The best new camera phone might not be from Samsung or Apple

Oppo has gone big on photography this year, as it gets closer and closer to unveiling its next flagship smartphone, the Find X8. Having spilled the beans about the phone's existence only recently, it's now shown off some hugely impressive photographic evidence that it might be one of the best phones for taking photos.

It's shared a series of shots, including the one above this article and another that you'll find below, all taken on the Find X8 series, to underline just how capable the phones' sensors are going to be. In each case, there's no doubt that they look like professional-grade photos, with lighting that you'd normally have to work extremely hard to capture without a proper camera.

This photo focus will include a new system, from the sounds of it, called Atmospheric Environmental Portrait, one that aims to capture true-to-life shots of people, without sacrificing the detail and feeling of what's around them. That's one of the few gripes some users might have with aggressively-focused Portrait shots on iPhone or Samsung Galaxy flagships, which can blur out that background entirely.

In fact, all of these shots suggest that the likes of Apple and Samsung might have real competition on their hands over the next year, if the Find X8 can live up to the shots we've been shown so far in normal use. For a long while, those two giants haven't had that much opposition where phone photography is concerned, although Google's made huge inroads in the last few years.

Joy Cheng, OPPO’s Director of Imaging Products, commented on this topic at a roundtable in Paris last night that T3 attended: "We’re delivering master-level tonal quality, smoother colour transitions, and enhanced skin tone representation for professional portrait quality in every shot."

The Find X8 series will also seemingly iterate on the Livephoto setting that has been imitating Apple's own animated Live Photos for a while now, for those who like capturing a bit more context when they take shots of fleeting moments.

I was in Paris last night to get an early look at a new exhibition Oppo's sponsoring as part of Paris Photo, called Dear Life, in which all of the photos were taken on Oppo phones. It was a pretty eye-opening reminder of just how much photographic power people already have in their pockets, even before the promised upgrades coming in the newer handset.