After my first shooting session, I walked away thinking a thought I’m not in the habit of having about phone cameras: these could be the best photos I’ve ever taken on a handset. The catalyst is a renewed partnership with Hasselblad and a brazen, there’s-no-way-this-works 200MP telephoto system that goes beyond the typically expected smartphone playbook.
Why Pay Attention to Hasselblad Tuning on Phones
The value of Hasselblad here is not a logo, it’s how images are rendered. Color looks true rather than exaggerated, there’s gentle highlight roll-off and the skin tones don’t fall into that waxy, overwarm category of some phones. That “medium-format” sensibility — a focus on tonal nuance over punch — does turn out to translate surprisingly well to mobile.
The consistency among the lenses is where you can tell. Shot-to-shot white balance holds firm whether I’m on ultrawide, the main sensor or the tele module. OPPO’s LUMO Image Engine plays up that aspect, structurally smoothing exposure jumps and retaining microcontrast without losing detail to oblivion. It feels tuned, here, as a coherent rather than baggy assembly of parts.
A 200MP Telephoto That Will Rewrite the Game.
The hardware headline is a 200MP telephoto camera at 3.3x (approximately 70mm) equivalent, co-engineered with Hasselblad. Snap on the matched Hasselblad extender and that lens extends to a 9.6x reach at around 230mm equivalent. Given some smart crops from that massive sensor, I could push out to 40x — an effective 920mm telephoto — and avoid the watercolor smearing I’ve come to expect from digital zoom.
That is a different approach than prevails with the algorithm-soup “super res” pipelines out there in recent years. Optics do the heavy pulling; computer processing tidies, not invents detail. For perspective, 230mm is uncharted territory for phones. While a lot of flagships have toyed with the same reach there or thereabouts, most tend to sit between 120 and 135mm. Going from 200mm to 230mm makes a difference in the composition and subject separation.
At that focal length, background compression is flattering for portraits and can simplify busy backgrounds. Bokeh is derived from physics – not just edge maps. I saw fine textures — on brickwork, distant signage and the feathery edges of foliage — hold together where normal hybrid zoom begins to fall apart.
Where I Was Surprised by Real-World Results
A city hall clock tower at 230mm resolved not just the minutes on its markings but also all that aging patina around rivets. Even a backlit portrait at dusk kept skin tone while the sky did not blow out, and stray hairs stayed razor sharp. Heck, I felt like framing wildlife handheld at 9.6x was within my own reach thanks to the firm stabilization and smartly responsive shutter.
The extender lens is, sure, a bit chunky and you will notice the weight shift. Nonetheless, the mounting system snapped in relatively cleanly and balance was manageable with both hands. This setup was also not a gimmick — it allowed me to frame shots I wouldn’t have been able to capture with just a standard mobile zoom.
Returning to the native lenses, color and contrast remained in sync. Ultrawide didn’t lurch into a colder tone and main matched tele in midtone density. It’s that kind of harmony that makes a camera phone something you can trust when you’re shooting an entire story, not just hero shots.
Serious Shooter Tools for Video Capture Workflows
There are also specs on the motion side: 4K at 120fps in Dolby Vision for high dynamic range capture, as well as a LOG profile with support for the Academy’s ACES color pipeline.
So, you can grade alongside mirrorless or cinema cameras with predictable results — which is a win if you’re the sort of creator to mix sources and need some peace of mind color management.
Stabilization was steady at telephoto, and tone mapping didn’t offer pulsing exposure shifts that can mess up an HDR scene. In short, the video stack treats advanced abilities as normative, rather than a parlor trick.
How It Fits In With The Camera Phone Landscape Though
Throughout the industry, the best camera phones aim for two things: plausible color and useful reach. Apple relies on fine-tuned processing, Google extols computational zoom and Samsung has pursued long periscope optics. And this is the system that threads those needles — serious glass combined with high-res capture and careful tuning.
Independent labs such as DXOMARK have for years stressed cross-lens consistency and texture-noise balance in their scoring methodologies. This is precisely where this configuration feels at its best. Throw in the power of a flagship-grade chipset and a large battery in the spec sheet, and you’ve got a camera that you not only want to rely on for 24 hours straight but arguably for more than just your first golden hour.
Bottom Line as Early Shooting Sessions Wrap Up
You can see Hasselblad’s fingerprints in the way these files look, and the 200MP telephoto plus extender opens up compositions that felt off limits on a phone.
What you get isn’t photos that are louder but ones that are truer in color and whose reach and refinement have been packed into the same pocket for the first time.
I don’t throw the phrase “best I’ve ever taken on a phone” around lightly. But — after pixel-peeping and printing out a few favorites — that’s where I’ve landed. If this is the future for mobile imaging — optics before computation — consider me sold.
