The Smartphone With a Microscope Camera?!

[Music] [Music] hey what's up mkbhd here it's always fascinating to see how companies will try new things to separate themselves from the pack like there's a lot of great smartphones out there there's the samsungs and the apples and the xiaomi's and oneplus of the world they all have great performance they all have pretty solid batteries and overall nice designs and build quality and some solid cameras but all these companies they all know how steep the competition is and so they need to find one more thing to give you a reason to buy their phone over the rest and so that's where i get into the classic feature versus gimmick debate so there's the high-end flagship smartphone that also zooms in a hundred times gimmick or feature the high-end flagship phone that also has a stylus gimmick or feature maybe the high-end flagship phone that also has extra buttons for high-end gaming gimmick or feature a lot of stuff is just up to you to decide but now enter the oppo find x3 pro the flagship phone with a microscope and this isn't a review but this has been now turning a lot of the same gears in my head as i've been playing with this phone about what really makes a gimmick versus a feature so the find x3 pro is absolutely a flagship phone in every measurable way it's got the snapdragon 8 chip 12 gigs of ram there's 256 gigs of fast storage inside and you've got a pretty decent sized 4 500 milliamp hour battery and it's all packed in an impressive design so this entire back of the phone is one seamless single piece of glass which is curved up into this camera module is pretty cool and oppo talks a big game about how difficult this is to do something like 40 hours to make a single sheet of glass with this perfect curve i'd say it's worth it this is the same reason that i like the s21 series designs those phones felt very intentional about embracing the huge set of cameras this does the same thing which is very refreshing versus the typical camera bump that kind of just looks like it was stapled to the back of a flat piece of glass now this mirror finish you know i probably would have gone with something a little more matte or or satin at least myself there is a blue version that is like a silk blue anyway this whole body is ip68 dust and water resistant and it's pretty slim but also impressively lightweight so actually it feels sleek in the hand if you're into that there's a nice pair of stereo speakers with dolby atmos support which is also nice and up front is a super high-end display and that's really nice so i don't know if you're ready for all these numbers we already know oppo's done some pretty great displays in the past see oppo find x2 pro but this is what a great flagship display looks like now in 2021 it is a 6.7 inch diagonal with a bit of a curve around the edges it's also quad hd plus or 1440p which lands you at about 525 pixels per inch that is super sharp and it's 120hz ltpo panel which means they can actively adjust the refresh rate up to 120hz which saves you battery when you're just reading a webpage or an e-book or something like that anything that doesn't need high refresh rate and it can drop as low as 5 hertz but when you are actively moving stuff and playing games and scrolling around the ui the high refresh rate combined with the 240 hertz touch sample rate makes things feel super responsive so 6.7 inch 1440p 120 hertz ltpo oh by the way it's an oled too and a great one at that so this panel is giving you 1300 nits of peak brightness one of the brightest on any phone and that lands it at 5 million to 1 contrast ratio it's hdr 10 plus certified it covers 100 of the dci p3 color gamut it's great it checks all the boxes but let me finish up with the rest of the flagship stuff the fingerprint reader is underneath the glass but it's much lower on this phone for some reason i'm not sure why like every other phone i've seen puts it a few centimeters up from the bottom where it's more reachable this one like it feels worse so it's harder to reach so i'm not sure why it's there but it's there if you want to use it and then there is a neat trick in the software so a long press on the fingerprint reader can pull up shortcuts to some frequently used apps and i love that that is a really good idea for software there's a bunch of other nice stuff like that sprinkled here in as you'd expect oppo's color os on top of android 11. and i really like what i've been seeing in color os over the past two years this might be a hot take but it's risen to near the top of my favorite versions of android to use period i think i'd put it right above oneplus oxygen os it's come a long way and actually a big part of that now is how the animations and overall physics of things move around it's one of those subtle things you notice when you use a lot of different phones but it's very snappy and smooth and responsive there's also google feed integration on the home screen and some better google integration with some stock apps like the dialer and messaging so of course there are still quarks like there's no quick launch option for the camera but other than that it's actually pretty dope and then of course you can't forget the charger included in the box in 2021 you actually got to say it but it's a 65 watt fast charger that can get you up to 40 percent in 10 minutes which is pretty sweet but like i said so many other phones are good now so sure this phone is excellent but that's when you get into the world of unique special features to try to stand out above the rest of the also excellent phones sometimes it's kind of tough to tell if something is a gimmick or an actually useful feature or maybe somewhere in between we'll let you be the judge of that when you hear about him but i think there are two things worth noting with this phone so number one the billion color display okay so we know apple has been putting a lot of care into their displays over the years they're calling this the first billion color smartphone which it's a pretty sexy tagline but what does it mean well it means it's a 10-bit display what they're really saying behind that billion color tagline is they have a 10-bit display instead of an 8-bit display and when you hear that it might not sound all that impressive but the math on that is so for every single pixel on an 8-bit display there's 256 different color levels but in a 10-bit display it doubles that twice to 1024. so an 8-bit display which is pretty common in a lot of smartphones can show up to 16.7 million colors which is awesome but a 10 bit display can show up to 1.07 billion colors so there you go it's a billion color display but that's not actually the impressive part there are other 10-bit displays out there in smartphones the impressive part of it all is that they've created a pipeline from image capture from the cameras all the way through the firmware to the display that preserves that 10-bit color so that extra color information is super useful in some specific environments so if you shoot a lot of photos and videos professionally especially you'll always take things like the higher bit depth to reduce banding and crumbling and things and like fades and gradients so if you're going to be doing a lot of high level photo and video capture and then manipulation on this smartphone display this may be something to care about but i'm pretty confident there's going to be a lot of people who actually get this phone who never even noticed this especially because it is actually turned off by default you actually have to go into the display settings and turn this on if you want to take advantage of the full 10-bit pipeline so i think what i'm trying to say here is there are other more noticeable great things about this display like a high refresh rate like the touch refresh rate like high brightness that you'll notice before 10 bit over 8 bit but if the question is gimmick or feature i'm gonna put it in the feature category it's just a very niche feature just a very very small sliver of people who will actually take advantage of that okay then there's the second thing which is the microscope so this camera array on the back of the find x3 pro is already pretty powerful it's using a new 50 megapixel sony sensor for both the main camera and the ultra wide love that and i think that should be done more often there's also a 13 megapixel telephoto 5x hybrid optical zoom but that's just this little one in the corner here this last big one is a three megapixel macro camera with a ring light around it now okay you know how i feel about macro cameras but i should clarify i hate bad macro cameras like when you see a like mid-range sort of cheaper phone slap an extra camera in there to look like the more premium multi-camera systems but it's just a crappy two megapixel macro that they could have spent that money on somewhere else in the phone to make a better difference i hate that waste of money that's a bad macro camera but the idea of a good macro camera well that that could be kind of fun now this one is actually a 60x magnification lens and the macro bit just means you can get extremely close as far as minimum focus distance and so this is less of a macro camera and more of a literal microscope so you open the camera app and switch to microscope and it flips over to that camera and when you bring that camera one to three millimeters from the subject basically almost touching it and it works it actually gets microscope-like images which means a couple things so the area you're capturing is incredibly small and the depth of field on this lens is super shallow so this is an f3 lens and you're you're literally almost touching the subject so you got to spend some extra effort stabilizing everything to actually get a good shot in focus but the photos you get are crazy i actually just made up this game so you can play along it's like a game show i'm going to show you the super macro photo and then you can try to guess what it's a picture of i'm convinced you're going to get all of them wrong or you probably won't know what i'm taking a photo of but pause it if you need more time let's play a little game [Music] oh [Music] so how would you do one or two right maybe i think the dollar bill one maybe was the the one that more people will get than not but just this it's so much fun look at this look at i just did this earlier just for fun just see if i can get it to look at that you can see the threads on my shirt that's crazy it's so much fun okay so the microscope camera feature or gimmick okay so it's still a gimmick but not all gimmicks are created equal and this is one of the most fun gimmicks that i've ever seen in a phone it's awesome like microscopes and macro photography are hard to do well they're actually kind of expensive to do well so when they first started showing up in phones they were usually so trash because they were using a smaller cheaper sensor and they would get a cheap lens that doesn't let in very much light so you have this poor noise performance and not a lot of detail pretty bad combination and macro photos would look like garbage but they did that because well it's more expensive to make a good macro camera if you remember the dope tech video i did about the pro blends which is another crazy macro capable lens that lens had an f14 to f40 aperture range but you'd strap that to a much bigger sensor and there's a bright ring light attached to the front of it and this is a 1500 lens so this this microscope camera to me feels like oppo actually put extra time and effort and money into making a much better than average experience and it shows the f3 aperture is interesting but obviously the ring light because you get so close to your subject you cast a shadow on it so they really thought about a lot of this stuff now if this is going to go from gimmick to feature one of the biggest differences between a gimmick and a feature is iterating and keeping going with it making a new version maybe this can benefit from dual aperture in the future where you have like an f8 version that gets more in focus but that's all getting ahead of myself this is one of the most fun gimmicks i've ever seen in a phone and i'm glad they did it either way that's about it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,141,545

Rating: 4.9425278 out of 5

Keywords: smartphone microscope, microscope camera, smartphone microscope camera, Oppo Find X3 Pro, Oppo Find X3, Find X3 Pro, microscope phone

Id: 1jmcloqc4yg

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/QuadraKev_]

Finally, a phone for taking dick pics

[u/teleekom]

I love this

[u/RayS0l0]

I was sceptical but after watching the videos I'm impressed.

[u/OpportunityLevel]

Its a lot better than Samsung M Series macro cam.

If they are gonna put a macro cam they may as well put a good one like this

[u/NXGZ]

The Billion Color smartphone with a microscope camera. Gimmick or feature?

[u/jidiest]

where are all the ignorant that says colorOS is still an iOS clone?

[u/onometre]

I could see this being useful for a lot of professions

[u/2BadShibas]

lol the more Androids wreck iPhones at macro photography the more drug dealers will continue to prefer them. I won't say anything about stuff that is definitely illegal but I live in a legal state for weed and it would be so nice to have pics like this before you buy. The dispensary doesn't even give you this.