The OPPO Reno 10x Zoom Review: Bezeless Zoom

Display Measurement

In terms of display, the Reno 10x plays it relatively safe with a 6.6” AMOLED panel at a resolution of 2340 x 1080. Aside from the now more common 19.5:9 aspect ratio, and the fact that it’s a bezel-less, cutout-less and notch-less design, there’s nothing particularly interesting about the display panel itself from a technical perspective.

From a software standpoint, things are also quite straightforward. Oppo offers two display modes, “Vivid” which targets a P3 gamut, and “Gentle” that aims for sRGB. Aside from the gamut choice which changes the colour saturations, there’s also a global colour temperature slider that is adjustable from “Cool” to “Warm”, with a default snap-in in the middle. I noted that the default colour temperature was quite cool, and the extreme “Warm” setting actually targets near 6500K, which is what I used for the accuracy testing of the display in this section, and what I recommend people to use if they wish for more accurate whites.

We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Reno 10x Zoom screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.

In terms of brightness levels, the Reno 10x reaches a maximum manual brightness of 417cd/m². The result is average for this generation of OLED panels and is quite adequate. While the phone does have an adaptive brightness mode, I didn’t encounter any brightness difference in the panel when subjecting the phone under bright environmental conditions, so it doesn’t seem to have any brightness boosting mechanism.

 
SpectraCal CalMAN

I mentioned that I’m testing the phone with the colour temperature slider to its far end “Warm” setting, however it does seem that this setting is ever so slightly too red, resulting with reds being ever so slightly stronger. Adjusting the slider 1-2mm to the left likely resolves the issue.

The bigger issue in the greyscale accuracy test is the fact that the phone looks to be calibrated with higher gamma targets in mind. At a target 200cd/m² brightness setting with a constant APL50 and 50% window size, we’re seeing an average gamma of near 2.4 instead of the expected 2.2 for regular content. It does look like the phone has a non-linear brightness compensation based on APL and window size, however this is night impossible to accurately measure aside from using a static image with the target measurement patches.

SpectraCal CalMAN

Overall, the higher gamma will result in slightly darker tones in the image, giving off a sense of more contrast.

The greyscale accuracy dE2000 against a standard gamma target of 2.2 thus is relatively average with a deviation of 2.57. It’s still not too bad compared to what other phones exhibit, but it’s also not great.

SpectraCal CalMAN 

In the “Gentle” mode that targets the sRGB gamut, we see that the screen here has a few issues. The saturations points being too saturated are result of the higher gamma calibration of the display, so that’s expected, however the bigger issue is the hue shift in the magenta and cyan secondary channels, which show larger deviations than the relatively hue accurate primary channels as well as yellows.

The saturations deltaE2000 ends up at 2.34, also not quite the best out there but at least not utterly disastrous.

SpectraCal CalMAN 

In the “Vivid” P3 gamut colourspace mode, the Reno 10x behaves largely the same, again showcasing the hue-shift in magentas and cyan. The dE2000 here is near identical at again 2.34.

SpectraCal CalMAN

In the Gretag Macbeth chart of common colour temperatures, we see an overall dE2000 of 2.99. Some colours have the expected luminosity and saturation errors due to the gamma, but the hue errors are also more evident in some colour patches.

Overall, the Oppo Reno 10x’s screen isn’t nothing too much out of the ordinary. As usual for an OLED panel, the viewing angles and contrast are great. The 1080p resolution on a screen of this size is a bit stretched out, so if you’re after a sharp screen I’d recommend looking elsewhere.

In terms of calibration, things were adequate enough, however there’s clearly much better options out there on the market if one values colour accuracy.