Whoever said ‘size doesn’t matter’ clearly never had the Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit bolted to the front of their Oppo Find X9 Ultra. After taking the girthy glass addon with me on a recent trip, I’m a convert: it turns what was already one of the best smartphones of 2026 for photography into a something that can genuinely replace a DSLR in your camera bag.
It helps to have a great baseline, of course. The Find X9 Ultra combines an oversized main sensor with one of the biggest telephotos you’ll find on any phone. Both have huge 200MP pixel counts. A second telephoto tops out at 10x native zoom, letting you get impressively close to your subjects. The 50MP ultrawide is no consolation prize, and there’s also a dedicated spectrum sensor to help deliver impactful but lifelike colours.
The Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit then goes even further, taking native zoom from 3x to 13x (or 300mm) – no AI upscaling or algorithms required.
What’s in the Hasselblad Earth Explorer kit?
This is not a new concept: Oppo did something similar for the Find X9 Pro in 2025, while rival Honor recently got in on the action with one for the Magic8 Pro. Vivo has sold something similar in the Chinese market for a few generations now for its photography-first flagships.
Oppo has outdone the Find X9 Pro’s lens for zoom and clarity here, courtesy of several more glass elements inside the lens barrel. It’s bigger and heavier as a result, but still svelte enough I could slip it in my pocket once removed from the case that also comes as part of the £499 Hasselblad Earth Explorer accessory pack.
The case has an integrated grip and physical shutter button, which give a much more tactile feel than either onscreen buttons or the Find X9 Ultra’s touch-sensitive Quick Button. It doesn’t protrude nearly as much as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra‘s detachable grip, so I’ve kept the phone in it 24/7 since it arrived. I also love how Oppo has styled it to match Hasselblad’s X2D medium format camera, and that the mounting thread that keeps lens and phone securely held together doesn’t obscure the other lenses. It means there’s one less thing to remove when you just want to use the phone like normal.
I’m less fond of how it connects over Bluetooth and needs charging separately from the phone. It doesn’t bring any kind of backup battery like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra’s one either.
Once the lens is securely fitted, you’ve got to pick the specific Hasselblad Teleconverter mode from the camera’s mode menu; I moved it to one of the bottom shortcuts, which was far more convenient, but it’s a shame it doesn’t detect the lens and switch automatically. From that point on it’s point and shoot, only with a much more magnified view of the world.
Learning curve
At first I found 13x almost too restrictive; I mostly shoot landscapes and street scenes, but even in the middle of Central Park I was struggling to fit very much of New York’s skyline into frame. Stepping back a bit isn’t going to cut it here. You also really have to support the lens with your off-hand, because it adds so much weight to the phone. I definitely caught a few side-eye glances from passers-by wondering what the hell I had strapped to my phone too.
When it’s fine details you want, however, the Find X9 Ultra delivers impeccable results. The scaffolding on a distant building would’ve looked mushy and over-processed on any other phone, simply because of how much digital upscaling and enhancement would be required to magnify a 3x or 5x telephoto lens. Here every pole and every bit of netting is preserved and perfectly crisp.
Aim closer to street level and there’s a wonderful amount of natural bokeh on display. I was able to get some properly cinematic closeup of the Queensboro Bridge from inside a taxi, the focal length able to capture a sense of depth between street signs and departing subway trains.
You get free reign on magnification within the camera app but are offered up three specific zoom levels: native 13x (a 300mm equivalent), 30x (a 690mm equivalent) and 60x (a staggering 1,380mm equivalent). Unsurprisingly it’s the 13x mode that gives best results, as there’s no extra processing required. Textures just don’t hold up at extreme zooms, even in good light and with static subjects. Trying to catch an erratic squirrel that refused to stay still just after sunrise resulted in smudged fur detail.
There are also some telltale signs that you’re still dealing with a phone here, not a camera. In one panning shot of a speeding cyclist, the image processing decided to keep some of the background in focus as well as the subject itself. Hasselblad Master mode, which disables a lot of the background algorithms, can’t be used in conjunction with the lens extender.
No typical handset can deliver the sort of convincing depth blur that this can at such extreme distances, though. It turns even fairly mundane shots, like the passing peloton or woman walking to work into something altogether more filmic. And that’s before you start experimenting with the various Hasselblad-approved filters, which lean even heavier into the analogue aesthetic.
Where it truly starts to impress
It was once I switched from buildings to wildlife that the Hasselblad Earth Explorer kit became indispensable. As long as you can get your subject into the frame – easier said than done at 30x and beyond when they’re scurrying about and the onscreen preview showing the entire 13x view is rather small – you can expect shots that are easily on par with dedicated digital cameras.
All of my test shots appeared wonderfully sharp around the subject, with fantastic background separation and some properly dreamy depth blur behind. No other phone can get those kinds of results solo, particularly at the distances I was standing at to avoid spooking the park’s animal residents. I bet you’ll struggle to tell which of the samples below were taken at native zoom and which had a digital helping hand.
Being able to lock focus with a half-press of the case’s physical shutter button was a big help with a fidgety bird that got a little too close to the lens at times; the minimum focusing distance is further away than you initially think.
As the sun set and I moved back into the city, I remained impressed by the Find X9 Ultra’s performance. Low light was already one of this phone’s strengths, on account of its oversized sensors, but the Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit only accentuated it.
While the processing did sometimes get tripped up by bright highlights, resulting in slightly blown out neon signs, it delivered absolutely stunning detail for something that still slips into a pocket. The sense of depth is preserved, too. Moving elements aren’t captured so cleanly, but I like the sense of speed the moving taxi cab adds to the first shot below.
I genuinely don’t think I’ve taken photos on a phone that are as good as the ones seen here. Being able to get so near to a subject without having to physically step into their space let me capture more candid shots, in scenes I’d otherwise not have bothered reaching for my phone to snap.
While I don’t think the Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit is a mandatory purchase for Find X9 Ultra owners – £499 is an awful lot of cash to splash after paying nearly £1500 for the phone itself – it’s still great to see this kind of hardware innovation at a time Google, Apple and Samsung all seem content to focus on software and algorithmic image processing.
Next I’d like to see Oppo tackle regional availability. The kit – and the phone – are only officially on sale in select Asian and European territories. Americans are plain out of luck unless they import. But based on my experience, US phone photography fans should give serious thought to doing so.
