Oppo, a smartphone company most people have probably never heard of, has been launching insurgent devices with tricks up their sleeves that no other manufacturer has tried. Their latest, the Find 7, comes with another new trick: 50 megapixel shots.

Chinese manufacturer Oppo Electronics pulled a similar coup with the Oppo N1, introduced just in time for the 2013 holiday shopping season, which had a physically-flipping 13-megapixel main camera (for high quality selfies), the option to boot in Cyanogenmod built in, and top-notch specs. The newest Oppo smartphone, the Find 7, announced in Beijing on Wednesday, comes with even better specs and a camera option to take 50-megapixel photographs.

Specs

The Find 7 comes in two variants: the Find 7a, or "Lite" and the Find 7. Both sport a 5.5-inch display and Android 4.3. The Lite, for $499, is powered by a 2.3 GHz Snapdragon 800 processor with 2GB of RAM. It sports a 2,8000 mAh battery and 1080p Full HD display, with 16 GB of internal storage with microSD support for up to 128 GB more.

For a hundred dollars more, the Find 7 features the state of the art 2.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with an Adreno 330 GPU and 3GB of RAM. For storage, you have 32 GB internal with 128 GB more via microSD.

And the Find 7 boasts a slightly larger battery of 3,000 mAh powering a stunning Quad HD display with a resolution of 1440 x 2560p, delivering about 538 pixels per inch. Compared to the Galaxy S5, one of the currently highest-resolution flagship devices by Samsung (with a smaller 5.1-inch screen), that's a little bit more than 100 pixels per inch more. You could call it overkill, unless you're one who likes to watch movies like Avatar on your phone -- perhaps now it will look good.


The Find 7 and its Lite counterpart both share other specs, like Gorilla Glass 3, a micro-SIM slot, LTE capability, a curved "skyline" notification light bar at the bottom of the phone, rapid charging (to 75 percent in 30 minutes), a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and a dual-LED flash 13-megapixel camera on the back. Wait, did I just write 13-megapixel camera?

Yes I did.

Camera Trick

While Nokia's Lumia 1020 actually sports a 41-megapixel camera sensor, the Oppo Find 7's 50-megapixel shots come from a software trick mixed with its run-of-the-mill 13-megapixel sensor and an image signal processor by Oppo called Pure Image 2.0. Basically, to achieve 50-megapixel photos, the camera takes 10 shots at a rapid clip, and then automatically picks the four best shots to stitch them together into a big, 10MB, 50-megapixel photo.

You may write this off as a trick -- and it is. But Engadget's hands-on of the Oppo 7 noted, "the results we saw earlier were surprisingly good," and Oppo is going by the code technology companies often follow: Whatever works, as long as it does.