Oppo’s Find X9 Pro has a detachable telephoto lens and a giant battery
By Mat Smith | Published: 2025-10-28 16:00:00 | Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Oppo’s latest flagships, like the stylish (but hard-to-purchase) foldable Find N5, are very inconsistent with their tech specs. In fact, the Find Oh, and the optional telephoto lens add-on that boosts the camera’s zoom to 10x.
The Find X9 Pro will be priced at £1,099 (about $1,459). Perhaps the biggest drawback is that although the Find X9 series is Oppo’s biggest phone launch to date, it won’t be available in the US. However, with everything crammed into this phone, I had to give it a try. Do I really want a thinner smartphone? Or one that lasts several days before needing to be recharged? Man, that telephoto lens sure is an eye-catcher.
Presentation and design
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
The Find X9 Pro has a 6.78-inch display, with an external brightness of up to 3,600 nits. In theory, this outperforms the iPhone 17 Pro, but most people with phones older than a year or two will notice how brighter phones like the X9 Pro are. Another notable feature is the minimum brightness of 1 nit to reduce eye strain when using the phone in the dark. Or in bed. Which we shouldn’t do, but we all do. Oppo has also included high-frequency pixel dimming to further reduce screen harshness.
Like recent phones from its commercial cousin, OnePlus, Oppo has added a new button on this year’s Find The Snap key is located on the left side of the device, and can be customized to launch apps like voice recorder, translation apps, and flashlight. Meanwhile, the right edge houses the Find X9’s quick button, which is ostensibly the camera button. Double-tapping it launches the Camera app. Although it’s not as complex as controlling the iPhone’s camera, you can swipe the button to zoom in and out while using the camera, which is a simple and welcome addition.
Along with Mediatek’s new Dimensity 9500 chip, the Find X9 Pro is another flagship phone with a silicon-carbon battery. With a higher energy density than graphite-based batteries, this means longer battery life without making the phone larger or thicker. The battery is huge at 7000 mAh. That’s significantly larger than the battery found in foldable devices like the Samsung Z Fold 7 (4,400 mAh) and Pixel 9 Pro Fold (4,650 mAh). It is larger than that of the OnePlus 13 (6,000 mAh). Fortunately, the Find X9 supports decently fast charging speeds, with support for 80W fast charging and 50W wireless charging. During my time with the phone, it often lasted a couple of days on a charge. Even after a day of heavy use of the camera, Google Maps, and video streaming, I didn’t need to recharge the Find X9 Pro until late afternoon on the second day.
Cameras
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
The Find X9 Pro camera consists of a 50-megapixel main sensor with an f/1.5 lens and optical image stabilization. There’s also a 50MP ultra-wide camera and arguably the most technically impressive part: a 200MP periscope camera with an f/2.1 lens and optical image stabilization (OIS). This is further enhanced with an mountable teleconverter lens – more on that later.
Oppo’s Hasselblad collaboration focuses on zoom, though the company calls the entire camera setup the Hasselblad Master Camera System. I’m not sure it needs such a classification. To make the most of the high-resolution sensor, the camera app includes a new high-resolution mode for 200MP capture for the telephoto lens and 50MP when using the other two camera sensors. The company warns that the mode is best used in well-lit environments, as it excludes pixel binning and other computational photography techniques that are used when there is limited light.
But that’s not really the point: it’s all about zooming. The telephoto camera has a primary 3x optical zoom, which can be cropped to 6x zoom with a 50MP image. It is worth noting that all cameras in the Find X9 can take photos at a resolution of 50 megapixels. If the phone detects more difficult shooting conditions, it automatically drops down to 25MP or 12MP shots. In fact, I didn’t notice the resolution increase in most of the photos I took, although the rich foliage in some landscape shots shows just how much detail the camera system is capable of capturing.
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
Oppo says its expertise in computational photography pushes the zoom here to 13.2x, but its algorithms can get a bit aggressive and messy with faces and details at higher digital zoom settings. Take a look at these photos taken across a hill. While foliage looks clear and detailed, pedestrians are blurred and there is a halo effect around them. Other times, CGI turned pedestrians into terrifying faces.
And in another opportunity to mention the Hasselblad collaboration, there’s also an XPAN shooting mode for 65:24 cinema images. Conversely, if you’re a fan of the disposable camera aesthetic, the Find X9 series can also sport a powerful dual flash to mimic ’00s photography.
The same zoom capabilities are available in video capture as well, and the company has added a new audio focus mode to remove ambient noise, which worked better than I expected. There are several video recording upgrades, including full LOG recording (activated in Settings) and a built-in LUT preview to check color grading in real time.
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
Then there is the mountable lens. Oppo’s Hasselblad Teleconverter is a sturdy, premium peripheral with a metal barrel and some heft. It extends the Find X9’s optical zoom range to 10x, with an equivalent focal length of 230mm. Thanks to the high-resolution 200MP telephoto camera sensor, you can digitally zoom up to 200x for still images and zoom 50x for video, although the sweet spot is definitely in the middle. The additional teleconverter lens, although not brand new (Vivo did it first), might be the most interesting part.
You do need to use a specific case and mounting plate to attach the lens to the phone securely, but when locked, it feels solid and very secure. It also looks like, well, what it looks like. Since it’s a very thin lens, it looks like something you might use for spying. It doesn’t even look like a point-and-shoot camera. It’s… eye-catching, but also a lot of fun.
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
I’ve been testing the Find What is particularly attractive is the combination of high detail and bokeh effect. With the jump in zoom, I had to make sure I was far enough away to use the teleconverter, otherwise I would struggle to focus.
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
Oppo is pitching its new flagship as the perfect phone for concerts and live events, and the zoom range is very impressive. It is probably understandable that when you zoom in too much, there is a high risk of getting blurry shots. Oppo includes a special tripod that attaches to the lens barrel to ensure everything doesn’t tip over, but it’s one step too far for me. It’s already a lot to carry around the teleconverter and mounting plate. It’s also a chore to have to disconnect the plate when using the camera without a teleconverter. Oddly enough, the panel covers the other sensors, meaning that if you want a closer focal point (or want to use anything besides the telephoto sensor), it’s an extra pain point before you can take the photo.
It’s unusual for a phone’s ‘main’ camera not to be the star of the show, but that may be the case with the Find X9 Pro. However, it’s still technically impressive. Thanks to the new 1/1.28 sensor developed in collaboration with Sony, the 50MP main camera can capture triple exposures in each frame before combining them. Oppo claims to give images 17 stops of dynamic range. There’s also a fourth camera, the True Color Camera, dedicated to accurately measuring color temperatures across all other sensors. It’s an impressive system, but you’ll get the most out of it if you’re willing to pay for the extra teleconverter.
Photo by Matt Smith for Engadget
At £1,099 in the UK, Oppo has priced it similarly to the iPhone 17 Pro, although we’re still waiting to hear pricing for the teleconverter kit. I was afraid of the folding prices, but this seems competitive at least here in Europe.
What prevents Oppo from storming the United States? There will likely be business disruptions and competition. If it can improve the experience (and perhaps keep its next phone compatible with the same teleconverter), it will have a good chance of luring the obsessive smartphone photographer away from their iPhones and Pixels.
(Tags for translation)Telephoto Camera
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