As we saw at the Shanghai launch event, all three Reno phones tout a cute pop-up camera wedge for 16-megapixel f/2.0 selfies, along with a 48-megapixel f/1.7 main rear camera. The Reno 10x Zoom is basically the Reno 5G sans 5G radio, featuring the same 13-megapixel f/3.0 periscopic zoom camera plus an 8-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide camera. Together, the three rear cameras cover a focal length of 16mm to 160mm, hence the "10x hybrid zoom." The smaller Reno, on the other hand, only has a 5-megapixel f/2.4 assistive camera to add bokeh to the main camera.

Ahead of today's launch event, Engadget sat down with Senior Camera Engineer Li Longjia to hear how Oppo's 10x hybrid zoom technology came together. It turned out that this camera project goes as far back as 2014, when Li's camera team was tasked with a mission to boost the mobile camera's zoom range. This led them to Hoya which offered a tiny periscopic camera with 3x optical zoom -- apparently the first of its kind in the mobile industry.

In the end, Li's team deemed this solution infeasible, mainly due to the fact that Hoya's supply chain was an unfamiliar territory to Oppo and its peers. Li added that a purely continuous zoom solution like this -- as opposed to the current hybrid zoom tech -- comes with many limitations, especially the zoom range and package size. In this case, going beyond the mere 3x zoom would require much more space to accommodate different lens sizes. Still, Hoya's periscopic camera would end up on the ZenFone Zoom, but that didn't turn out so well for ASUS.