Oppo Find X3 Pro 5G ‘microlens’ displays your couch fibres

The Oppo Find X3 Pro 5G‘s microlens turns your phone into a portable microscope. That’s a wonderful thing, but it can be a case of too much information.

The microlens on the Oppo Find X3 Pro 5G smartphone magnifies up to 60 times.

Phone maker Oppo has been trying to reduce the limitations of cameras on smartphones.

One of those limitations is optical zoom, another is the magnification that lenses offer. Can a phone double as a microscope?

Smartphone cameras are simply too small to deliver decent optical zoom. They don’t offer the space needed to pass light through a lens and magnify it – as a camera zoom lens does.

Oppo has been conducting research, shunting light through lenses up and down the length of a smartphone to try to make higher optical lens magnification possible.

Director of global marketing and brand strategy at Oppo, Michael Tran, says the research is still in train. While phones offer 50x or 20x hybrid zoom – a combination of optical and digital zoom – pure optical zoom is typically 5x (iPhone 12 Pro Max), or 10x at best.

The degradation of higher digital magnification is easy to detect in a phone image, so the quest for higher optical magnification is a good idea. The only way around it for now is to add an external lens to your phone.

Oppo also has worked at the other end of the scale, developing a microlens that offers a considerable magnification capability – 30x and 60x. You can see the fibres in the fabric on your couch, and explore the veins in the leaves in your garden.

“Creating a microscopic camera lens with 60x magnification is no simple task,” says Oppo. “There are very real, functional challenges associated with any super macro module, let alone a microscopic one.”

“High-magnification lenses, for example, are very sensitive to white specks and hair particles on the lens. These tiny elements can degrade the quality of a photo taken at high magnification because they too are magnified.

“Crafting a microlens camera even requires a different mounting method when manufacturing. On the structural level, Oppo installed the microscope module on the back cover of the phone, instead of directly mounting it on the motherboard.”

Oppo Find X3 Pro 5G smartphone

Mr Tran sat down with The Australian to explain how the microlens works in the accompanying video.

You need to place the phone almost touching the surface you want to inspect, about 3mm away.

I found it interesting to delve into the bits of fabric that make up my sofa and carpet, and the scales on my skin. I could appreciate the beautiful structure of leaves in the garden.

On the other hand, scaly skin can look quite revolting at magnified levels. It’s too much information. The question is can you really make use of this capability?

The Find X3 Pro 5G has a small ring light around the lens that illuminates the surface. It needs that, otherwise the shadow of the phone would prevent you seeing anything at such close quarters.

I found the microlens worked better when the surface is even, and you got a clear image with darker fabrics. I found it harder to focus clearly on skin; it can look like a hazy orange blob. You need a steady hand. The microlens feature is available though the ‘more’ option in the camera settings.

Michael Tran demonstrates the Find X3 Pro 5G microlens in the video above.