Hands on: The Oppo Find X6 Pro stuns with its camera and eye-searing display [Gallery]

The Oppo Find X6 Pro was just announced for China and while it won’t ever come to the US, just a few hours using it shows what we’re missing. The Oppo Find X6 Pro quite literally shines with an insanely bright display, as well as an impressive primary camera.

The Oppo Find X6 Pro is the company’s latest flagship, and there are two specs on the device that really stand out at a glance.

One of those is the display. Android flagships are no stranger to big, bright displays, but the Find X6 Pro really takes it up a notch. The 6.82-inch display tops out at 2,500 nits at peak (1,500 outdoors typically, 2,200 for HDR content). You’ll only ever see that peak figure in extreme conditions, but wow is this a bright display.

Even just sliding the brightness up to its max level indoors shows how much brighter this panel is compared to most. In my office, I really just couldn’t even look at the full brightness for too long without feeling uncomfortable. But that does turn into a strength outdoors. While most high-end phones are solid in sunlight nowadays, the Find X6 Pro holds up even better. It’s not even a challenge for this phone.

The closest comparison is the iPhone 14 Pro which has a 2,000-nit display. I’ve not had my hands on that device and I’m sure there’s a law of diminishing returns, but comparing the Find X6 Pro to the Galaxy S23 Ultra and especially the Pixel 7 Pro I usually carry, the comparison is quite literally day and night.

And then, there’s the camera system.

The Oppo Find X6 Pro has a trio of 50MP cameras that firstly includes a 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor. That’s the same sensor you’d find in Sony’s RX100 handheld camera, and it’s incredible. This is my first time playing around with a phone with a sensor of this size, and the results really speak for themselves. Details are sharp and bokeh is natural and gorgeous. This is a noticeable improvement over existing smartphone cameras, and I can’t wait for the day these sensors are common enough to show up in Pixels and other mainstream brands in the States – or really any brand that will give me the power button double-tap to open the camera gesture.

Oppo’s cameras here are impressive, but it’s not hard to find their limits. Dumbfoundingly, this phone has 120x maximum zoom, which is bizarre to see on a device that is limited to 3x optical zoom. To Oppo’s credit the camera app handles the shooting experience at high zoom levels wonderfully, but the end results are just terrible. Anything beyond around 10x zoom is essentially unusable for detail, because at that point the AI is basically just handing you a watercolor painting of what it saw.

The image of my dog below, taken at around 13x, has no detail left in Finn’s face despite looking really solid at a glance, and the 120x example of a Wyze camera mounted to my shed is a mess.

It really just feels that Oppo is taking things way too far. The company’s imaging chip is capable of some wonderful things, but eventually, it’s just too much.

I’d love to see what the Find X6 Pro would be like in an international flavor, but it sounds like we might never get the chance. Hopefully, some of these upgrades will show up in future OnePlus devices.

More on Oppo:

• Review: Oppo Find N2 Flip beats the Galaxy Z Flip 4 in key areas, but doesn’t take the crown
• Official: OnePlus will launch its first foldable in 2023
• Hands-on: Oppo Find N2 is a masterclass in foldables – it’s a shame it won’t go global