OPPO Find X8 Ultra review: Smartphone photography's new benchmark?

Business Standard

6 hours ago

Chinese smartphone maker OPPO's Find X series has long been the company's playground for camera innovation, and with the Find X8 Ultra, it's doubling down on that legacy. Packing four 50MP sensors, including a custom 1-inch Sony LYT-900 main camera, this latest flagship is built to impress mobile photographers. But the hardware is not the only thing that's been upgraded, there's also a refreshed design, a new shortcut button, and Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragon 8 Gen Elite powering the experience. The Find X8 Ultra isn't officially available in India, but we managed to get our hands on a unit to find out whether it truly delivers on its ambitious promise. Here's how it performed.
Design
The OPPO Find X8 Ultra looks more refined than its predecessor, with a symmetrical camera layout and a cleaner overall aesthetic. The frosted glass back and flat metal side rails lend the device a distinctly premium feel, especially in the white colour variant (which we reviewed). The textured glass effectively resists fingerprints, adding to the elegance.
While the oversized camera module does make it difficult to find a natural resting spot for your index finger, the phone remains sleek considering the hardware it packs. Slightly contoured edges further improve grip and comfort during use.
As expected, the large camera bump causes noticeable wobble when the phone is placed flat on a table. However, the slight tilt it creates also helps protect the camera glass from scratches, which is a welcome trade-off.
A major design change in the X8 Ultra is the addition of a new shortcut button. It's highly versatile, allowing you to assign a variety of functions—switching audio profiles, launching the AI assistant, recording voice notes, taking screenshots, or opening the camera app.
However, there's a dedicated camera control button located on the bottom right edge, similar to the one on the iPhone 16 series. A double-press launches the camera, and a quick third press snaps a photo. You can also slide across it for precise zooming, which works reliably in practice. The only downside is its awkward placement—difficult to reach in portrait orientation and tricky to use in landscape as you fumble to find the right finger to operate it comfortably.
Camera
Just like its predecessor, the OPPO Find X8 Ultra is a camera-centric smartphone, and that label is well-earned. It packs an impressive array of sensors: a 1-inch 50MP Sony LYT-900 main sensor, a 50MP Samsung JN5 ultra-wide, a 50MP Sony LYT-700 telephoto with 3x (70mm) optical zoom, and a second 50MP telephoto using the Sony LYT-600 sensor for 6x (135mm) zoom. Accompanying these is a 2MP 'True Chroma' sensor designed to work with the others to enhance colour accuracy. On the front, there's a 32MP selfie camera with autofocus. OPPO also continues its Hasselblad collaboration here, using their tuning and colour science.
The Find X8 Ultra's camera output is just as remarkable as its specs suggest. Daylight photos are sharp, colour-accurate, and full of detail, with excellent dynamic range. Colours remain realistic across conditions, and the phone impressively adjusts colour tones based on lighting without needing manual tweaks, making it one of the best point-and-shoot smartphone cameras available. Low-light photography is similarly strong, delivering clean shots with well-retained shadow detail and consistent colour reproduction.
While the 1-inch main sensor offers great versatility, the real standout is the auxiliary lens setup, particularly the dual telephoto arrangement. All sensors don't deliver the same level of micro-detail, but the consistency of colour across 3x and 6x optical zoom is impressive. Even beyond 6x, images remain highly usable in daylight. At 300mm, sharpness starts to suffer slightly, with textures smoothing out and edges becoming too defined due to over-sharpening. Still, it's arguably the best digital zoom implementation I've seen on a smartphone, even ahead of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and on par with the Vivo X200 Pro.
The ultra-wide lens is the only outlier, occasionally boosting vibrancy under artificial lighting, which can feel a bit unnatural.
A standout feature for me was the Macro mode. It's no longer tied to a specific sensor, giving you the flexibility to shoot macros from any of the lenses. What's more, you can toggle between a Natural Blur effect and enhanced clarity, offering fine-tuned control depending on the subject. The level of sharpness and detail the X8 Ultra captures in close-up shots is truly impressive.
Portrait mode is equally strong, with a pleasingly natural bokeh effect enhanced by Hasselblad's tuning. While daytime portraits are excellent, what really surprised me were the low-light portraits. Even with the flash off, the phone uses computational photography to great effect, capturing detailed and well-isolated subjects with soft, realistic background blur. This performance extends beyond the main sensor, delivering solid results from both the 3x and 6x telephoto lenses, using their large 1/1.56-inch and 1/1.95-inch sensors, respectively.
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Though I didn't focus on video recording as much during the review, the Find X8 Ultra still impressed when I did. It supports Dolby Vision HDR at 4K 60FPS across all four cameras, even with ultra-stabilisation enabled. The main and telephoto cameras can also shoot at up to 4K 120FPS. Handy additions like Sound Focus (which suppresses background noise) and a 'Lock Lens' mode (to prevent camera switching mid-zoom and reduce stutter) add further polish to its video capabilities.
Display
The OPPO Find X8 Ultra features a 6.82-inch flat edge-to-edge display with impressively slim, uniform bezels on all four sides. There's no curve to the screen, giving it a clean, modern look. The panel itself is stunning, with a crisp 3168 x 1440 resolution that delivers vibrant, well-balanced visuals.
However, it's worth noting that the phone ships with the display set to a lower standard resolution of 2376 x 1080 by default. Users looking to experience the full Quad HD+ sharpness will need to manually change this setting. For colour tuning, the phone offers a few options: the default is quite natural, but there's a "Vibrant" mode that boosts saturation while maintaining accurate white balance. There's also a 'Pro' mode that sticks to standard colour temperature for a more calibrated output.
Outdoor visibility is excellent. I encountered no issues using the phone in direct sunlight, and the display's brightness held up well across different lighting conditions. Viewing angles are equally solid, with minimal colour shifting even when viewed from extreme angles.
The display supports a 120Hz refresh rate, ensuring fluid scrolling and smooth animations. OPPO also allows you to customise refresh rate settings on a per-app basis, so you can manually set individual apps to run at higher rates if needed—even if their default cap is lower.
As with other OPPO flagships, you get useful enhancements like Image Sharpener and Video Color Boost, which work with select apps to improve extremely low-resolution content. These features aren't always game-changing but do help in fringe cases.
Other notable additions include an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor embedded beneath the screen, which is fast and consistently accurate. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, and the phone comes with a factory-installed screen protector. During testing, the Find X8 Ultra withstood a few accidental drops with only minor scuffs to the aluminium frame but no visible damage to the display itself.
Performance and software
The OPPO Find X8 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite and comes with 16GB of RAM (review unit). Despite being a China-specific unit with Google apps side-loaded, I encountered no performance hiccups or lag while using or switching between apps. Animations are fluid, and the overall experience is consistently snappy.
The phone handles intensive tasks with ease. Whether it's multitasking, recording high-resolution Dolby Vision HDR videos, or running graphics-heavy games, the X8 Ultra remains smooth and responsive. Interestingly, I noticed the phone getting unusually warm while using certain local delivery apps—which may point to region-specific software optimisation issues. That aside, it remained impressively cool during extended gaming sessions, with only a slight warmth along the frame. Prolonged camera use does lead to more noticeable heating at the back, but it didn't seem to affect performance in any way.
On the software side, the unit comes pre-loaded with a suite of China-centric apps such as TikTok, Weibo, and various Baidu services, which is expected from a model shipped from OPPO's home market. Still, the broader user experience remains on par with OPPO's global flagships.
I faced no major roadblocks while sideloading the Google Play Store and other essential apps. Even setting up payment apps, while slightly cumbersome and requiring multiple tweaks in Settings, ultimately worked. Once configured, the experience was stable and familiar.
Battery and charging
The OPPO Find X8 Ultra is equipped with a 6100mAh battery, and for the most part, it gets the job done. It typically lasts a full day under regular use, but if you rely heavily on the camera, especially for extended shooting sessions, you might start to feel a bit of battery anxiety by evening.
In day-to-day use, I often resorted to overnight charging using the phone's Smart Bedtime Charging mode—which helps preserve long-term battery health by optimising the charging cycle.
When you do need a quick top-up, the phone's 100W wired charging support (with a charger included in the box) ensures you're never waiting long. With Smart Rapid Charging enabled, the battery charged from 7 per cent to 100 per cent in just 35 minutes during testing. You also get 50W wireless charging support (with compatible chargers), and 10W reverse wireless charging, which came in handy for topping up my earbuds on the go.
Verdict
OPPO has no plans to launch the Find X8 Ultra is India. The unit reviewed here has been sourced from China by OPPO. Despite initial setup friction with sideloading apps and tweaking settings, the overall experience remained smooth and uncompromised, especially once configured with Google services.
What stands out most is just how well-rounded the X8 Ultra feels, especially for a camera-centric flagship. While competing devices that I have reviewed in the past like the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and Vivo X200 Pro excel in specific scenarios, the Find X8 Ultra presents itself as a more balanced smartphone while still offering similar imaging capabilities. From ultra-realistic colour tones to versatile telephoto zoom and surprisingly good low-light portraits, it's easily the best camera-centric phone I have used this year.
Add to that a premium design, flagship-tier display, excellent performance, and fast wired and wireless charging, and the Find X8 Ultra makes a strong case as OPPO's most refined and complete flagship yet.