The last time a selfie camera really impressed me was the iPhone 17’s Center Stage front camera, but no Android manufacturer even comes close. It looks like smartphone makers have forgotten the front cameras, as there has been no serious innovation in the last few years.
Well, Oppo might change that arrangement this year. Chinese tipster Digital Chat Station (via Weibo) claims that Oppo is testing a 100MP square-format front camera sensor for its purported Find X10 series. If it makes the cut to a commercial release, the Find X10 would be the first Android smartphone to ship with a 1:1 square selfie sensor.
Why does a square sensor matter for selfies?
Until now, Android phones ship with rectangular sensors optimized for vertical framing or a portrait orientation. A 1:1 square sensor changes the geometry entirely.
First, it captures a wider field of view in all directions, which means you can fit in more people in a group selfie without taking a few steps back, or you can crop the same picture for a portrait Instagram post or a landscape YouTube thumbnail.
For group selfies, live streaming, and creator content where users constantly flip between orientations, a 1:1 square sensor is genuinely a quality-of-life upgrade rather than a spec sheet number.
Doesn’t the iPhone 17 already have that?
For context, Apple’s iPhone 17 uses a similar square sensor for its Center Stage camera, but with a 18MP sensor. I’ve been using the smartphone for over nine months, and the selfie tricks it pulls are simply phenomenal.
Within a second, the camera goes from accommodating a group of four to a group of 10 to 12 people in the same selfie. The horizontal wide-angle selfie setting is my favorite. However, there are times when I feel that the experience could have benefited from a higher resolution selfie camera.
That is the problem that the upcoming Oppo flagship might fix with its 100MP selfie shooter, which should provide more flexibility for digital cropping and zoom. The sensor itself is reportedly a custom Samsung-made chip measuring around 1/2.5 inches.
Although no launch date is confirmed for the Find X10, the handset should break cover later in the year.