The Oppo Find X9 Ultra made me stop carrying a camera

There’s a point, somewhere around the 50th photo, when the Oppo Find X9 Ultra stops feeling like a smartphone and starts behaving like that one expensive camera you promise yourself you will only use on holidays—you know, the Sony A7s and the Nikon Z series of the world.

You begin noticing light differently. Reflections on cafe windows seem clearer. Neon bleeding into wet pavements looks extra vibrant. There’s a cinematic way Delhi’s smog catches the sunset at 6 pm. Suddenly, you’re zooming into distant bylanes and convincing yourself you have discovered street photography.

And that’s the thing about the Find X9 Ultra. It doesn’t just take excellent photos. Plenty of phones do that now. It changes the way you use a camera on a phone in the first place.

Unlike most flagship phones today that have settled into predictable routines—a main camera, an ultrawide, maybe decent telephoto, if you’re lucky—Find X9 Ultra is built around zoom photography in a way almost no modern smartphone is anymore, except, of course, the Vivo X 300 Ultra, which launched earlier this month and has an equally beefy camera module.

The star of the show is the 10x optical zoom camera. Not AI-enhanced zoom. Not cropped sensor pretending to be zoom. Actual optical zoom. And it’s glorious. You start using it for things you’d never normally attempt on a phone. Musicians across a venue. Details on buildings half a street away. Random strangers walking through dramatic shafts of sunlight. The sort of shots you usually take, realise they look terrible, and immediately delete. Except here, they look shockingly usable. More importantly, they look natural.

Street photography feels especially brilliant on this thing. The 3x and 10x lenses let you observe scenes from a distance without aggressively shoving a phone in someone’s face. You can isolate tiny details in crowded environments with a confidence that most phones simply can ’t match.

Even low-light photography, usually the point where smartphone zoom systems completely collapse, holds together remarkably well.

And because Oppo hasn’t gone overboard with sharpening, skin tones remain believable too. Human beings still look human.

For years, smartphone photography has been a race towards computational cleverness—talks about AI, keynotes with phrases like “machine learning pipeline” and “semantic rendering”... You get the drift. And the result is often technically brilliant but emotionally hollow. Faces look too smooth. Night shots feel fake. Zoom images dissolve into oil paintings the second you crop in (I’m looking at you, Samsung S23 Ultra, the Oppo Find X8, and the Vivo X100).

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra goes in a different direction; it feels obsessed with hardware again. To begin with, it is an unapologetically enormous phone. The camera bump alone looks like it could be detached and become its own gadget. Put it next to an iPhone 17 Pro or Galaxy S26 Ultra and the Oppo feels like it missed the memo about minimalism. The back, especially with the brown vegan-leather finish, leans heavily into vintage Hasselblad aesthetics. It looks less “sleek lifestyle accessory” and more “photographer who owns three film cameras and drinks pour-over coffee”. The camera ring looks like it should physically rotate (it doesn’t). There’s a shutter button on the side, complete with half-press focusing. In an era where most phones are becoming anonymous titanium slabs, the Find X9 Ultra has an actual personality.

The irony is that the software tricks are clearly there, quietly cleaning things up in the background, but they don’t dominate the experience. The phone still lets light, optics, and sensor size do the heavy lifting.

Of course, all this comes at a cost. It’s a heavy phone. Not just slightly heavy but the kind you can feel in your jeans pockets and definitely while lying in your bed, doomscrolling at 1am. The sheer size will immediately put some people off. But unlike some giant phones that feel awkward and clumsy, the Oppo’s prominent camera protrusion acts as a physical ledge for your fingers, giving you a steady grip.

Furthermore, this expansive chassis allows the phone to house a giant battery and an overbuilt internal cooling system, ensuring you can record sustained 4K video or shoot lengthy burst sessions without the device throttling or turning uncomfortably hot. With Find X9, you can go out, navigate maps, hammer the camera, doomscroll social media and still end the day without anxiety. Coming from smaller battery flagships, it feels magical.

The phone is imperfect, naturally. Oppo’s software, while cleaner than before, still occasionally slips into over-designed territory. Honestly, I get the ambition here. This phone isn’t trying to replace a mirrorless camera for professional photographers shooting campaigns or weddings. It’s trying to eliminate the gap between “phone camera” and “camera you actually want to carry”. And for perhaps the first time in years, a smartphone gets remarkably close, with the Vivo X300 Ultra—whose exceptional strength is portrait photography—being right up there.

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra is one of the first phones in a long time that genuinely rekindles the joy of taking photos. Not content creation, not AI-assisted memory capture, just plain photography. And if you want to take it up a notch, the phone supports the Hasselblad Photography Kit, enabling high-resolution imagery beyond 100x.

Although the accessory bundle’s India pricing and availability have not been announced, judging by the Vivo X300 Ultra phone with teleconverter kit, the pricing will easily push over ₹2 lakh.

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra is available in two colours—Tundra Umber and Canyon Orange—and comes in a single configuration featuring 12GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage. While it carries a standard retail price tag of ₹1,69,999, promotional launch offers bring the effective price down to ₹1,36,999