OPPO’s full-path color management system to debut on its OPPO Find X3 series in 2021

OPPO’s newly released Full-path Color Management System is set to premiere as part of its 2021 new flagship smartphones, Find X3 series.

OPPO’s Full-path Color Management System is the very first Android color management system to support the full DCI-P3 wide spectrum and 10-bit color depth from capture, storage, and display. This delivers an outstanding viewing experience with it authentic and accurate color reproduction.

“Color inspires creativity and affects our perceptions of reality. That’s why we’ve enhanced every aspect of the color management system to add brilliant, high-quality visuals to more aspects of daily life.” said Bai Lang, Product Manager at OPPO.

The new Full-path Color Management System is based on the stellar color performance of the Find X2 Pro, previously developed to support for 10bit image capturing and HEIF format. 

Considering the future trends lie in wide color spectrum and high color depth, OPPO’s R&D engineering team improved the underlying system and hardware that supports colour reproduction. The system is an end-to-end solution, covering all the steps from image acquisition, to computation, encoding, storage, decoding, and finally display, supporting a High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) image with 10bit high color depth and the P3 wide color gamut.

The full-path color management system adopted higher specification algorithm and hardware to record color when capturing. OPPO’s R&D engineering promoted almost 20 algorithms in the areas such as distortion correction, multi-frame noise reduction and perceptual extreme super-resolution. Moreover, OPPO will be the first to support image sensors featuring Digital Overlap (DOL) HDR mode. In the DOL-HDR technology, it synthesizes different exposure conditions into an image. Therefore, brilliant colors are captured even when pictures are taken against bright light. 

With the right hardware, calibration becomes the next important factor. OPPO’s screen calibration procedure enables a professional, digital film-grade color accuracy at around 0.4 JNCD (Just Noticeable Color Difference), thereby delivering a consistently accurate display on the screen. On the other hands, OPPO’s proprietary algorithm guarantee color gamut compatibility by adjusting the DCI-P3 with the D65 white point at the center of the color space. 

Compared with the depth of 8-bits, the 10-bit color depth tones down the artificial visual features brought about by gaps in colors. The 10-bit color depth further improves color gradient to enhance the quality of visual content during creation and post-editing. Meanwhile, with a size only around 50% of a JPEG image, the new and powerful HEIF format fully supports a wide variety of multimedia, such as static images, Exif, depth information, and dynamic videos, thus giving users more creative freedom. It is also worth mentioning that the HEIF format can be further developed to ensure compatibility with respect to ultra-high color depth.

At the recent OPPO INNO DAY 2020, OPPO Founder and CEO Tony Chen set forth OPPO’s brand belief, entitled “Technology for Mankind, Kindness for the World”. OPPO uses technology as a means to bring the best to people.

The belief manifests in OPPO’s R&D process in color management. OPPO’s Full-path Color Management System is a fundamental function at the system level, and it is smart too. OPPO first sought to achieve a uniform standard with every screen showing colors in the same way to ensure the accuracy and fidelity; now, we go deeper to seek to meet user needs with customization. 

Back to 2018, OPPO’s R&D engineering team became aware of the challenges facing smartphone users with color weakness. Considering about visual health, the team went on to initiate systematic research on color correction to address the needs of a wider user for better visual experience. This is what we call “virtuous innovation”.

Right now, OPPO is joining forces with Zhejiang University with an aim to find the optimal solution to color correction by sampling potential users with accurate quantification of color vision test.

For OPPO, years of innovation have led to new heights of color expression for smartphone displays. The Full-path Color Management System will be first available in OPPO’s 2021 flagship Find X3 series. Going forward, OPPO’s flagship smartphones will fully support a 10-bit color depth and the P3 color gamut, our benchmark for selecting image sensors for our flagship series.