Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Almost a flagship smasher

The question raised by the Oppo Reno 8 Pro is a tricky one: when does a mid-range phone stop being a mid-range phone and start to compete with flagships? The lines are fairly blurred at this point, and the Reno 8 Pro doesn’t do much to clear things up, delivering powerful performance, blisteringly fast charging and high-quality cameras for a price that almost qualifies as mid-range.

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There are a few things missing that we’d expect from true flagship phones – wireless charging and more impactful secondary cameras – but for the most part, the Reno 8 Pro feels like a flagship masquerading as a mid-ranger.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: What you need to know

Having already presented a credible challenge to the flagship market with its relatively affordable Find X5, Oppo now positions the Reno 8 Pro as an even more cost-effective alternative. The impressive thing is that it doesn’t sacrifice too many flagship features to reach this price, either.

You’ve still got a gorgeous 6.7in AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, as well as a triple camera array led by a 50MP main lens. A Mediatek Dimensity 8100-MAX processor powers things, with 8GB of RAM and a 4,500mAh battery that supports speedy 80W fast charging. As for the software, the Reno 8 Pro is running ColorOS 12.1, layered over Android 12.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Price and competition

At £599, the Oppo Reno 8 Pro pushes against the upper boundary of the mid-range bracket, coming within £150 of the brand’s most recent flagship, the Find X5 (currently £745). For these prices, both phones come with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space, so the main differences you’re paying for are the larger battery, wireless charging and telephoto lens offered by the Find X5.

The closest competitor to the Reno 8 Pro is the OnePlus 10T. Costing a little more at £629, the base model OnePlus 10T comes with the same 8GB of RAM, but only half the storage capacity, at 128GB. The cameras aren’t anything to brag about, but the 10T does make up for these shortcomings with outstanding gaming performance and battery life.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Design and key features

For a phone that insists it isn’t a flagship, the Oppo Reno 8 Pro sure does look like one. Available in either Glazed Black or Glazed Green (reviewed here), the Reno 8 Pro cuts a sleek silhouette with its aluminium frame and unibody glass rear. It’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, however, and it’s also rather slippery, which is unfortunate given that Oppo hasn’t included a case in the box, a move it says is to help eliminate excess waste.

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At 183g, there’s a reasonable amount of heft to the Reno 8 Pro, but it still feels slim in the hand, measuring 161 x 74 x 7.3mm. It’s well protected, too, with Gorilla Glass 5 covering the front and back, and an official IP54 rating. This means the odd splash of water or bit of dust won’t do any harm, just don’t go dunking it in the drink.

The 6.7in display is surrounded by barely-there bezels on all sides – apparently, the slimmest ever on a Reno device – and conceals an optical fingerprint reader beneath it, as well as housing the 32MP selfie camera in a top-centre notch. Face unlocking is also supported here, with both methods of entry efficient enough to be worth the inclusion.

On the left and right edges, you’ll find the power and volume buttons, with the USB-C charging port and dual-SIM tray located on the bottom. This tray doesn’t support microSD card storage expansion, so the internal 256GB is the maximum, and there isn’t a 3.5mm headphone jack, either.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Display

The AMOLED panel used in the Reno 8 Pro continues the uncanny flagship feeling, with its vibrant FHD+ (2,412 x 1,080) resolution, slick 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ certification making an attractive first impression. The contrast is effectively perfect, as we have come to expect from OLED screens, and the peak brightness I recorded of 479cd/m² isn’t too shabby, either.

There are two colour modes to choose from, Vivid and Natural. As is often the case with colour profiles, Vivid does exactly what it says on the tin, producing brighter, more impactful colours across the spectrum, but anyone who prefers accuracy to vibrancy will want to go with the Natural profile.

Here, I recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 98.9% and a volume of 106.9%, with an average Delta E score of 1.36. This isn’t the most accurate screen on the market – reds in particular are some way off target – but it’s close enough that you shouldn’t notice any colours looking abnormal.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Performance and battery life

The Reno 8 Pro runs on an octa-core 2.65GHz Mediatek Dimensity 8100-MAX chipset with 8GB of RAM, and the results are certainly impressive.

Going up against the Find X5 and its Snapdragon 888 chipset, the cheaper Reno 8 Pro scores about the same, with an 8% lead in single-core processing, and a slightly lower victory of around 5% in multi-core. Even more impressive is that the Reno 8 Pro secures similar multi-core scores to the beefier Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor inside the Find X5 Pro – a bona fide £1,049 flagship.

Interestingly, even the newer and more powerful Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 used in the OnePlus 10T couldn’t match the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-MAX in our multicore benchmarks. The OnePlus 10T does, however, level the playing field by pulling around 15% ahead of the Reno 8 Pro in the single-core results.

The Reno 8 Pro initially seems to hold up well against the Find X5, X5 Pro and OnePlus 10T in the 3D graphics tests too, with identical 60fps scores for each in the on-screen portion of the GFXBench Manhattan 3 benchmark.

The off-screen results, recorded by the orange bar, are more useful, and here the differences start to show. The Reno 8 Pro, to its credit, does pull slightly ahead of the Find X5, but the OnePlus 10T and Find X5 Pro leave both in the dust here, with gains of nearly 90% apiece.

Battery life doesn’t quite compete with the exemplary efforts of the Find X5 Pro and OnePlus 10T, but a result of almost 22 hours is still very good and should see you well into a second day of use.

Once depleted, the battery has a secret card to play in the form of an 80W Supervooc fast charger, which is included in the box. Oppo says this is its fastest charger yet, and is capable of taking the 4,500mAh battery from empty to 50% in just 11 minutes, and to full in a mere 33 minutes according to my tests.

Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Cameras

While there have been odd niggles up to this point, the camera array is the first area in which the Oppo Reno 8 Pro actively disappoints. To be clear, the 50MP (f/1.8) main lens is not a problem. The issue lies with the backing cameras – an 8MP (f/2.2) ultrawide and a 2MP (f/2.4) macro shooter are the kind of additional fluff that I can just about forgive in a phone half this price, but here, their presence feels more tedious.

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Still, as mentioned, the main lens carries the team well enough for it to not fall down completely. Images produced in decent lighting are full of colour and detail, with well-represented windows in the cityscape pictured below, and nicely distinct tree foliage with vibrant shades of green.

The digital zoom isn’t half bad, either. This 3x crop of a Parisian metro sign retained enough detail to make out the scuffs in the paintwork, even if the sky is a little muted.

The main camera fares reasonably well after dark, too. The detail and artificial brightening are decent enough, the sky is relatively free of visual noise and there aren’t any lens flares issues with streetlights. My one criticism is that the night mode has a tendency to veer too hard into the warm colours when lighting up the scene, giving the whole image an over-the-top yellow tint.

The 32MP (f/2.4) front-facing camera is also worth the price of admission, with useful features such as autofocus and a bokeh portrait mode. I’m yet to find a portrait mode that doesn’t blur out my earring, so I won’t judge too harshly here, but otherwise, the artificial bokeh effect was suitably effective.

The Reno 8 Pro can capture 4K footage at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps, with digital stabilisation employed to reduce sway from shaky hands. When the sun goes down, the MariSilicon X image processor gets to show off, lifting the brightness and detail of night video. It’s not on a par with daytime footage, but anyone who often records after dark will find this a useful inclusion.

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Oppo Reno 8 Pro review: Verdict

The Oppo Reno 8 Pro hasn’t done itself any favours being priced so close to the flagship competition, but when you dig down into the figures, it’s actually impressive how well it stacks up to the more expensive Find X5. Performance is on par and both phones benefit from the 80W fast charging, helping to make up for the Reno 8 Pro’s slightly inferior battery life.

The Find X5 does have a couple of advantages, of course, including wireless charging and a telephoto lens, but if you’re happy to forgo these for the sake of saving over £100, the Reno 8 Pro presents a strong argument for (slightly) undercutting the flagship market.