Oppo resuscitates 10× zoom, this time with hasselblad’s name on the lens

Oppo wants the shot heard around the world: a 50-megapixel, 10× periscope that can read the label on a wine bottle from the other side of the plaza. The Find X9 Ultra, still wrapped in factory plastic until April, will be the first phone to carry that glass outside China, and the company is already planting flags in Barcelona, London and Madrid.

The headline sounds like 2019 all over again. Six years ago the Reno 10× Zoom offered a hybrid 13-MP periscope and Huawei’s P40 Pro+ went full optical at the same magnification. Samsung doubled down with the S22 Ultra, then the industry quietly buried the module: thickness, cost and thermal throttling turned the spec sheet into a graveyard. Flagships settled for 3× or 5×, marketing departments invented the euphemism “lossless”, and reviewers stopped asking where the big glass had gone.

Why oppo thinks the moment is now

Two things changed. Sensor brawn now compensates for focal length: the new Sony LYT-900 inside the Ultra can crop a 5× frame and still spit out 12 usable megapixels. Second, Hasselblad’s colour scientists demanded a bigger prism in exchange for co-branding; Oppo’s engineers carved 0.4 mm out of the battery stack and wedged the prism sideways. The result is a 240 mm-equivalent lens that does not bulge like a periscope in a submarine—at least that is the pitch executives repeated like a rosary outside Hall 2 at MWC.

Spain becomes the test track. Previous Ultra models never left Chinese e-commerce; this time Oppo will stage pop-up galleries in Barcelona’s El Born and Madrid’s Literary Quarter, inviting street photographers to print wall-sized crops. The subtext: convince Europeans that a phone can replace the Fuji GFX they haul up Montjuïc at dawn.

Early samples, embargoed but circulating on Weibo, show a cyclist’s face razor-sharp at 100 m, skin pores intact, sunset bleeding into ochre without the magenta shift that dogged the Reno era. Still, computational photography, not glass, did the heavy lifting: multi-frame HDR stacked 18 exposures in 0.8 s, the Qualcomm ISP juggling 3.2 gigapixels per second. Pure optics? Hardly. The marketing deck omits that footnote.

The gamble behind the glass

Oppo ships fewer than 2 % of Europe’s premium handsets, according to Canalys. Reviving a feature the market abandoned is either arrogance or desperation. One supply-chain source says the periscope costs US$38 per unit, double the 5× module in the Find X9 Pro. Add Hasselblad’s licence fee and the bill of materials climbs past US$550 before the box, the charger or the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 even enter the spreadsheet.

Yet margins may matter less than optics—of the political kind. Oppo’s parent BBK needs a flagship halo in the EU after OnePlus retreated to the mid-range and Vivo exited last year. A 10× zoom that lands on the front page of El País is cheaper than a Super Bowl slot and more dignified than another price war.

Consumers will decide whether the resurrection is visionary or merely necromancy. History says the industry ditched 10× for good reasons: thick pockets, overheating sensors, shots that looked painted rather than taken. Oppo wagers that better silicon, smarter algorithms and a Swedish brand in chrome lettering can turn a parlor trick into a daily tool. Pre-orders open in April; the price starts at €1,399. If the gamble fails, the periscope goes back into the drawer for another half-decade.