Oppo Is Using Periscopes To Give Smartphones A 5x Zoom Camera

Oppo has a great idea for stuffing more cameras into your smartphone. Instead of having a camera lens aimed directly outwards, it’s bending light by 90 degrees inside the chassis of the phone. Y’know, like a submarine’s periscope.actually zoom since no elements move, but you get the point) is around 6mm thick, Oppo’s 3x periscope-style setup is 5.7mm — meaning phones with dual lens setups can be even slimmer than they currently are. It calls its new setup a 5x camera, though, because it also has “proprietary image fusion technology for digital zoom”. We don’t like digital zoom, but hey, Oppo, you do you.

The 3x telephoto lens, too, has optical image stabilisation applied to its final stacked element, massively improving shake reduction (by 40 per cent, apparently). versus sensor-based OIS methods. Oppo’s engineers have filed 50-odd patents for the tech, and it’s the result of a year’s development work. Now we just have to wait for it to appear in a new handset. [Oppo]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.