I’m a Pro Photographer, and Oppo’s Find X9 Ultra Is a Stunning Camera Phone

These two shots, taken with full automatic settings in the standard camera mode look good. They’re bright, with crisp details and plenty of saturation making them look vibrant and cheerful. But they also look a little cold to my eye, and that’s something I found to be the case when shooting with this phone’s default settings pretty much the whole time. 

When taken in the default camera mode with all settings set to automatic the resulting shot (seen on the left, above) looks cold to my eye, with a magenta color cast in the tint. Switching to master mode allowed me to take control of the white balance, warming the colors up and moving the tint more into the greens. The resulting image (right) looks less natural, but it’s much more like what I had in mind when I took the shot. The cooler tones the phone originally wanted didn’t do that sunny scene justice.

In fact, pretty much all of my favorite images have been taken in master mode with manual white balance settings. I’ve mostly shot in DNG raw as well, resuling in images with a lot more flexibility for editing in Adobe Lightroom or Google’s Snapseed. 

Straight out of camera, this unedited raw file is off to a good start, with an even exposure and accurate colors. 

I’ve not edited this from taking the shot, but I did use master mode to set my own white balance to get the look I wanted. I love the tones of the blue sky and the deep shadows on the figures.

I’ve done the slightest tweaks here, bringing down the highlights just a touch and adding a little warmth to the colors, but otherwise this is mostly as I took it. It’s a great shot, with lots of detail. But shooting in DNG raw also means the files aren’t treated to Oppo’s own image processing, and in my opinion that’s a good thing. Like many Android phones, the X9 Ultra uses its own image processing to try and make your images “better.” What that really means is usually over-sharpening shots and raising the shadows to a sometimes unrealistic extent. 

It’s something I’ve complained about with various Android camera phones — and, sometimes, on iPhones too — and while Oppo isn’t the worst offender for over-processing, it’s definitely noticeable in some of its jpeg images taken in the default camera mode. But it doesn’t apply the processing when you shoot in raw in master mode and the benefits, at least to my eye, are clear. 

The top image here is taken in the default mode with auto settings. The image processing has been quite heavy handed, brightening the shadows so much that it killed a lot of the drama of the beautiful sunrise I was trying to photograph. It’s been oversharpened and the cooler tones don’t do the scene justice. But my raw file is world’s apart. I’ve lifted the shadows a little, but not much, maintaining that drama of the moment and I’ve adjusted the tones to match that golden hour sun pouring in.

The difference becomes even clearer in the ultrawide camera — the default camera mode goes quite far in its image processing, but by taking manual control you can craft a much more artistic image. In my opinion the X9 Ultra’s image processing actually does its underlying technology a disservice; the sensor and lens can take amazing, artistic images that look like they were taken on pro-level mirrorless cameras. But the image processing cranks up the shadows and the sharpening to such an extent that they start to look like cliche phone photos again. 

It’s why I’ve shot almost every photo in master mode and then spent some extra time editing my shots to get the best from them. It’s a different, more labor intensive way of working than was required when I took photos on the Leitzphone. With that, I shot using the built-in Leica color profiles — especially Leica Chrome and the high-contrast black and white mode — and I actually preferred many of my jpeg files without any extra editing. 

The X9 Ultra does have a small selection of filmic styles built in but I’m honestly not a fan. They’re not subtle, looking more like the sort of aggressive photo filters you’d apply in a free photo editing app downloaded from the Play Store. 

The phone has not one but two separate telephoto lenses, one offering 3x optical zoom and one offering 10x. I took this shot of these roosting pigeons at 10x and it’s pin sharp. I love that the amount of zoom has allowed me to compress the scene and captured this much more intimate moment. It’s what zoom lenses are made for. But slap on the telephoto zoom lens and things get wild.

As a quick reference, here’s an ultrawide snapshot of a view of a docked cruise ship (yes, the white balance is very cold). Difficult to really see much of the ship isn’t it?

But attach the telephoto zoom lens and suddenly I’m able to get up close on details like the windows and these vibrant lifeboats. 

While here I used the zoom lens to create an interesting composition using this sole cable car against the rough rock face. There’s no way I could have taken this shot with just the phone by itself. If long zooms are your thing, this add-on is a great option to consider. But it’s not always easy to work with. 

Even at its base 13x zoom (a 300mm equivalent field of view) it’s so zoomed in that it’s quite limiting in the shots you can actually take. Trying to frame up your images using the in-sensor crop modes of 30x or 60x zoom (that’s up to 1,380mm equivalent) can be extremely tricky too. I took it dolphin spotting and the results were… mixed.

Most of my images were of empty patches of sea and, if I was lucky, a hint of bottlenose. It’s hardly a contender for Wildlife Photographer of the Year. 

This was the best I managed to get, but it took a lot of failed attempts. To be fair to the camera, it’s not just that the zoom range made it difficult to target the dolphin, I was also taking my shots from a boat bobbing along on the water. It would have been much easier if I had a steady, static shooting position.

I also captured what looked like a pirate ship, even though it was almost barely visible on the horizon to my own naked eye. 

I like the chaos in this zoom shot of suburbs of the Madeiran city of Funchal. By zooming in, I was able to focus the composition and emphasize the stepped nature of the landscape. It’s truly impressive that I’ve been able to capture something like this on a phone. 

Is the lens a perfect solution? No. Aside from being often quite difficult to actually use, the lens is big and heavy and requires a case and lens mount, making it awkward to attach and a chore to carry around just on the off-chance that you might want a hugely zoomed-in shot. Going up to 30x or 60x relies on a lot of in-sensor cropping along with digital upscaling so while you can achieve a long zoom, there’s often not a lot of actual detail in your images. Good enough for Instagram? Sure. Good enough for a gallery print? Probably not. 

You can also only use the lens in a specific telephoto camera mode which requires extra steps to activate and means you can’t shoot in raw or take manual control over settings like white balance. But the biggest downside is that the lens will set you back an additional £499 (around $674). That’s a huge amount to spend on something with arguably limited use. It does come as part of the Explorer Kit though, which includes a camera grip featuring a shutter button and zoom switch. 

The small handle makes the phone easier to use as a compact camera — especially when you have the big lens attached — but I prefer Xiaomi’s grips I’ve used on its phones like the 15 Ultra. Mostly because they can be attached independently of the case, offer a larger, more ergonomic grip and connect over USB-C, rather than Bluetooth. This not only allows Xiaomi’s grips to add extra battery to the phone but it can also be quickly removed when you don’t want to use it without having to take off the case. Oppo’s grip has to be charged independently, a Bluetooth connection established and turned off again when you don’t want to use it. I like my photography to be as free from these little steps as possible so Oppo’s grip case isn’t the most elegant solution for me. 

There’s no question though that the X9 Ultra is a potent camera phone. But it loses out against Xiaomi’s Leitzphone in a few key ways. For one, the Leitzphone uses a physically larger main image sensor that employs fancy new LOFIC technology which promises better dynamic range from a single image. Oppo says its sensor will achieve similar results from blending images using traditional HDR techniques, but I can’t help but feel that Xiaomi has gone to more effort to equip its phone with more up-to-date tech. 

The Leitzphone also offers the first continuous telephoto zoom, using actual moving elements to achieve a lossless zoom across a range, rather than simply jumping between fixed focal lengths. Sure, Xiaomi doesn’t offer a whopping additional zoom lens, but the Leitzphone’s built-in zoom ranges are more applicable on a day-to-day basis, especially for street and travel photographers. Add on the Leitzphone’s innovative settings wheel around the camera lens and it feels like Xiaomi is working harder to provide more tangible benefits for real photographers. Oppo’s huge lens is a real headline, but it’s an accessory I’d want to call on very rarely in my everyday photography. 

Oppo Find X9 Ultra: Design and display

I really like the look of the phone. With its stark metal and leatherette design, it’s clearly trying to emulate the sleek, professional aesthetics of Hasselblad’s X2D cameras and I think it achieves it well. There’s certainly a family resemblance — especially with the orange camera button on the side, which closely mimics the vibrant orange Hasselblad uses on its camera shutter buttons. 

It feels good in your hand and its IP69 rating means you won’t need to be afraid to keep on taking photos when the rain starts to pour. The camera grip helps give the phone ergonomics more akin to a compact camera but I wish it was possible to buy the grip case independently of the lens. It’s a more broadly useful accessory that I suspect most photographers would want to buy but that wouldn’t be as interested in paying big money for the gigantic lens. 

The phone’s 6.82-inch display is bright and vibrant and I found to be perfectly readable under the bright sunshine — and sometimes gray clouds — I experienced on my photography trip to Madeira. It has a variable 1 to 144Hz refresh rate and its 10-bit color depth means you’ll see exceptionally accurate colors. It’s great for gaming and watching YouTube videos, as well as for editing photos in Adobe Lightroom. 

Oppo Find X9 Ultra: Processor, software and battery

Powering the phone is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, along with 12GB of RAM on my review model (although a 16GB variant will be available in “some markets”). It feels potent, with no delays while navigating the interface and handling games like Genshin Impact perfectly well at max settings. On benchmark tests, it delivered high scores on par with other top-end flagships with the same chip. 

It runs Android 16 at its core with Oppo’s Color OS over the top, which I like as it doesn’t change much of the core Android experience. Whether you’re an Android veteran or if it’s your first time using an Android phone you won’t struggle to get to grips with it. It’ll receive five major software updates in its lifetime and will receive six total years of security updates. That’s a year behind Samsung or Google but it’s still a fair amount and means this phone will be safe to use at least until 2032.

What bugs me though is the variety of preinstalled apps like Amazon, Amazon Music, AliExpress, LinkedIn, Netflix, Temu, Joybuy and various others. Then there’s the wide variety of Oppo’s own apps like Game Assistant, Zen Space and its own app market and theme store. It makes the phone feel cluttered before you’ve installed a single thing of your own and it really cheapens the experience for me. It’s like you handed the phone to your kid, who excitedly started pressing “install” on every app they could get their sticky fingers on before you had a chance to snatch the phone back.

I see this a lot on Android phones, but often it’s worse at a budget level, where phone-makers are clearly making a bit of extra money from these companies by installing their apps as standard. I don’t mind it so much on cheap phones as it feels like it’s almost ad-supported and you’re getting the phone for much less as a result (whether or not that’s actually the case). But on a premium phone with such a high price tag seeing all this stuff installed the first time you turn it on irks me. Sure, you can just uninstall whatever you don’t want, but the point is you shouldn’t have to. 

Oppo Find X9 Ultra: Should you buy it?

The design of this phone both looks and feels premium and its processor and battery life delivered superb scores in our tests. So far, so good. 

But it’s the camera that’s the real story here. Its multiple lenses are capable of taking great-looking images in a variety of conditions, though to get the absolute best out of it you need to take manual control. That means it’s not necessarily the best phone for beginner photographers, but if you’re into photography enough to want to drop this kind of money on a camera-focused phone then odds are you’ll already be familiar with concepts like white balance. 

Still, I do think it’s a bit of a shame that getting the best out of it essentially means manually bypassing a lot of the phone’s own image processing. It forces you to take more steps to get a better photo — both at the point of taking the shot and in the editing stage, which slows things down. The results can be superb, but the phone doesn’t always make it easy to get them. 

I’m a bit disappointed too that Oppo hasn’t pushed its tech further to compete with the Leitzphone’s larger image sensor, LOFIC technology or continuous zoom. Nor does it have the Leitzphone’s innovative control ring on the front. 

On paper it feels like Xiaomi and Leica are working that bit harder to push camera tech forward and woo truly passionate photographers as a result. The Oppo’s main ace up its sleeve for photography is the enormous zoom lens, but its application is arguably limited and it’s a frighteningly expensive extra. If I were picking one to be my everyday carry camera phone, ready to tackle everything from walks to the food market to weekends away in the countryside it’d be the Leitzphone. 

But the Find X9 Ultra is still unquestionably a superb all-round Android phone, offering image quality that’s absolutely up there with the best. Its battery life is better than the Leitzphone and the fact that it’s cheaper is the cherry on top. Really, you can’t go wrong with either.