The Find X9 Pro has a long, detachable zoom lens

for several years, Top Chinese smartphone brands have been vying for photography dominance. Although year-over-year changes are often minimal, these companies try to outdo each other. Let’s take, for example, Oppo’s latest flagship phone Look for X9 Profor example.

It features a 200MP telephoto lens developed by camera manufacturer Hasselblad, so you can zoom in on the subject from afar. If that’s not enough, Oppo sells the Hasselblad Teleconverter Kit, a convenient 3.28X telephoto lens that mounts in a special case that offers more optical zoom than you’ve ever seen in a smartphone.

The Find X9 Pro will launch alongside the more modest Find X9, which has already launched in China, but will launch soon in the UK and Europe (not the US). As you might expect, it’s an absolute unit in terms of specs. Along with a versatile camera system with professional software tools, there’s a beautiful 6.78-inch display, and a massive 7,500 mAh silicon battery.

close up

I love the telephoto lens on my phone. Although I rarely care about ultra-wide photography, the option to zoom in from a distance is often useful. You can take close-ups of concerts and other stage-based events, capture cool architectural details, and sometimes even figure out what the hell that thing in the distance is. Properly named amplifiers don’t realize how good they are getting; You used to need a DSLR with a huge lens to get as close as your regular phone can now.

The Find Oppo claims it is capable of 13.2X lossless zoom using computational photography; I’m not sure what that number is, but the Find X9 Pro certainly takes great photos of any distant subject. Technically, digital zoom is up to 120X, but anything past 30X starts to look like an oil painting.

Although it’s impressive, there have been other phones with 200MP telephoto lenses, so Oppo has improved things with the optional Hasselblad Teleconverter Kit. Used in conjunction with the Magnetic Photographer’s Case, there is a sliding attachment that opens over the camera module, and the lens then twists and clicks securely into place over the telephoto lens, adding another 3.28X magnification.