OPPO RENO 4 PRO Full Detail Review

These days Smartphone manufacturers are really ramping up their production. Just a few months after we saw oppo’s reno 3 pro we now have the reno 4 pro. What's new this time around let's find out in our full review.

DESIGN AND BUILD

The OPPO RENO 4 PRO has a smooth looking mid-range design of matte plastic. Ours is in the starry night color scheme and the subtle gradient is rather elegant. The finish is a bit gritty to the touch and lends some extra grip. At about 160 grams this is one of the lightest phones we've held in a while may be due to the polycarbonate build and one-handed use is a breeze and as we've seen before on opal phones the power button has a snazzy green accent on it.

6.5” SUPER AMOLED DISPLAY

The reno 4 pro's display is a 6.5-inch super AMOLED with a 1080p resolution. It's not often that you see a curved display on a midrange but you get one here. Plus it has a fast 90-hertz refresh rate and responsive 180-hertz touch sampling rate to boot. Overall this is a really nice screen for this price range. it has a great contrast you'd expect from an AMOLED and vivid colors. You can make them reasonably accurate too after tweaking a few settings. The 90-hertz refresh rate makes moving objects look smoother and is adaptive only remaining at the high rate for the UI and supported content. 

Finally, max brightness is excellent here up to around 500 nits with a slider and up to 840 nits in auto mode. When out in the bright sun the reno 4 pro's fingerprint reader is located under the display if you hit the right spot it's super fast accurate and responsive to wake up and unlock the phone.

SPEAKERS AND SOUND

The audio experience on the reno 4 pros is alright the phone has a single bottom-firing loudspeaker and it placed an average score in our loudness test. Quality-wise it's pretty average as well. There's also a regular 3.5-millimeter headphone jack down at the bottom. The phone supports FM radio if you have headphones plugged in. You'll have plenty of space for all the content you want. There are options for 128 or 256 gigs of storage and that are expandable through the triple card slot.

Starry Night, 8GB RAM, 128GB Storage    Check On Amazon 

Silky White, 8GB RAM, 128GB Storage     Check On Amazon

Galactic Blue, 8GB RAM, 128GB Storage  Check On Amazon

SOFTWARE AND OS

The phone's OS is the newest version of oppo's Color OS on top of android 10. It's a smooth interface with some proprietary features such as the photos music and video apps file manager and other tools. You can choose to have all of your apps on the home screen or to store them in an app drawer wiping from the side of the screen opens up a smart sidebar. This can hold various customizable shortcuts while there isn’t a notification led on. The Reno 4 pro there is an always-on display as well as edge lighting where the edge of the display glows to remind you to check your phone.

PROCESSOR

Under the hood is a Qualcomm snapdragon 720g chipset it does offer good performance for a mid-range though. It does fall a bit behind the upper mid-range snapdragon 765g. The 720g doesn't support 5g network speeds like the higher tier chipset can and posts lower scores both CPU and GPU wise. You can get perfectly adequate performance on the reno 4 pros even when gaming, but this isn't the most powerful device you can get for the money. The reno 4 pro has a 4 000 milliamp-hour battery pretty much an average size these days.

BATTERY ENDURANCE AND CHARGING SPEED

However, battery life is quite good with the display set to 90 hertz. The phone scored an endurance rating of 96 hours in our battery life tests on top of that one of the standout features of the reno 4 pros is its lightning-fast charging. It comes with a massive 65 watt super VOC 2.0 charger in the box. This is able to deliver one of the fastest charging speeds we've measured taking the phone from an empty battery to 100 charges in about half an hour.

CAMERAS

Moving on to the phone's cameras there are four on the back a 48-megapixel quad bare main cam an 8 megapixel ultra-wide-angle cam a 2-megapixel macro cam and a 2-megapixel depth sensor that oppo markets as a black and white camera used for various color effects. Photos from the main camera come out in 12 megapixels and in daylight, these are really nice. There are good sharpness and detail balanced colors and natural rendition of textures like foliage. 

The dynamic range is fairly wide too. We did notice some visible noise though but it's acceptable. Like with other quad bear cameras you can shoot in the full resolution at 48 megapixels. This doesn't necessarily grant you more detail though you can achieve this sometimes in the right situation. There is more noise in this mode though. 

Portraits are taken with the main camera and these are good. Subject isolation is competent with minimal glitches along the edges. There is no telephoto cam on the reno 4  pro but the two times digital zoom from the main cam is decent producing some usable results. The ultra-wide-angle cams photos aren't on the same level quality-wise as the main camera. 

The color reproduction is off especially with the blues and the dynamic range is more narrow. These aren't bad though the detail level is quite nice for 8 megapixels. Close-up shots taken with the macro camera are unimpressive don't expect a lot of detail at 2 megapixel resolution plus there's a lot of noise narrow dynamic range and washed out colors. Focus is fixed too so getting a sharp image takes some trial and error.

LOW LIGHT CAMERA PERFORMANCE

In low light the reno 4 pro's main cam produces decent images for its class. They are noisy but there are good enough detail and color saturation. Dynamic range is fairly wide as well we would prefer a brighter exposure though. You do have night mode to brighten up the shadows for you and highlights are better developed as well. The results are solid though you do lose out on some fine detail in the process. The ultra-wide cam doesn't do very well in the dark you get underexposed photos with narrow dynamic range. Night mode does help a lot though improving both the exposure and dynamic range though it adds a lot of sharpening too.

SELFIES

For selfies, the reno 4 pro is equipped with a 32-megapixel quad Bayer front-facing cam. The shots come out in 32 megapixels and these are nice with plenty of detail. Just watch out for challenging lighting HDR seem to be a bit unreliable resulting in some clipped highlights.

VIDEO RECORDING

Videos can be recorded with the main camera and up to 4k at 30fps. The quality is ok with fairly wide dynamic range and conservative processing. The ultra-wide-angle cams footage comes out in 1080p and you get decent detail the dynamic range is narrow though. Electronic stabilization is always on for the main cam in all modes it does an excellent job in smoothing out walking induced shake and panning. However, there's no stabilization available for the ultra-wide-angle cam, and footage comes out shaky. You do get the ultra steady pro mode which fixes that but you can see some glitches here and there. Finally, Oppo claims the fourth camera is used to create a variety of color filters you can use when recording videos but we think these are software generated as covering the camera with a finger made no difference. Still the effects look cool.

CONCLUSION

So that's the oppo reno 4 pro you get a light and elegant looking build. A curved high refresh rate AMOLED screen. A decent chipset a pretty good primary camera great battery life and some of the fastest charging around.  Plus you get features that many phones are skipping over these days a headphone jack and expandable storage now there are some downsides worth mentioning though.

First is the chipset a 720g is a decent chip but you could get a faster one if you shop around. Also, the monochrome camera is neat but it feels more like a gimmick than a fully functional camera. The macro cam isn't great either and we definitely would have preferred having a telephoto zoom but still, the reno 4 pro is a solid mid-ranger that clearly offers something unique, with this combination of a curved AMOLED and fast charging. These are features you are interested in and heavy gaming isn't a priority. Then the reno4 pro is definitely worth recommending. Thanks for reading guys stay safe and see you on the next one.