Thanks Hasselblad: These 15 photos might be the best I’ve ever taken with a phone

This week, we’ve spent some hands-on time with the upcoming OPPO Find X9 Pro flagship. It won’t be long until we can share our full initial impressions, but we can talk a bit about the new camera setup, and it’s certainly shaping up to be impressive. That’s not particularly surprising. I highly rate the Find X8 Pro — my current daily driver — in no small part for its stunning pictures. But OPPO plans to take things up a gear this year with a new 200-megapixel telephoto camera, co-developed with Hasselblad once again.

The company also has a Hasselblad telephoto extender lens that takes the 200MP camera’s 3.3x zoom / 70mm focal length and blasts it up to a longer-range 9.6x zoom with an equivalent 230mm focal length. Paired with crops and upscaling from that huge 200MP camera, it can take photos all the way out to 40x (920mm).

Who needs AI zoom when you can have proper optics? Well, let’s find out. Here’s a selection of snaps we’ve taken with the new phone and its admittedly bulky lens accessory. You can follow along with the full-res samples in this Google Drive folder.

OPPO Find X9 Pro camera samples

Let’s start with a few snaps showing just how far this handset can zoom. I’ve grouped the snaps into threes, beginning with the main lens, then the telephoto’s default zoom, and right out to the maximum range we can obtain with the extender lens.

I’ll leave you to pixel-peep at the details, but the lens extender clearly holds up well, providing more range than you’ll likely ever need. But the extender lens isn’t all about range. In fact, the 230mm focal length allows for plenty of fun playing with bokeh and depth of field in ways you can’t from a standard smartphone camera lens.

Of course, the OPPO Find X9 Pro aims to be flexible enough to use without the need to add an extra lens. We grabbed a few snaps from the ultrawide, main, and telephoto lenses too, and although the series drops back down to a triple rather than quad camera array this year, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

So far, our first snaps look to offer OPPO’s signature consistency across all of its lenses, and I’m eager to see if this holds up in a wider range of environments.

Like virtually all of today’s high-end phone brands, OPPO stakes a huge part of its reputation on its photography prowess. The Find X9 Pro has a lot to live up to, and the ongoing partnership with Hasselblad aims to give the phone a more unique selling point. In addition to new hardware, the handset includes OPPO’s LUMO Image Engine, an in-house portrait and computational photography solution that should bring out the best in a wide range of snaps. We’ll definitely be putting this to the test.

OPPO isn’t just banking on photograph smarts this year. The Find X9 Pro brings 4K 120fps Dolby Vision and LOG recording with ACES support to the series for the first time, giving videographers plenty to get excited about. Powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9500 and with a huge 7,500mAh battery, the flagship looks to have power users well covered as well.

Keep an eye out for more hands-on coverage of the Find X9 Pro in the coming weeks.