Oppo Reno 12 Pro Review: Lacks Pro power

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has some features that are undeniably pro-grade… but the lack of pro-grade processing power seriously detracts from its value proposition.

Score: 2.5/5

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In this review

Oppo Reno 12 Pro Specifications
Oppo Reno 12 Pro Design
Oppo Reno 12 Pro Camera
Oppo Reno 12 Pro Performance
Oppo Reno 12 Pro Battery
Oppo Reno 12 Pro Conclusion

Design

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro sits in a very competitive price space at $999; that’s where you’re just leaning into premium phone territory (or buying a slightly older flagship phone on discount), so you do need to bring as much of that premium “feel” as you can.

First visual impressions of the Oppo Reno 12 Pro are decent enough. In Australia it comes in two colour variants, either Nebula Black or Nebula Silver, which is what I’ve tested with. The Nebula Silver model has a purple pearlescent finish that certainly stands out if you’re the more showy type, capped off with a fine cut rim around the camera block at the back, which is a detail I don’t recall seeing on too many other phones.

However, there’s a catch here, because while the Oppo Reno 12 Pro looks like it’s a metal body phone, it absolutely is not at all, and that’s evident as soon as you pick it up. It has a slightly cheap plastic feel to it, which isn’t typically what I’d want out of a $999 phone.

True, me being me I’d drop it into a case as soon as I could buy one – Oppo Australia sells them, as do third parties, but there’s not one in the box – but it’s certainly worth noting in terms of ongoing durability.

It would appear to be IP65 rated – I say appear as Oppo Australia’s spec sheet doesn’t list that, but other sources do suggest it and regional variations can always occur – with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 at the front. As such, it should be reasonably durable, but not perhaps the toughest you could get at this kind of price.

Flip the Oppo Reno 12 Pro over and you’re looking at a 6.7 inch 120Hz capable 2412x1080 pixel OLED display with a small holepunch array for the front-facing selfie camera.

Biometrics are handled by a fingerprint reader that was nicely responsive during my review period, with simple volume and power controls up the left hand side.

The SIM card tray sits at the base next to the USB-C socket. For SIM cards, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro supports dual Nano SIM with the typical secondary SIM card slot also doing double duty as microSD expansion if required, but there’s no inbuilt support for eSIM.

Camera

Oppo has long sold itself as a camera phone company, and that’s typically been reflected in better than expected camera quality, especially for its mid-range phones.

That’s broadly true for the Oppo Reno 12 Pro, which features rear 50MP wide, 8MP ultra-wide and 50MP 2x telephoto lens along with a front-facing 50MP selfie camera.

At the front, the Reno 12 Pro delivers a decent selfie, though I’m far from the most exciting subject:

Having a somewhat large wide sensor – bearing in mind that megapixel count isn’t the be-all and end-all of mobile photography – does also allow the Reno 12 Pro to shift quite a bit further than its 2x telephoto zoom.

One interesting aspect here is that while competitors like Samsung or Motorola go to 30x or more “hybrid” zoom, Oppo’s capped this on the Reno 12 Pro to 20x hybrid zoom.

The practical reality here of these extreme zoom is that they’re rarely good beyond short distances anyway, though the Reno 12 Pro does OK at this. As an example, here’s an ultrawide shot looking towards the iconic Centrepoint Tower in Sydney:

My goodness, that’s a long way away.

It’s slightly better as a shot if we switch to the primary wide lens:

There’s a definite colour shift to the sky on the wide version of the shot.

Obviously we’d like to be a little closer… what’s it like with the 2x lens?

I think it’s technically “Sydney Tower” now, but it’s Centrepoint Tower to me. And so it shall stay.

The next step up in Oppo’s default camera app is for a hybrid 5x zoom, and here it holds quite well:

Tourist tip: Despite the sign, there isn't a Westfield shopping centre up there.
Though there is one below.

Not surprisingly at 20x zoom, it’s feeling a little more digital and a little less iconic:

Lots of noise here... and just a little vertigo.

I can see why Oppo didn’t push the Reno 12 Pro out to 30x, but the practical benefit here is that this is actually a little better than I’ve seen out of 30x zooms, even if it’s not as close. Ultimately what you want are nice usable photos, and as always I’d suggest sticking to closer zoom distances than this.

On the video front, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro maxes out at 4K 30fps, which isn’t quite premium grade but then this is a sub-$1000 phone. Results are decent without being stellar for handheld video shooting.

Of course, it’s 2024, and you can’t have a smartphone camera app without layers of AI on top. Oppo’s big push here is for its AI Eraser app, which more or less promises to do what Google’s Magic Eraser does on its Pixel phones.

My experiences with Magic Eraser haven’t always been that spectacular… and to cut to the chase, neither is Oppo’s.

It absolutely requires an Internet connection to work at all, so you do have to keep your photo privacy in mind there, but even with that, it’s not particularly fast and it leaves some pretty prominent picture artefacts behind when you use it.

Here’s an example that I figured would be a pretty light test for the Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s AI Eraser, with a photo of a White Ibis, the classic Australian bin chicken.

The shot itself isn’t much to speak of, but what if the Bin Chicken was ejected via AI?

That’s a Bin Chicken that’s had invisibility cast on it

That result is not good; not only is the shadow of its feet quite prominent, but so too is the outline of the bird itself. Who knew Bin Chickens had access to Romulan cloaking technology?

While its AI camera prowess is a little underwhelming, I rather like the general approach that Oppo has taken here. Many sub-$1000 phones omit telephoto, but that’s present, giving me far more flexibility in my shots, most of which (if I’m not using AI) turn out quite well.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro Sample Photos

Performance

At $999, The Oppo Reno 12 Pro sits just below where I’ve classically considered “premium” smartphone pricing to sit – or to put it another way, it’s the upper echelon of mid-range pricing.

That’s a competitive field, not just because of phones like the Motorola Edge 50 Pro or Pixel 8a, but also because it’s around the price range that you see older Android flagships fall too pretty frequently once they’re 6-12 months old.

As such, performance really is paramount. The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is built around MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy processor with 12GB of RAM and a healthy 512GB of onboard storage for the Australian model as tested. I’ve not benchmarked a Dimensity 7300-Energy CPU previously, but Mediatek’s Dimensity systems have largely punched above their weight in processor performance terms previously.

Except here, because I was genuinely shocked by the Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s benchmark performance. Here’s how it compares against a range of similarly priced phones – and one that’s much, much cheaper.

I run benchmarks multiple times to allow for outlier results and to get an average, and for the Oppo Reno 12 Pro I ran them a few more times to be certain that it was running slower than the $549 Samsung Galaxy A35. The results did not change despite additional test runs.

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro does best the A35 in GPU terms, but not by much. Here’s how the same crop of phones compare using 3DMark’s Wild Life benchmarks:

On the one hand, mid-range phone performance has improved markedly in recent years, and I can’t call the Oppo Reno 12 Pro slow in the sense of being an utter laggard.

However it absolutely does run much slower and less effectively than other phones you can get for its $999 price point, and that’s just in new phones – if you can grab an older 2023 flagship at this money (and it’s not that hard) you can do even better.

The bigger issue here, I feel is that performance at that rate is only going to degrade over time relative to those other phones, and it really does make the Oppo Reno 12 Pro a hard phone to recommend.

On the software front, you’re faced with Android 14 with Oppo’s own ColorOS on top of it. Oppo promises three years of OS upgrades and four years of security updates, delivered quarterly to the phone.

That’s a nice step up from Oppo, where often it’s been hard to work out if a phone would see any updates for a decent period of time, though still short of what Samsung and Google are offering at similar price points.

Battery

The Reno 12 Pro is equipped with a 5,000mAh sealed battery, which is no different at all from the vast majority of Android phones you can buy in 2024.

Outside of folding phones, it’s rare – but not unheard of – to find an Android device not packing a 5,000mAh battery, so the number alone isn’t that interesting.

What is interesting is how well that battery performs. Here the inclusion of the MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Energy does bear fruit, because it’s a very efficient engine, albeit not that quick an engine.

First stop, my standard YouTube battery test. As a reminder, what I’m looking for here is at least 90% battery life after an hour; phones that can’t do that tend to struggle to last a full day, but most do, and every percentage point above 90% is a very good thing indeed.

Here’s how the Oppo Reno 12 Pro compares:

It’s a great figure, always nice to see, and it’s not just a benchmark for the sake of the numbers either, with the Reno 12 Pro lasting nicely through the day in anecdotal use.

Being Oppo, it’s also SuperVOOC compatible. That’s Oppo’s ridiculously fast proprietary charging system that can top up the battery on the Reno 12 Pro via an included 80W charger very quickly indeed.

This has its upsides – nobody wants to hang around waiting for a phone to charge – but also some downsides. The SuperVOOC charger is a bulky beast that will dominate any powerboard it’s plugged into for a start.

I also found that, while the Reno 12 Pro will charge from any given USB-C charger, it was a little fussy about some of the PD chargers I used with it, taking a much slower charge than I’d expect on other phones.

I guess that’s part of the phone protecting its battery (no bad thing), but it does mean if you’re not charging from the SuperVOOC charger, even if it’s a higher capacity charger in its own right, you might see sub-optimal charging rates.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro: Alex’s Verdict

I’m as torn about the Oppo Reno 12 Pro as I was about the similarly priced Motorola Edge 50 Pro recently, but for different reasons. The Reno 12 Pro has really good battery life and superb charging, and the camera quality is very good indeed. For most people at this price, it would be more than enough phone.

However, the plastic body construction does leave a little to be desired at this price, and the use of the Dimensity 7300-Energy gives it performance that’s only equal to phones that are pretty much half its price. You do not have to look far at all in brand new phones, let alone price-dropped flagships to find better performance for this money.

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Oppo Reno 12 Pro: Pricing and availability

The Oppo Reno 12 retails in Australia for $999.

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