Samsung beware: Oppo's new 10x zoom camera is next-level impressive

Now that is one fancy-looking, cross-sectional diagram of the Oppo Find X9 Ultra's new zoom camera – which will be revealed in full in three weeks time, on 21 April.

It's also the sort of illustration that ought to have Samsung quaking in its boots. Despite launching the superb Galaxy S26 Ultra just last month, the speed of change among the best phones is only accelerating at pace.

Case in point: Oppo has already released the 5-star Find X9 Pro, which houses an impressive camera array. The Find X9 Ultra, however, looks as though it wants that to be yesterday's news.

Described (admittedly by the brand itself) as "the most significant breakthrough in Oppo's history," this new Ultra zoom lens does appear to move the goal posts. As you can see from the main image, the solution bounces light five times before it reaches the sensor.

This is significant, as it means the light is covering a greater distance – and distance in this instance effectively equates to focal length, i.e. a 'longer' zoom – without this hugely impacting the scale of the camera unit.

When the first periscope zooms were introduced into phones, they effectively took a lens 'barrel' and turned it sideways, 'absorbing' the required distance for focus without rendering a phone's camera unit centimetres deep – as would be ineligible for most pocketable designs.

Bouncing light once is one thing. Doing so multiple times is quite another, as each surface, or lens, used to do so adds further interruptions and potential blemishes. Light can 'split', creating colour aberrations, for example. It can diffuse, not arriving as pin-point sharp as from its original source.

The brand's 'Ultra-Sensing Optical-Zoom Telephoto', however, uses what the brand describes as a 'Pristine Optical Path Architecture', meticulously crafting the prism "from three precision pieces separated by an industry-first nanometer-scale diaphragm and a specialised air capsule, ensuring the image data hitting the sensor is exceptionally pure".

It doesn't end there, though. Oppo's research and development teams have also engineered a new optical image stabilisation system, although details of how this functions are limited at this stage.

Add to all this impressive engineering that the Find X9 Ultra's 10x zoom camera is also 50-megapixels and Hasselblad approved and you might be looking at the year's most impressive phone-camera breakthrough already.