo is able to capture at night is incredible – this is flash off, just using the computational nighttime mode built into the phone. I was able to shoot portraits with the X8 in low-light situations where I would never even consider picking up my mirrorless camera.

I am also not talking about the large 1-inch main sensor here, this is also using the 1/1.56-inch sensor in the 3x or the 1/1.95-inch sensor in the 6x camera.

Oppo’s background blur is also really good at night, even in challenging situations with models with dark hair against a dark background, it did a stellar job of isolating the subject, down to flyaway strands. Falloff is impressively natural-looking – I wouldn’t say we are quite there yet, but we are edging ever closer to looking like a mirrorless camera.

More obvious at night than in the day are specular highlights – these are lights that form bokeh balls. You can adjust the bokeh effect after the image has been taken, with options from f/1.4 to f/16. They are pretty and look genuine, however, they have a tendency to change shape as you go through the aperture range rather than stay rounded. I am missing Vivo’s options to pick the shape of the bokeh balls (Vivo’s are based on classic Zeiss lenses), and wish this were also an option here from Oppo.

One minor complaint, and this isn’t just a nighttime portrait issue, but it is most pronounced at night – I take issue with the amount of skin smoothing Oppo employs. Even with all retouching options off, skin is just a little bit too porcelain. This is frustrating, as retouching really should be an option rather than compulsory.

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Macro

Oppo has opted for the 3x camera as the macro camera, and take note all other brands, telemacro wipes the floor with macro photos from the ultrawide cameras. Ultrawide is an incredibly awkward perspective for macro. Telemacros can zoom closer to your subject while being physically further away – so you’re not blocking out light on your subject, or if its a critter, potentially scaring it away.

And the results from the Oppo Find X8 Ultra are seriously impressive. The level of sharpness and detail captured in macro is stunning. It's also so easy, I have never really been much of a macro photographer, but I can barely walk past a pretty flower now without having to stop and photograph it. I think you’d be hard pushed to find much better macro photos on a phone, with it going toe-to-toe with my reigning macro champion, the Vivo X200 Pro.

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Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Phone Performance

The Find X8 Ultra features the latest Snapdragon Elite processor, and the version I am testing here with 16GB of RAM absolutely flies. ColorOS is my favourite OS outside of a Pixel, and it is so silky smooth on the X8 Ultra, with animations being effortless, and I haven't managed to slow the phone down at all.

However, one issue I have noticed with the phone is the amount of heat it can generate with certain tasks. When using the camera for long periods, the back of the phone did become quite warm, although it didn't really seem to affect overall performance for photography, although I haven't tested the phone with high-intensity gaming.

Despite the moniker as the thinnest Ultra phone, Oppo has managed to fit in a 6100mAh battery thanks to new silicon-carbon battery tech. Battery life is good for everyday use, but it's not completely battery anxiety-free. Although I was pushing the phone hard with the camera app open pretty much for a full day, I did manage to make it through the whole day with a little juice left in the tank – but definitely required a little help from the battery saver mode towards the end.

Oppo Find X8 Ultra: Verdict

The Oppo Find X8 Ultra has snuck in to snatch the ultra phone crown (for now anyway – stay tuned for the Vivo X200 Ultra in a few short weeks). If I had a checklist of what I want from a phone, this is it, and I am struggling to think of all that much that could be improved.

The phone itself is top class, with a new design that is the thinnest Ultra phone yet. The design is more subtle than previous generations, but it's sophisticated and premium, and it feels great in the hand. The screen is also a stunner, with a flat display with minimal bezels. Performance is powerful, and while the phone isn't conservative with the 6,100mAh battery, it does keep plugging away all day.

But cameras are where this Ultra phone really shines, and Oppo's four (five, including the True Chroma camera) are something spectacular. Both day and night, clarity and detail are impressive, with color and white balance being dead-on. Portraits are stunning, especially at night, and zoom, all the way up to 30x (and occasionally beyond), can be mind-blowing in the right situation.

Although the major downside to this being the best camera phone you can buy right now is – you likely can't buy it, with the X8 Ultra being exclusive to China. For much of the West, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra remains the only viable option that is on the same level as the Oppo, with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra being a slightly less compelling but more available alternative, meanwhile, Google's Pixel 9 Pro is left with some catching up to do.

Alternatives

Xiaomi 15 Ultra
The best camera phone for a few weeks has just been usurped, but the differences between the two are marginal, and both phones are incredible. However, you can actually buy the Xiaomi 15 Ultra in Europe with Google services – which makes it the only one most of us can really consider.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
Not quite the envelope pusher it used to be, the S25 plays it a little bit safe with its cameras, but it still offers a total of five sensors to cover a huge amount of range, and the resulting images are top quality.