Oppo Find X9 Ultra review: excellent camera in luxury jacket

Oppo Find X9 Ultra: our experiences

The camera in a smartphone has been an important asset for many manufacturers for years: many people don't want to lug a big camera around their neck (anymore). And they often don't need to, as smartphone cameras are getting better and better. Yet there is often still a lot of difference in camera quality. We showed this earlier, for instance, in the comparison between the Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. The differences were huge, which we did not expect beforehand.

After Xiaomi with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, OnePlus with the OnePlus 15 and Samsung with the Galaxy S26 Ultra, we can expect another true high-end this year: and that is Oppo's Find X9 Ultra. For the first time, Oppo is releasing an Ultra model in Europe. The new smartphone follows a few months after the Find X9 Pro was released. This device already garnered high marks, which we wrote about in the Oppo Find X9 Pro review. In recent weeks, we have taken the Find X9 Ultra into daily use, and on trips. Can you leave your big camera at home with this device?

Unboxing

Where packaging for your new phone used to be exciting, things have changed. Only the essentials are included, where you used to be able to rummage endlessly through the extras. This is no different with the Oppo Find X9 Ultra. We see the device itself, a USB adapter, USB cable and some paperwork. Unfortunately, even for this amount, you have to provide your own case. A plastic screen protector is stuck on the screen.

Design and interface

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra's design is one of the key features of this smartphone. Besides a striking orange colour, there is also Tundra Umbor, a grey-green colour with a faux leather finish. It provides a fine grip and also looks very premium. Also, the large circular camera module provides a point behind which you can rest your finger. This too makes for a bit more grip.

The screen is flat, so no curved edges. Handy if you prefer a glass screen protector yourself. The screen size comes out to 6.82 inches, giving you a 4K resolution. The screen is nice, can be bright on sunny days and in the dark hours it can be dimmed pleasantly enough. The volume key and power button are on the right side of the phone.

Unlike many other smartphones, there are two additional buttons on the Find X9 Ultra. On the left, this is a hotkey, which you can use to use Oppo AI. However, fortunately, you can also personalise it. This allows you to set it to turn on the torch, for example, or to set your phone to silent, vibrate or sound. On the right, you'll find a large orange button, which can be used when shooting. This serves, for example, to zoom in, or to actually capture the image. You can also quickly launch the camera app by pressing this button.

In practice, this button turns out to cause quite a bit of irritation. For instance, the gallery is quickly filled with photos taken while (accidentally) touching the button. In addition, it happens quite often that you accidentally zoom in while holding it while shooting.

Interface

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra's interface is called ColorOS. This is the name of the skin that lies over Android. Meanwhile, the skin is almost identical to that of OxygenOS, which you can know again from OnePlus. We also see Apple's influence here. As we see here and there the so-called Liquid Glass elements. Although I personally find the interface less sleek than on, say, a Pixel, it is excellent to work with. You can also personalise things extensively, such as the lock screen, the Always On Display and, of course, your home screens.

The menu, called the app drawer, collects your installed apps in alphabetical order. There is also an on-screen option that lets you search directly by the colour of app icons. There is also a search function.

Communication and multimedia

Calling, texting and internet browsing. Of course, it's all possible on the Find X9 Ultra. Call quality is excellent and of a high standard. Which is nice. There is room for two SIM cards and eSIM. Calls can be made via Google's own phone app, which we know from many other Android devices. For browsing, you can use the Chrome browser, although Oppo also offers its own browser on its device.

The smartphone can handle many networks, as you would expect from a high-end smartphone. There is WiFi 7, 5G and Bluetooth. There is also infrared, so you can use the Oppo as a remote control.

Multimedia

From a high-end smartphone, you can expect things to be fine in terms of multimedia. This is then also the case with Oppo. The Find X9 Ultra is excellent at letting you enjoy both images and sound. The phone displays images brilliantly and even on sunny days, this is perfect. In screen colour mode, you can choose to adjust the colour temperature. By default, there is a slightly yellow, warm hue on the screen. If you switch the colour mode to another setting, it becomes whiter. You can also go in many more directions in terms of colour tones, using the colour wheel, which offers a so-called 'colour picker'.

In terms of sound quality, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra is also well equipped. We do sometimes miss some warmth and more bass in the speakers; but it's not bad.

Camera

The camera, that's why you probably buy the Find X9 Ultra. If you're shelling out this high amount for the Find X9 Ultra, of course it should be fine. In the Find X9 Pro review, the camera already managed to prove itself. The Ultra's five (Hasselblad) cameras add to this. First, there is a 200-megapixel main camera, a 200-megapixel periscope lens with 3x zoom and a 50-megapixel periscope lens for 10x zoom. Finally, there is a 3.2-megapixel colour assist sensor to help you capture colours correctly. If you want to zoom even further, you can choose to screw a special zoom lens adapter onto the camera module. A special kit is available for this. Unfortunately, we did not have access to this during the review period.

We used the Oppo Find X9 Ultra camera intensively for weeks, including during a visit to beautiful Sweden. But we also shot the necessary photos in our own country. How do you like the Oppo's photo quality? We can say that the Oppo takes really stunning photos. Especially with depth of field, and thus blurring the background, the X9 Ultra really does a fantastic job.

At night, we also see beautiful photos, with good exposure and high dynamic range. Even zoomed in, the Find X9 Ultra manages to hold its own just fine. Anyway, the zoom function manages to make impressive images that are full of detail. We can see this in the picture of the great tit, for instance.

As for portrait photos, the Find X9 Ultra is spot-on. Here too, we see the very good effect of depth of field. The selfie camera also gives you the opportunity to take great photos. Photos we took with the Oppo, we have collected for you in the digital photo album.

Video camera

In the camera app, you immediately have the option to film. Here you also have additional options; fireworks and stage, the latter of which can come in handy for shooting a video at a concert. As we didn't have a concert planned, we couldn't test this feature. Of course, we did test the video camera itself. The images are very sharp and colourful and of high quality. If we have to nitpick, we noticed that while zooming, the colours sometimes jump, and they are not always the same. We took the video below with the Oppo Find X9 Ultra.

Performance and battery life

Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, we have already seen in several devices. The high-end Find X9 also houses this processor. The speed of the device is absolutely fine. The 12GB of working memory also contributes to that. For storage, you have 512GB available as standard.

One downside is the huge amount of bloatware found on the Oppo Find X9 Ultra. For a $1,600 device, the amount is ridiculous. Apart from Oppo apps like the theme shop, music player, AI Mind Space (which you can barely do anything with), a translator, Zen Space and much more, third-party apps are also pre-installed on the smartphone. So we see a game called Arrows Go! but also apps like Autodoc, Temu and Amazon. Fortunately, you can uninstall these, but for this amount of money, don't expect so much clutter.

Battery

The time has come for smartphones to get bigger and bigger batteries. Whereas previously this was often with a battery capacity of around 5,000 mAh, lately this capacity is increasing. This is due to the use of so-called silicon-carbon batteries. These have a higher energy density, which means that in the same space, more battery can be stuffed. The Oppo Find X9 Ultra also features a large battery. It has a capacity of 7050 mAh.

In practice, this means you can get through the day just fine. Screen time comes down to around 6 hours with mainly 5G usage, and towards 8 hours on mainly WiFi usage. What is noticeable is that camera use in particular chops up battery consumption. But still enough to shoot for a whole day on holiday, for example. Charging is fast, but fastest with the optionally available charger. The maximum supported charging speed comes out to 100W, with 50W wireless charging also supported.

Update policy

Updates are increasingly important when choosing a smartphone. Especially for the more expensive devices, several manufacturers promise a long update period. For a device with a recommended retail price of 1700 euros, you naturally expect a generous update policy. That fly doesn't quite hold true for the Oppo Find X9 Ultra. Oppo promises five Android updates and six years of security updates. That's less than the seven years for both that Google and Samsung promise. It's not bad, but for this price, it could have been upgraded quite a bit.

Review

We used the Oppo Find X9 Ultra for about three weeks as a daily-driver, that is, as an all-day device. The interface takes some getting used to if you're coming from a Pixel, for example, but the software is well put together. In terms of personalisation, you have a lot of options. The screen also delivers nice images and the battery life is fine. But most impressive, of course, is the camera. That will also be the reason why you buy this smartphone.

Want to start taking photos yourself with the Find X9 Ultra? The smartphone is on sale at Belsimpel, Mobile, MediaMarkt, Coolblue and providers KPN and Odido.