Starting at $779 in Australia for the 42mm size, the Apex 4 is tough, made using titanium, and it’s designed to provide super-accurate GPS data, so I can imagine using it for my next ultra marathon. Depending on which size watch you pick, Coros estimates up to 65 hours of battery life when using GPS, which is impressive.
Taking it out of the box for the first time, it’s a sleek wearable with a traditional circular design and an easily readable watch face. Stay tuned for my thoughts after I’ve taken it for a run.
Oftentimes, we review things because they are a priority of our editors, or because they are being pushed by suppliers. But I approached FiiO for this one. I was intrigued by the DM15 R2R portable CD player. I’d previously been playing with the DM13, but it became ‘EOL’ – end of life, as it’s called – before I completed the review. And replaced by the DM15 R2R.
You see, could it be that in addition to being a portable CD player, it might also serve as a starter CD ‘deck’ for a young person keen on getting into physical digital media?
Why CDs? $1 or $2 each at a charity shop is one good reason!
Not bad in one compact, fairly lightweight unit. Note, as far as portable CD players go, it’s not the smallest and most light in weight. Some are barely bigger than a CD. This one adopts the form, looking from the top, of a near square, 144.2mm deep (150.6mm including the rotary volume control) by 137mm wide, and it’s 25.4mm thick. The top is a door which is held closed by magnets near the front. It weighs 473.7 grams empty. Add 17 grams for a typical CD.
The top opens fully, allowing easy access, and a shallow recess under the CD allows you to get a thumb on the side of the disc to help pull it out from the spindle clip. You are careful not to touch the CD surface, aren’t you? Yes, they’re quite robust, but not entirely impervious to damage. I have several CDs that I bought forty years ago, and they still work perfectly … because I take just a little care. The FiiO DM15 R2R helps, also, by the spindle clip holding firmly enough for operation, but not so hard that you have to bend the disc to get it off.
Image: Stephen Dawson.
On the front edge of the unit are control buttons, switches and the volume knob, the two headphone outputs and the display. On the back are the balanced 4.4mm line output, the combo 3.5mm unbalanced line, coaxial S/PDIF and optical S/PDIF digital outputs.
Also on the back are switches for ESP mode and Desktop mode and two USB Type-C connections. ESP – Electronic Shock Protection – buffers the digital audio being read from the CD so that, in the case of physical shock, playback can continue uninterrupted while the mechanism finds its place again. FiiO doesn’t say how long the buffer is, but the previous model was specified at 60 seconds.
Image: Stephen Dawson.
The Desktop mode makes the unit run only from external power, plugged into a USB socket. In that mode, the battery only charges if it’s at zero. The idea is to cut down on charge/discharge cycles, providing a longer healthy lifespan for the battery.
Bluetooth (v.5.4) headphone connectivity supports SBC (of course), aptX, aptX HD and aptX Low Latency, but not AAC.
The printed quick start guide included in the box is rather more informative than such things usually are, and quite elegantly written. The main manual is in the form of an online FAQ, which covers everything quite well. There doesn’t seem to be a downloadable PDF version of the full manual. There is some amusing terminology. On the Parameters page (i.e. specifications), there’s reference to a “custom bald head”. This seems to be a context-free machine translation of the Chinese for “custom optical head”. (I had to ask Grok to help me with that one!)
R2R – what’s that all about?
R2R is a hot new technology which has appeared in a lot of CD and DAC products in recent years. Well, it’s new and … old. R2R uses a resistor ladder to turn the discrete numbers in a digital signal into the discrete analogue voltage levels. After that, done properly, the analogue signal is low-pass filtered to produce a smooth analogue output ready to be sent to an amplifier.
Resistor networks were also used in the early days as well, such as in the Sony CDP-101, the first consumer CD player. But there the arrangement called for impossibly precise resistor accuracy because the resistor values had to be in exact proportion, at up to 65,000:1, just for 16 bits. Various technologies were developed to avoid this problem. The most common is delta-sigma conversion. This turns the multibit PCM stream into a higher frequency, lower bit-depth stream, which is far easier to decode. This is not to be sneered at. There are standalone DACs costing many thousands of dollars that use this technology.
Lately, it has become fashionable to return to the multibit voltage divider concept. But a new, and very clever, arrangement has been developed so that only two values are required in the resistor ladder. One value is double the other. That allows something like the accuracy of delta-sigma chips with far less mathematical manipulation of the signal. Quite a few audiophiles seem to prefer the sound of such DACs.
Playing CDs with the FiiO DM15 R2R
I used the FiiO DM15 R2R in all its many ways. That is, I used the optical output, the coaxial digital output, the single-ended line output, the balanced line output, both the unbalanced and balanced headphone outputs, and, of course, Bluetooth. That last with noise-cancelling Sony over-ear headphones, Bluetooth loudspeakers, and with a connection to a high-quality Bluetooth receiving device connected to my main stereo. A switch on the front panel selects between the output modes.
In terms of usability, it was all there. I played several dozens of CDs, including some of those aforementioned four-decade-old ones. All worked perfectly … except for one. I’ll come to that.
The front panel display is tiny – 25mm diameter – and shows orange lettering and graphics on a black background. It shows three lines: volume level, playback mode (repeat, random, etc.), battery level at the top; play/pause/stop, EQ setting and output mode on the bottom line. In larger font, the middle line shows information about the content. With a CD that’s track number and time in track. With a digital input via USB, that’s digital audio format (PCM or DSD) and sampling frequency.
Image: Stephen Dawson.
The press buttons on the front for things like play/pause, stop, skip and so on are tiny! But the DM15 R2R comes with a small IR remote control, which makes things much easier. This works well from two or three metres away, so that helps very much in the unit’s Desktop function.
What I loved, though, was the rotary volume control. To be clear, it’s digital, but you can spin it rapidly to raise or lower the volume.
That damned exception
The CD player would not play one track on one of my CDs. I’ve had the CD for approximately forever, and it has never been a problem. And indeed, I checked with my Cambridge Audio CD transport, my Oppo and Panasonic Blu-ray players and a couple of computer disc transports, and it was fine.
The disc was Henry Purcell’s Music for Queen Mary (Erato ECD 88071). The first nine tracks are a selection of lovely, jaunty birthday tunes for the good queen’s birthday in 1694, while the last seven are sombre ones for her funeral the following year. When “See Nature, Rejoicing”, the final birthday track, finishes, the display briefly shows “10” for the following funeral March (famous from A Clockwork Orange), and then instantly skips to track 11. It doesn’t search or struggle; it just skips. Fortunately, the March is played again as the last track, still…
I hate puzzles like this. Was there something special about that particular CD? I grabbed another 17-track CD from my shelf and played it. No problem with track 10. I used the freeware ImgBurn to clone the Purcell CD onto a CD-R. It played the March at track 10 without the slightest problem. I stopped it partway through and popped in the original CD. The player restarts the last-played disc at the position where it was stopped. The cloning was sufficiently good that the FiiO thought that the original disc was the CD-R copy and started playing in the middle of track 10 at the place I’d stopped it. When I skipped back to the start of the track, it resumed its previous behaviour: showing “10” briefly than skipping straight to “11”.
So, I suppose that was a one-off to do with some physical aspect of the disc which other players ignore. Or perhaps it’s the firmware. The behaviour was identical with the DM13.
On the good side, the electronic shock protection seemed to work well. At a couple of points, I did manage to interrupt play, but only because I was shaking the unit so vigorously the CD popped off the spindle!
Back to basics: listening with headphones
Let’s face it, most people are going to plug headphones or earphones into one of the front sockets and never bother with the other functions of the unit. So I did a lot of listening in just that way. The IEMs (in-ear monitors) I used were: Sennheiser IE 300, Audiofly AF-180 Mk 2 and Final Audio B3. For headphones, I used Focal Elear, Sennheiser HD 535, Oppo PM3, FiiO JT7 (review forthcoming) and Final Audio D8000 models. Except for the PM3s, the headphones are all open-back models, the first two dynamic and the last three planar magnetic.
To make sure I wasn’t imagining things too much, I also plugged the balanced 4.4mm line output of the DM15 R2R into the 4.4mm line input of an iFi Zen CAN headphone amplifier (which I enthusiastically reviewed for Australian HI-FI four years ago), which I level-balanced as closely as possible. And then from time to time, I switched the headphones from one to the other. Especially the Final Audio D800 headphones, which I used for final, critical listening.
So, what did I hear?
Image: Stephen Dawson.
I started with the CD-EP Bastard Son/Holiday from Australian group George. As a totally independent recording from 2000, at the start of the period when, with a computer and a few thousand dollars of gear, one could record at home decent sound, this is a lovely, if naïve, disc. It’s that naivety – and the great songs – that make this a good test CD. There’s little dynamic compression, little overall processing. And with the FiiO DM15 R2R, there was a first-class transparency to all of this. I could hear all that was in the recording, without qualification.
So I turned it up, especially the track “Holiday” which brought to the attention of the world Katie Noonan’s amazing voice. Jumping the headphones between the Zen and the DM15 R2R revealed almost no difference. If you demanded that I make a choice, I’d say that the ifi ZEN CAN was very slightly cleaner, keeping things more orderly at very high levels. Maybe. There was almost nothing in it.
And remember, throughout this, the FiiO DM15 R2R was running off its battery. The ifi ZEN CAN was running off the mains, using the optional low-noise power supply.
For a very different style of music, I went to the 1971 King Crimson album Islands (not the so-called HDCD version). This had me winding up the volume to 88/99. “The Sailor’s Tale” includes a unique Fripp guitar solo over drums that are recorded not as mere accompaniments, but integral parts of the music. When they fully kick in, the full body of the music is revealed, unimpeded by the headphone amplifier within the DM15 R2R. The CD player was entirely comfortable in this delivery.
Which brings me to Lorde’s latest album, Virgin. I popped it in after the King Crimson without remembering to reduce the volume level, so it was still at 88/100. I imagine most of us are aware that recent (2025 in this case) releases tend to be normalised to a higher level than old stuff.
But Lorde remained perfectly clean (albeit a little sibilant at times – but that’s the recording, not the playback). Around a minute and a bit into the first track, the bass was not only powerful in my ears, but it vibrated the driver on the D8000 headphones so much that my right ear – the pinnae – was vibrating in sympathy!
Image: Stephen Dawson.
Great sound! But I purchased that CD – the almost completely transparent version of it – specifically to check compatibility, in light of recent suggestions that this disc might cause problems. Fully compatible it was. And a lot of fun. With the transparent lid of the DM15 R2R and the transparent CD, I could see the movement of the optical head… or should I say the bald head!
Another change of pace: Schubert’s String Quintet in C, featuring Pablo Casals (and Paul Szabo) on cello, recorded back in 1961. This stunning recording features an immediacy lacking from the many other versions I’ve purchased over the years. I moved to the Focal Elear headphones for this one. They’re a little brighter than the Final Audio headphones, but still nicely balanced. Being dynamic rather than planar magnetic, they have a variable impedance across the frequency spectrum. Everything, absolutely everything, was there. Prior to each movement, there’s a brief moment of the quintet prepping themselves, and I might as well have been there. The two violins were sweet, and the cello pair propelled the work forward. The ambience of the recording venue was fully delivered.
Finally, I whipped out my twin CD of Vladimir Ashkenazy performing with the LSO the five Prokofiev piano concertos. I particularly love the fifth. As with much of Prokofiev, it has an air of, well, insanity, but a madness that resolves. Again – and I switched frequently between the ifi ZEN CAN and the FiiO DM15 R2R’s own output – the dynamics were first class, as was the tonal balance. A brief surge of volume to the full 99 max kept the control intact, with inaudible distortion. Very brief, though, because the sound was thunderingly loud. (The iFi ZEN CAN went even louder. But I didn’t push that too hard out of concern for my hearing.)
Measurements
My measurement rig is only for the unbalanced output of gadgets. FiiO mentions a 2 x 1150mW output. That turns out to be balanced into a 32 ohms load, something I couldn’t measure.
But I did measure the unbalanced outputs. Into a 300-ohm load, the unit delivered 55mW per channel, which was way more than the 35mW claimed by FiiO. That means it could deliver 17dB higher than the sensitivity rating of high impedance headphones.
Into 16 ohms, it managed slightly more than 600mW per channel with the 100 hertz and 1kHz test frequencies, and 210mW with 10kHz. In the real world, that 10kHz figure is way more than required to support the 600mW at the lower frequencies. And that 600mW means 27dB above headphones’ sensitivity rating. That also exceeds FiiO’s 575mW specification.
I measured the output impedance at 1.5 ohms. FiiO specifies it at less than 1 ohm, but either way it’s low enough that it has minimal impact on the frequency balance of the sound when using dynamic headphones.
The FiiO DM15 R2R as a CD Transport
Let’s say that you have a high-quality digital-to-analogue converter connected to your stereo, or perhaps it has a nice one built into the amplifier. Why not put the FiiO DM15 R2R into desktop mode, select S/PDIF output and use optical or coaxial digital audio for a perfect connection?
After all, that’s the job of a CD transport: grab the coding from the surface of the CD and turn it into a clean PCM stream that perfectly matches the stream originally encoded onto the CD.
Well, that’s the usual way of doing it, but FiiO has done something quite different.
Normally, I check this by recording the digital output of a full track (usually “Solid Rock” from Dire Straits’ Making Movies, the 1996 remaster) to my computer via a professional digital audio interface.
Is the recording perfect? To check, I digitally subtract a digital rip of the track from this recorded one. If only an unending sequence of zeros is left, we’d have a match.
But there was no point doing this because the recording from the digital output was obviously different. A quick measurement showed it was some two decibels lower in level. Obviously, I did a bunch of tests (such as recording the output from my CD transport) to check that the setup was okay. It was.
What was going on?
It turned out that the output stream from the FiiO DM15 R2R was not 44.1kHz, 16-bit. It was 44.1kHz, 24-bit! The unit was converting the 16-bit number space (65,000+ levels) to 24-bit (16.7+ million levels) and lowering the level a bit to provide a bit more headroom. It ought to be able to do that with absolutely no loss of resolution.
But it was doing more than that. The Dire Straits track suffers a little from that 1990s remastering, which was the early days of the loudness wars. To make music sound louder on, say, a jukebox or the radio, they had to raise the average level. But that often meant that the peaks had to be dynamically compressed. Digital audio has a hard limit at the top.
A close comparison of the original digital from a rip and the output of the FiiO DM15 R2R showed that where a couple of samples were right at the top in the 16-bit original, indicating a crushing of the dynamic range, the new 24-bit version would attempt to reconstruct a peak which may have been squeezed out by processing.
For example, here’s one such segment in the original:
And here’s the version served up by the DM15 R2R:
I’m ambivalent about this. The audio purist in me says: just serve up the data, damn it, to the DAC. After all, you might have a DAC that processes the signal better than the DM15 R2R.
On the other hand, this might actually improve the sound with the great majority of DACs.
The main advantage of this is reducing what are called “intersample overs”. The explanation is highly technical, but what it boils down to is where you have those samples up near the hard limits of the CD, a delta-sigma DAC, which boosts the sampling frequency, may well generate illegal values, introducing distortion.
I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to use the FiiO DM15 R2R as CD transport to feed a high-quality DAC. I checked it with an insane test signal (11,025kHz sine wave, -2dBFS). Instead of hitting a brick wall at what would have been 0dBFS, the digital output was a perfect sine wave that peaked at 1dB higher than the former 0dBFS. That’s way worse than a worst-case scenario.
And this whole thing gives us a bit of an insight into what it’s doing to the signal internally before feeding things to its analogue outputs. I checked the analogue sine wave output with this test signal on an oscilloscope, and it was perfect.
Pre-emphasis
One final note on performance. Back in the early days of the CD, engineers were worried that with the hardware then available, there might be excessive noise. So the CD was specified to optionally include “pre-emphasis”. That was a significant boost to the treble prior to the analogue sound being converted to digital. The relevant CD carried flags in its data section marking the tracks which were so treated. On playback, the CD player would see the flag and apply a “de-emphasis” filter to reverse the boost. That reduction in treble would reduce any noise as well.
The FiiO DM15 R2R does not see the flag, nor does it pass it through to any downstream DAC to act upon. So if you have one of the very few early CDs with pre-emphasis, it will likely sound bright. This is a widespread issue with modern equipment.
The FiiO DM15 R2R as a CD ripper
The CD ripping function, though, was absolutely bit-perfect. I ripped the Dire Straits CD to a USB stick and checked out “Solid Rock”. It was a bit-perfect match for my existing CD rip, and a recording from my Cambridge Audio CD transport, and the online TIDAL version, and the online (now lossless!) Spotify version. So that shows that the CD mechanism is perfectly capable of reading the contents of the CD without error.
You can’t select specific tracks: you start it, and the whole CD gets ripped, with tracks titled TRK1.WAV, TRK2.WAV, etc, into a RIP folder. The process operates in regular play time, and you can listen as it’s going. If you rip another CD onto the same memory stick, its tracks are titled TRK1~0.WAV, TRK2~0.WAV, etc.
Incidentally, when I ripped the Purcell disc, all seemingly worked fine, including the Funeral March. But that particular track turned out to be just 13/1000s of a second long, containing nothing but noise.
At this point, I will note that we at GadgetGuy do not encourage CD ripping.
Oh, one caution: do not use the USB-A to USB-C adaptor with your USB stick. It doesn’t work. It only seems to work for using with phones. I used a third-party adaptor with no problems.
The FiiO DM15 R2R as a DAC
So, if FiiO has included a fancy DAC in the DM15 R2R, why limit it to CDs? Indeed, using the supplied cable, you can plug it into a USB-C phone and suddenly get great sound out of the phone. Or you can plug it into a computer.
I tested it with my Samsung Galaxy S25 phone and a Windows 11 notebook computer. It worked brilliantly with both. Initially, I didn’t bother downloading and installing the FiiO drivers on the computer. I just told my player software (JRiver Media Center) to output to the FiiO via WASAPI, and everything worked perfectly, up to 384kHz PCM and DSD128 (via DoP protocols). If you install the FiiO drivers, you can send DSD natively rather than via DoP, which allows decoding of DSD256. If you have such files. I have three for testing, but it’s really hardly worth the bother.
Who is the FiiO DM15 R2R CD player for?
The FiiO DM15 R2R CD player is incredibly versatile. It played everything apart from one track on one CD. It is comfortable in both its portable and in-system modes. If you’re using it at home in desktop mode, you’ll keep the internal battery in good nick for years.
If you’re getting into CDs, this unit provides excellent sound out of the box when matched with good headphones, and can be the main CD source for a quality in-home audio system.
FiiO DM15 R2R CD player
With the extremely versatile FiiO DM15 RDR CD player, op shops become a treasure trove of great and affordable music.
Features
10
Value for money
9
Performance
10
Ease of use
9
Design
9.6
Positives
Incredibly versatile
Negatives
On balance, I’d probably prefer the digital output didn’t process up to 24 bits… but it’s close!
Even with a monster battery, the Oppo Reno 15 F doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd.
These days, you don’t need to pay top dollar for an Android flagship in order to get a great handset. Mid-range competition is very tough in the $500 to $1,000 bracket, producing some impressive all-rounders.
Enter the $679 Oppo Reno 15 F, taking a decent price jump from the last $599 Reno F model, but still considerably cheaper than the last $899 standard Reno. While it strikes a balance on price, the Reno 15 F really struggles to hit the sweet spot in terms of features and performance.
With a 6.57-inch display, the Oppo Reno 15 F stands reasonably tall but not so wide as to be unmanageable. It sticks with Oppo’s move away from slightly bevelled edges and curved screens, in favour of a more utilitarian flat-edge aluminium frame which could easily be mistaken for an Apple iPhone.
Apart from the button layout, the Oppo Reno 15 F looks a lot like an iPhone. Image: Adam Turner.
Oppo can be a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to bringing its smartphone ranges and variants to Australia, so there’s some explaining to do. For example, the Reno 14 range completely bypassed us, so the Reno 15 F is actually the local successor to the Reno 13 F.
To make things more complicated, Oppo’s Australian Reno 15 lineup has changed compared to previous years, so it’s difficult to make direct comparisons.
The standard Reno 15 isn’t coming to Australia, but the 15 F has shrunk, so it’s roughly the same size as the old standard Reno 13. At the same time, the Reno 15 Pro has also shrunk to make way for the new 6.78-inch 15 Pro Max, which we won’t see locally.
All of that aside, the Oppo Reno 15 F’s design is by-the-numbers, with the power button on the right sitting comfortably under your thumb, or left index finger for southpaws, and the volume buttons above. The fingerprint reader is built into the screen, lighting up as soon as you pick up the handset to make it easy to find, but personally, I’d rather it be built into the power button.
There’s no sign of the Apple-esque extra buttons adorning the Oppo Find X9 Pro, such as the touch-sensitive Quick Button for launching the camera on the right, or a customisable Action button on the left.
The Reno 15 F comes in a choice of two colours, an understated matte Twilight Black and a more striking Aurora Blue (pictured), with a rear etched texture which shimmers like the northern lights. In return, the Aurora Blue model is a fraction thicker and heavier.
The Aurora Blue Oppo Reno 15 F (and 15 Pro) shimmer when they catch the light. Image: Adam Turner.
Across the bottom of the handset, you’ll find a USB-C port and SIM card slot, supporting dual nano-SIM, eSIM and a microSD. There’s no sign of an old-school 3.5 mm audio jack.
Fire up the Reno 15 F, and you’re presented with a decent 2372×1080-pixel AMOLED display (leaving Australian OLED-lovers regretting that we don’t get the standard Reno 15).
The screen offers 10-bit colour with a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with up to 120 Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. It delivers a peak brightness of 600 nits indoors and 1,200 nits outdoors.
That’s way down from 1,800 nits outdoors on the Reno 15 Pro, also meaning the 15 F doesn’t let you enjoy Netflix with the benefit of HDR 10+, for extra detail in the brightest highlights and deepest shadows.
Flip the handset over, and you’ll find a triple lens rear camera array, with the same specs as the old Reno 13 F.
There’s a 50 MP five-piece lens main shooter with the benefit of optical image stabilisation. Alongside is an 8 MP ultrawide and a 2 MP macro, which might disappoint those hoping instead for a telephoto lens like on the 15 Pro. To be fair, a telephoto lens with optical zoom isn’t common at this price point.
Around the front, you’ve got an upgraded 50 MP ultrawide selfie camera, opting for a punch-hole design rather than relying on a notch.
Oppo Reno 15 F specifications and price
Display size
6.57-inch
Display resolution
2372×1080 pixel, 397 ppi
Display technology
AMOLED
Corning Gorilla Glass
120 Hz max refresh rate
240 Hz max touch sampling rate
10-bit colour, 100% DCI-P3
600 nits brightness, 1400 nits high brightness mode
Bands
2G GSM
3G WCDMA
4G LTE FDD/TDD
5G Sub-6
Chipset
8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 Mobile Platform
The Oppo Reno 15 F runs Android 16, customised as usual with Oppo’s own ColorOS UI, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s iOS.
As is the trend, the ColorOS comes with plenty of AI-powered features, primarily around multimedia editing and the smart assistant. Oppo also strives to play nicely with Apple devices, such as AirDrop-like functionality, which kicks in when you place it alongside an iPhone.
The handset will receive five major Android OS updates and six years of security patches, which is good these days for a mid-range handset, even if it falls short of the seven years promised for the Samsung and Google flagships.
When it comes to connectivity, it’s a sub-6 5G handset, but it lags behind the times with Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 5.
Under the bonnet is an ageing mid-range 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 Mobile Platform, also carried over from the old Reno 13 F. It’s accompanied by stock standard 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of onboard storage.
Powering all this is a massive 6500 mAh battery, which has long been a standout feature of the Reno F variants. As a result, the Reno 15 F should easily go 36 hours before recharging, perhaps longer if you nurse it.
When you do need a top-up, the handset can take advantage of SUPERVOOC wired fast charging, using the supplied bulky AC charger, but not wireless charging.
Quality
Geekbench 6 results are disappointing considering the price tag, at 935 single-core, 2,745 multi-core and 1,537 GPU (OpenCL). It’s enough for day-to-day tasks, but is outgunned by the similarly priced Samsung Galaxy A56 and Motorola Edge 60 Fusion.
When it comes to photography, the 50 MP main shooter produces run-of-the-mill results, looking reasonably detailed but a bit dull.
Photos taken by the Reno 15 F (left) aren’t as vibrant or detailed as the Reno 15 Pro (right). Images: Adam Turner.
Likewise with the selfie camera, which struggles to pick up finer lines of a 50-something face, even when the default retouching isn’t too over-the-top.
Selfies look decent on the Reno 15 F (left), but you get nicer results with the Reno 15 Pro (right). Images: Adam Turner.
Meanwhile, the 2 MP macro lens is very disappointing, and it takes a lot of work to get even mediocre shots. Move the phone any closer, and it looks worse.
The macro camera. Image: Adam Turner.
Who is the Oppo Reno 15 F for?
Fantastic battery life aside, there’s not much to help the Oppo Reno 15 F stand out from the competition. The lack of firepower compared to rivals is to be expected from Oppo, but it fails to balance this out with the great camera quality that you might expect from the Reno range.
Oppo Reno 15 F
Giant battery aside, the Oppo Reno 15 F struggles to stand out in the cut-throat mid-range Android market.
As such, it’s interesting to see Oppo dial things back with its new mid-to-high-end Reno contender, aimed at Android lovers who believe that size isn’t everything.
The Reno Pro range kept getting larger, peaking at a hefty 6.83 inches, but Oppo has decided to rein things in and scale back the new Oppo Reno 15 Pro to a more manageable 6.32 inches.
It’s worth mentioning that Oppo’s Reno 15 Pro has actually shrunk to make way for the new 6.78-inch Pro Max, bringing Oppo’s spread of handsets closer to that of its rivals. Unfortunately, the hefty Reno 15 Pro Max isn’t coming to Australia, nor is the standard Reno 15, as we only get the Reno 15 Pro and Reno 15 F.
It’s also important to note that the entire Reno 14 range completely bypassed Australia, so the 15 Pro is actually the local successor to the 13 Pro.
By sacrificing a little screen real estate compared to the 6.83-inch Reno 13 Pro, the 15 Pro is less unwieldy than its super-tall predecessors. The 19.5:9 aspect ratio ensures that the handset is not too wide and cumbersome.
The Reno 15 Pro’s aluminium frame sticks with Oppo’s move to abandon slightly curved edges in favour of an aluminium frame with dead straight lines that could easily be mistaken for an Apple iPhone.
It comes in a choice of two colours, an understated matte Dusk Black (pictured) and a more striking Aurora Blue with a rear etched texture which shimmers like the northern lights. In return, the Aurora Blue model is a fraction thicker and heavier.
The Reno 15 Pro sticks with the tried-and-true form factor of a power button on the right, close to the centre, and the volume buttons above. Surprisingly, it hasn’t inherited the Apple-esque touch-sensitive Quick Button from Oppo’s flagship Find X range, for easily launching the camera app, or the customisable Action button.
Button configuration aside, the Oppo Reno 15 Pro looks a lot like an iPhone. Image: Adam Turner.
When the handset isn’t as tall, it’s not as much of a stretch to reach down to the onscreen fingerprint reader with your thumb, but personally, I’d rather see it built into the power button.
Fire up the phone, and you’re faced with a bright and vivid 2640 × 1216 pixel AMOLED display. The trade-off for the reduced screen size is a boost in sharpness, up to an impressive 460 pixels per inch.
The screen offers 10-bit colour with a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with up to 120 Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. It supports a peak brightness of 600 nits indoors and an improved 1,800 nits outdoors.
As a result of that extra brightness, you can watch Netflix with the benefit of HDR 10+, but not Dolby Vision, for extra detail in the brightest highlights and deepest shadows. The Reno 15 Pro can also shoot video in HDR.
At the bottom of the handset, you’ve got a USB-C port, alongside a dual nano-SIM port and the benefit of eSIM, but no microSD card support. There’s also no old-school headphone jack.
Oppo Reno 15 Pro specifications and price
Display size
6.32-inch
Display resolution
2640×1216 pixel, 460 ppi
Display technology
AMOLED
Corning Gorilla Glass 7i
120 Hz max refresh rate
240 Hz max touch sampling rate
10-bit colour, 100% DCI-P3
600 nits brightness, 1800 nits high brightness mode
The Oppo Reno 15 Pro runs Android 16, customised as usual with Oppo’s own ColorOS UI, which has always felt a lot like Apple’s iOS. You have to deal with a little preloaded social media and online shopping bloatware.
One of the key updates with ColorOS 16 is smoother motion to support the OS’ dynamic effects, such as translucent visuals. You also get a decent dollop of AI-powered features, primarily around multimedia editing and the smart assistant.
Oppo has also put a lot of work into playing nicely with Apple devices, including AirDrop-like functionality, which kicks in when you place it alongside an iPhone.
Oppo says the handset will receive five major Android OS updates and six years of security patches, which is pretty good these days for a high-end handset, but doesn’t quite match the seven-year deals for Samsung and Google flagships.
As you’d expect with the Pro moniker, one of the Reno 15 Pro’s big selling points is a triple-lens rear camera array. Flip the handset over, and you’ll find a 200 MP six-piece lens primary shooter with the benefit of optical image stabilisation.
Alongside is a 50 MP ultrawide and a 50 MP telephoto with 3.5x optical and 18x digital zoom. A 3.5x telephoto lens is better than what you’ll typically find at this price point. People’s priorities differ, but some will find that a telephoto lens is more useful than a macro lens.
Around the front, you’ve got a 50 MP ultrawide selfie camera, opting for a punch-hole design rather than relying on a notch.
You’ve also got the benefit of AI Flash Photography 2.0, with dual rear flashes delivering softer, more natural lighting, while the new front screen flash helps with selfies.
The Oppo Reno 15 Pro’s triple camera array punches above its weight. Image: Adam Turner.
Under the bonnet, the handset packs the energy-efficient yet powerful octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 8450 chipset. It’s accompanied by a generous 512 GB of storage and 12 GB of RAM.
When it comes to connectivity, it’s a sub-6 5G handset with the benefit of dual nano-SIM and eSIM. You can take advantage of Bluetooth 5.4 with a good spread of audio codecs, but it hasn’t joined the Wi-Fi 7 club and leaves you relying on Wi-Fi 6.
The phone packs a hefty 6200 mAh battery which, combined with the smaller screen, ensures that it should get you through a long day. When you do need to top up, the handset can take advantage of 80-watt SUPERVOOC wired charging, using the supplied bulky AC charger. You miss out on wireless charging, which is disapppointing at this price point.
Quality
Geekbench 6 results tell a slightly underwhelming story for a mid-to-high-end handset, scoring 1,555 single-core, 6,330 multi-core and 11,828 OpenCL. It’s outgunned by the standard-issue Apple iPhone 17, Samsung Galaxy S25 and Google Pixel 10, which each sell for roughly the same price. 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, that 200 MP primary shooter sounds impressive, but we all know by now that pixels aren’t everything. Thankfully, it produces sharp and vivid images that don’t look too overblown and do a good job with tricky lighting conditions and low-light environments.
It’s worth mentioning that the Reno 15 Pro’s photos below look a lot more vivid when viewed on my MacBook Pro, which can make the most of the Reno 15 Pro’s Extended Dynamic Range photography. Here, they don’t look much better than the shots taken on the Reno 15 F.
On the left, the Oppo Reno 15 Pro’s main shooter captures deeper and more detailed photos than the base Reno 15 (right). Image: Adam Turner.
The 120x super zoom also does an impressive job, even though Oppo doesn’t draw as much attention to it as with the Find X9 Pro.
At a range of 150 metres, the AI-assisted 120x zoom does a fair job of guestimating what’s on this sales board. Image: Adam Turner.
Around the front, the 2x optical zoom comes in handy for portraits, producing impressive results with good bokeh. The quality is assisted by the fact that the default retouching isn’t too over-the-top.
Like the main rear camera, the Reno 15 Pro (left) captures more colour and depth than the Reno 15 (right). Image: Adam Turner.
Who is the Oppo Reno 15 Pro for?
The Oppo Reno 15 Pro has a lot going for it if you’re looking for great cameras, particularly a telephoto lens, in a relatively compact handset with a decent battery life. Just keep in mind that you’re sacrificing some grunt compared to what you can get for roughly the same price elsewhere.
Oppo Reno 15 Pro
Squeezing impressive cameras into a compact body, the Oppo Reno 15 Pro is quite a handful.
