Chasing perfect portraits with the help of AI, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro focuses on helping you look your best.
AI is the new black when it comes to consumer tech, even though it doesn’t have that many practical consumer applications at this point. When it comes to smartphones, photography is perhaps one of the best ways to put AI to work.
With Oppo’s Reno Pro range always priding itself on its camera features, it’s little surprise that it’s gone all-in on AI with the new Oppo Reno 12 Pro.
Oppo Reno 12 Pro review
First impressions
Like its predecessors, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro feels quite tall – with a 6.7-inch display – but thankfully not too wide and cumbersome due to its narrow 20:9 aspect ratio and lightweight. This means that it fits comfortably in your hand, even with a less pronounced curved screen and bevelled edges than some Reno handsets.
It’s worth noting that the Reno 12 Pro comes in a choice of two colours, Nebula Black and Nebula Silver. The latter of which looks much more stunning, but the choice of colour also slightly impacts the design.
The Nebula Silver is 1 gm heavier and .05 mm thicker, due to Oppo’s Fluid Ripple Texture on the back, which uses the parallax effect to create visual ripples on a mirror-smooth surface. The Nebula Black looks rather pedestrian in comparison.
There are no surprises when it comes to form factor, with the power button on the right, close to the centre, and the volume buttons above. It’s a tried and true design choice that reduces the risk of overbalancing as you reach for the buttons – although that doesn’t feel like a major risk when the handset is so light and not top-heavy, despite the hefty camera array.
One compromise with such a tall screen is that the onscreen fingerprint reader is a little low to comfortably access with your thumb and it’s a shame Oppo couldn’t build it onto the power button.
Flip the handset over and you encounter one of the Reno 12 Pro’s key selling points in the hefty tri-lense rear camera array.
At the top, you’ve got a 50 MP five-piece lens main shooter, with a Sony LYT-600 sensor and the benefit of optical image stabilisation. Below is a 50 MP telephoto with 2x optical and 5x hybrid zoom, as well as an 8 MP ultrawide.
While it’s an impressive array, one downside of the lens configuration is that the handset wobbles a lot when you rest it on a flat surface and type on the screen.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a 50 MP five-piece selfie camera at the front, opting for a punch-hole design rather than relying on a notch.
Power up the handset and you’re presented with a bright and vivid 2412 × 1080 AMOLED flexible display. It offers 10-bit colour with a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with up to 120 Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling.
The screen supports a peak brightness of 600 nits indoors and 1,200 nits outdoors, and thankfully the auto-brightness setting isn’t too aggressive.
By default, the screen temperature looks a little cool, but you can enable Adaptive Tone to adjust the colour temperature on the fly, as well as configure the screen colour mode with more flexibility than you get on many Android handsets.
At the bottom of the handset, you’ve got a USB-C port, alongside a dual SIM port (but no eSIM) which can also take a microSD card. There’s no old-school headphone jack, but you do get an IR blaster so you can use the handset as an infrared remote.
Oppo Reno 12 Pro specifications
| Display size | 6.7 inches |
| Display resolution | 2412 x 1080 pixel, 394 PPI |
| Display technology | Flexible AMOLED |
| Bands | 5G sub 6 (dual nano SIM) |
| Chipset | MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy 8-core |
| GPU | Arm Mali-G615 |
| Rear cameras | Main: 50MP; f/1.8; FOV 79°; 5P lens; AF; OIS supported |
| Ultra-wide angle: 8MP; f/2.2; FOV 112°; 5P lens | |
| Telephoto: 50MP; f/2.0; FOV 90°; 5P lens; AF supported | |
| Front camera | 50MP, f/2.0, FOV 90°; 5P lens; AF supported |
| RAM | 12 GB LPDDR4X@2133MHz |
| Onboard storage | 512 GB UFS 3.1 |
| microSD slot | Yes |
| Charging | USB-C |
| Battery | 4880mAh/19.09Wh |
| Fast charging | SUPERVOOC SUPERVOOC 2.0 VOOC 3.0 PD2.0 (9 V, 1.5 A) |
| Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi 6 2×2 MIMO |
| Bluetooth | 5.4 SBC, AAC, aptX-HD, LDAC, and LHDC |
| Operating system | ColorOS 14.1 (based on Android 14) |
| Security | Fingerprint, Face Unlock |
| Ruggedness | IP65 |
| Dimensions | 61.5mm W, 74.8mm H, 7.4 mm D (7.45 mm Nebula Silver |
| Weight | 180g (Nebula Black) 181g (Nebula Silver) |
| Colours | Nebula Black Nebula Silver |
| Price | $999 RRP |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Official website | Oppo Australia |
Features
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro runs Android 14, customised as usual with Oppo’s own ColorOS UI. Considering that ColorOS has long had an iOS-esque look and feel, it’s little surprise that one of the key updates with ColorOS 14 is “Aqua Dynamics” notifications which dynamically resize between capsules, bubbles and panels.
Oppo says the handset will receive three Android OS updates and four years of security patches.
Under the bonnet, the Reno 12 Pro packs the energy-efficient, octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy chip, designed more for stamina than performance. It’s accompanied by 512 GB of storage and 12 GB of RAM.
It’s a sub-6 5G handset, as you’d expect these days, supporting dual nano-SIM but surprisingly not eSIM. Oppo’s AI-powered LinkBoost offers smart network selection to reduce dropouts.
As expected, the Reno 12 Pro is heavy on AI features, similar to most modern Android handsets.
AI assistance is primarily around photo editing and image manipulation. AI Eraser removes unwanted people from photos, AI Best Face pulls together the best options from multiple group shots and AI Clear Face enhances the faces of up to 10 people in a shot.
Then you’ve got generative image creation in the form of AI Studio, transforming photos into stylised digital avatars.
When it comes to content, the handset features an AI Speak smart screen reader, along with AI Summary which takes advantage of Google Gemini to summarise webpages. These features are built into the floating sidebar so you can easily access them while browsing.
The screen reader sounds a little robotic but offers more life-like inflections than your typical monotone screen reader. The summary feature breaks articles into useful bullet points, although the fact it’s typed out of the screen slower than you can read is a little frustrating.
You’ve also got AI recording, which provides written summaries of audio files, and AI Clear Voice assists with sound quality on phone calls.
The phone packs a 5000 mAh battery which can easily go well over 24 hours before recharging, thanks to the energy-efficient MediaTek chipset.
When you do need to top up, the handset can take advantage of 65-watt SUPERVOOC2 wired charging, using the supplied bulky AC charger. This should get you from 1 to 100 per cent charge in roughly 46 minutes, or an extra day of usage in as little as 10 minutes.
The battery durability is rated at four years, a stat that handset manufacturers generally don’t cite. There’s no support for wireless charging, which is a surprise at this price point considering that people are coming to expect it.
Quality
The GeekBench 6 benchmarks tell a bit of a disappointing story, even allowing for the fact that the Reno 12 Pro sports a mid-range MediaTek powerplant rather than a top-of-the-line Snapdragon.
The phone scores 824 on the CPU single-core test and 2,037 on multi-core, lower than what we’ve seen from MediaTek chips in earlier Oppo devices like the Reno 10 5G and the Reno 11 F 5G. An OpenCL score of 2,368 is about par for the course.
| Device | CPU single-core | CPU multi-core | GPU (OpenCL) |
| Google Pixel 8a | 1,510 | 4,232 | 5,754 |
| Motorola Edge 40 | 1,130 | 3,725 | 4,605 |
| Samsung Galaxy A55 | 1,153 | 3,428 | 3,086 |
| Motorola Edge 50 Fusion | 1,016 | 2,937 | 1,802 |
| Samsung Galaxy A35 | 1,011 | 2,897 | 3,001 |
| Samsung Galaxy A54 | 991 | 2,797 | 3,000 |
| Oppo Reno 10 5G | 963 | 2,444 | 2,387 |
| Oppo Reno 11 F 5G | 905 | 2,358 | 2,372 |
| Oppo Reno 12 Pro | 824 | 2,037 | 2,368 |
Such middling grunt is the compromise for that energy-efficient MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy chip, meaning the performance falls well short of similarly priced rivals from the likes of Google and Samsung. That said, it’s still more than enough power to cope with day-to-day tasks, especially with 12 GB of RAM at hand.
When it comes to photography, the main rear 50 MP lens certainly holds its own, producing sharp and vivid yet slightly harsh images. The ultrawide 8 MP lens is a good match image-wise, even though the drop in resolution is quite noticeable.
The 2x optical zoom comes in handy for portraits, producing impressive results with good boken. The quality is assisted by the fact that the default retouching isn’t too over-the-top.
Switching to the selfie camera, once again it’s good to see that the default beautification settings aren’t as brutal as some handsets – ensuring you still look life-like. There are a surprising number of granular settings, letting you adjust everything from eye size and face length to hairline and cheekbones – although some of them don’t seem to make any noticeable difference.
Who is the Oppo Reno 12 Pro for?
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is for those focused primarily on camera features, particularly if you’re looking for plenty of granular settings when it comes to portraits and selfies. If you’re looking for a solid Android all-rounder there are more attractive options at this price point, especially if you’re not prepared to sacrifice grunt for battery life.
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