OPPO Find X7 Ultra review: one of the best flagships that you can’t buy

Name: OPPO Find X7 Ultra
Item: OPPO Find X7 Ultra
Rating: 8
Author: Sanket Vijayasarathy

Published On: May 2, 2024

Review Summary

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The OPPO Find X7 Ultra was announced in January, yet you may not have heard much about it for one simple reason: it’s exclusively available in China. But why are we discussing it here? Because a flagship phone like the Find X7 Ultra deserves attention. Recently, OPPO invited 91mobiles to China to showcase the phone and its assembly process. We dedicated ample time to testing the Find X7 Ultra’s Hasselblad camera system and other features, and one thing became clear: this phone offers more than just exceptional cameras.

Table of Contents

Verdict

The OPPO Find X7 Ultra is easily one of the best premium flagship phones one can have in 2024. The only problem is that not many can buy this device as it won’t be released outside of China. Not only is the Find X7 Ultra one of the best camera phones this year, but it also offers a premium design and top-tier performance.

Design and display

OPPO’s Find X series is not available in India, but if you’re familiar with precious models in the series, like the Find X6 Pro (review) for example, you’ll see that the Find X7 Ultra isn’t all that different. This is a premium phone through and through with a premium curved glass on the front and a two-tone finish on the back. The variant we received had black leather covering most of the back and a frosted grey around the camera module.

Speaking of the camera module, this is OPPO’s statement piece and it is as big and bold here as it was on the Find X6 Pro. The camera bump is pronounced which means the phone lies at an angle when kept on a flat surface. At 221 grams, the Find X7 Ultra is a heavy phone, particularly top-heavy due to the camera system.

The Find X7 Ultra’s display is similar to its predecessor’s as well, with a 6.82-inch (3,168 × 1,440) LTPO AMOLED display and up to 120Hz adaptive refresh rate. The screen is as good as they come, offering excellent viewing angles, colours and sharpness. It can get plenty bright too with a claimed peak brightness of up to 4,500 nits.

Cameras

The cameras remain the highlight of the Find X7 Ultra, and understandably so. OPPO’s partnership with Hasselblad has steadily evolved since 2022 with the former looking to create a smartphone camera system that comes close to achieving the kind of photography that’s possible on Hasselblad’s SLR cameras. The Find X6 series touted three 50MP flagship cameras and the Find X7 Ultra takes it one notch higher by offering four 50MP sensors on the back. This system includes a 50MP Sony Lytia-900 primary sensor, a 50MP Sony IMX600 ultrawide lens, and two 50MP telephoto lenses.

With 50MP sensors across the board, OPPO is going for consistency between different modes and that is what you get. The cameras shine in daylight conditions, delivering excellent sharpness, balanced exposure, colour accuracy, and dynamic range. We compared the device with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and the OPPO phone came out on top, especially in low light conditions. In the comparison slider below taken in a dimly-lit walkway, you can see the Find X7 Ultra offers a brighter image with better detailing of the road and control of the light falling on the tree.

The Find X7 Ultra comes with what the company calls HyperTone Image Engine, an on-device algorithm that improves exposure levels in tricky scenarios and delivers natural skin tones without over-sharpening. All of this happens in real time resulting in improved picture clarity with very low noise.

Portrait captures are where the OPPO Find X7 Ultra truly shines. Both telephoto lenses can capture excellent portraits in 3x and 6x optical zoom, offering good detail and natural colours in various lighting. The reason OPPO opted for two tele cameras is so that you get good detail in between 3x and 6x zoom levels as well. While portrait shots look good on the Find X7 Ultra, I still prefer the ones taken by the Vivo X100 Pro. In the comparison shot below, the Vivo X100 Pro’s 3.7x portrait shot offers better colours especially the skin tone while the Find X7 Pro leans towards a warm, orange-ish tone. Both phones, however, do extremely well with edge detection and background blur.

When taking close-up shots using the Find X7 Ultra, the camera switches to the wide-angle lens for macro mode and you get pretty acceptable results in daylight. There’s a Master mode for those looking for more control when capturing photos. The Auto option in Master mode is a basic version that allows you to tweak the exposure and capture in RAW or RAW Max modes, while the Pro option gives you more settings to play with such as ISO, White Balance, manual focus, and more. Take a look at some photos captured using the various cameras of the Find X7 Ultra.

Performance and software

In addition to offering stellar cameras, the Find X7 Ultra also delivers top-of-the-line performance. There’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset along with 12GB LPDDRX5 RAM and 256GB of internal storage in the unit we received. In China, the phone is available with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Benchmark scores are as you would expect from a 2024 flagship. The Find X7 Ultra scored over 20 lakh on AnTuTu, much like other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered phones like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and iQOO 12.

No surprise that the OPPO Find X7 Ultra breezes through everything you might use the phone for, from general multi-tasking to gaming. The phone is snappy and fluid when it comes to browsing through the UI and switching between apps. There were no noticeable slowdowns during my usage but the device did get slightly warm during prolonged use, especially when recording videos.

Coming to the software, the device ships ColorOS 14 based on Android 14 in China. Since we received the China unit, the phone came with a bunch of China-specific apps pre-installed. We had to install Google Play Store to download all the apps we in India know and love, including Google-specific ones like Gmail, Chrome, etc.

Battery life

Much like the display, things are largely the same in the battery department as well. OPPO has packed a 5,000mAh battery inside the Find X7 Ultra. The device supports 100W wired fast charging and there’s a charger in the box. The phone takes roughly 31 minutes to charge from 20 to 100 percent using the bundled charger. The Find X7 Ultra also supports 50W wireless charging, but we couldn’t test the charging speed as we did not have OPPO’s proprietary charging pad around.

In our PCMark battery test, the Find X7 Ultra delivered around 10 hours of battery life, which is underwhelming. Real-world testing had a similar story with the battery draining quickly through the day, requiring a top-up before going to bed. This is clearly not a two-day battery phone and even getting a day and a half out of it on a single charge will be difficult on heavy usage. But it does charge quickly, so that’s nice.

Final verdict

The OPPO Find X7 Ultra is as premium as they come in 2024. Priced at CNY 5,999 (approx Rs 69,000), the device delivers a premium look and feel with its leather finish variant and curved AMOLED display. This is complemented by top-tier hardware championed by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which delivers a consistently smooth and fluid performance. But the star of the show is the Hasselblad camera system which delivers exceptional photography no matter the time of the day. In many ways, the Find X7 Ultra stands among the likes of the Galaxy S24 Ultra (review) and Vivo X100 Pro (review) as the best camera phones in 2024.

Unfortunately, most people won’t get to experience this flagship as it is exclusive to China. OPPO has no plans to bring this device to other markets, but one hopes the brand changes its mind with the next iteration in the future.