Oppo’s new camera lets you zoom in 5x further with no loss in quality

Smart phone cameras are getting better constantly, but one thing they’re nevertheless not great at is cruising in, usually not letting you zoom far or degrading the caliber of your shots when you perform. But Oppo has used Cellular World Congress 2017 to announce a brand new camera tech that could resolve that problem.

Catchily called “5x Twin Camera Zoom”, this new technology apparently provides 5x lossless zoom – to help you zoom in five times nearer to your subject without losing any kind of visible image quality.

Most present smartphone cameras top out from 2x lossless zoom, if they provide any at all, so this can be a big jump.

Inspired by submarines

It functions combining wide-angle and telephoto lenses inside a periscope-style structure, giving the lenses more space for any deep zoom, without them protruding the back of the telephone, as you can sort of see within the image above.

In fact, Oppo’s solution is apparently 10% thinner than the usual typical 2x optical zoom, so it may be implemented into a smartphone without adding an excessive amount of bulk, and it’s accompanied with a new optical image stabilization (OIS) solution that’s supposedly 40% much better than OIS on other smartphone move lenses, so shots stay crisp and clear even if fully zoomed in.

If you need to grab a phone with this particular new tech, well, you can’t. Not really yet anyway, but if it lives as much as Oppo’s claims we’d expect to determine it start filtering into new handsets within the coming year.