Hasselblad Teleconverter kit

The kit is something you will have to purchase separately for ₹30,000 which is quite steep in my opinion if you don’t know what you want to do with the thing. The value of such a kit is up for debate, and how much cash you’re willing to spend on it is an entirely separate conversation. There’s no market benchmark here in India for such a kit, and something tangible yet nuanced as optics and glass quality is not something that can be measured by novice photographers like myself. This is why, in the photography world, some lenses cost more than the camera itself. For reference, Moment, the American camera accessory company, will sell you a 58mm lens for the Apple iPhone 17 smartphone for $150 USD.

Regardless, Oppo is willing to sell this kit, and if you’re willing to buy it, here's what you should know. It is a three-piece set. First, the 23cm lens has a reassuring metal construction. It has the heft and feel of something that oozes quality. Second, you get a thin plastic case with a carbon fibre design and a MagSafe magnet ring within it that lets you use Apple MagSafe accessories with the case. A clever addition, since the phone itself doesn’t have these magnets, and if you’re shooting a lot with this camera kit, you can magnetically attach power banks (the phone supports wireless charging) and SSDs. Third, you get a metal plate which slides on top of the camera module, effectively covering the other lenses and reducing light leak from the environment. It has a punch-hole cutout that aligns with the telephoto lens and features a quick-release button for the teleconverter lens. All of this together works to magnify the telephoto camera’s optical range by 3.28x.

Bear in mind that the kit is a three-piece set, which means if you lose any one component, you will not be able to use the lens. There’s also a lens bracket in the box that can help support the long lens when you’re shooting with a tripod.

So what’s it like to use?

The burning question in everyone’s mind is: is it any good? Honestly, it’s amazing. This is a teleconverter kit that increases the optical range of the smartphone’s telephoto camera. So it’s imperative that you keep both the camera lens and the teleconverter glass clean and free of dust. Any fingerprints on the camera lens will ruin the image quality.

With the basics out of the way, the bottom line is that the Hasselblad teleconverter kit is a serious kit for photographers. It has its strengths and a few missed opportunities. Firstly, no amount of digital zoom comparison comes close to an actual physical lens. The 230mm zoom from the Oppo Find X9 Pro’s teleconverter kit versus the Apple iPhone 17 Pro’s 8x digital zoom is not even worth a comparison simply because the digital zoom on the iPhone has substantially less detail and clarity, and has a lot of noise. Oppo’s giant lens attachment is clearly winning any comparison here in terms of clarity and detail. No amount of Google AI upscaling from the new Pixels can bring this level of resolution.

However, the 230mm focal length works through a dedicated 'Teleconverter Mode' baked into the camera UI that basically corrects the lens-on-lens inversion issue. You can shoot videos and take photos in this mode, but the output is a 9MP cropped shot of the 200MP sensor. Why? Because Oppo is zooming into the frame a little bit to compensate for handshake and keep the viewfinder steady.

If you move away from the 'Teleconverter Mode' in the camera and use the 3x lens directly from the camera’s UI, you will find an upside-down image, which is uncomfortable to use. There’s nothing to gain by doing this, and the only mode where taking an upside-down photo might be worth the effort is the Hasselblad Hi-Res mode. Here, Oppo lets you take full advantage of the 200MP sensor but also makes you wait a few seconds for the shot to render and bin. I wish the 'Teleconverter Mode' had the 200MP toggle baked into it as well. However, the problem is that any minor hand movements get amplified over the 23cm lens, and most of my 200MP shots from the teleconverter kit were blurry. So, I am not too upset over the omission. However, XPAN mode definitely has value with this Teleconverter kit, simply because the XPAN filter, especially the Black and White one, is not technically a filter and cannot be added later in the image. A photo must be taken in the XPAN mode to get that dreamy Hasselblad Black and White image with the softness and grain, emulated to look exceptionally calming on the eyes. However, Oppo uses a dual exposure for image stacking here that takes a second or two for the photo to shoot, and that long time (in the photography world) is amplified over the long lens. This is the same problem as the Hasselblad Hi-Res mode but can be fixed with a tripod and a lens bracket, which Oppo so nicely gives you in the box.

So how are the images?

In a single word: amazing. And we don’t say that lightly. You can pixel-peep all you want, comparing the skin tones and details with Pixels and iPhones, but the reality is that a 230mm optical equivalent is unlike anything in the market right now (until Vivo launches their version of this rig).

Colors are bright and punchy, with an effort to lean towards realism while also boosting the saturation a bit for wider customer acceptance. The teleconverter doesn’t impact the colors of Oppo’s 200MP sensor, and you’ll see the photos have slightly warmer and brighter tones, because that’s what the masses prefer. If you’re a camera purist, you might prefer a Pixel or Samsung for better tonal neutrality.

The Hasselblad 200MP camera is optimized very tastefully here. It’s never oversharpened or too aggressive with the detail, which was an issue with earlier Samsung phones. The details are well preserved, and the skin tones are extremely well judged compared to previous Oppo phones. In comparison with iPhone and Samsung, Oppo does lean a bit too much into the brighter and vivid color space, but it’s not neon or borderline unpleasant. Faces, however, are a bit too flat for my liking. I was hoping the camera would let the shadows work their magic, but this is tuned to favor the masses who prefer clear and brighter images of their faces, and you can tell that this is a deliberate choice by Oppo. That said, it’s nowhere near as alarming as you might be reading. I am just nitpicking here.

Very rarely, you can see the GPU and NPU of the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 struggle to judge the exposure correctly for simple point-and-shoot. You can attack the shutter like a sports photographer, and sometimes all shots will be perfect, and sometimes each shot will be processed differently than the others. That uncertainty, and how Oppo’s algorithm judges the scene, is always tricky. However, this is a computational photography issue more than a hardware setback, because you can really go wild with the Master mode and change the shutter speed to capture crisper shots.

However, the image is upside down there as well. Oppo has only given us inverted image correction in the 'Teleconverter Mode,' and if you’re shooting manually in the Master mode, there’s no way to correct the viewfinder’s upside-down image issue. And if you're a photographer, you would want more control over your camera’s settings through the manual mode, so I think Oppo should really add an option there as well.

I love taking photos of people and faces, and I feel the 230mm focal length is absolutely jaw-dropping for such instances. You unlock a level of foreground and background freedom that was only possible with dedicated system cameras. The sheer subject isolation and perspective compression from these images is enough to make your head spin. Again, there’s no point comparing these shots to traditional smartphone cameras, because without an optical lens, these shots are very unlikely to be achieved on a competitor's smartphone.

This is the potential of this kit. The Oppo Find X9 Pro Hasselblad Teleconverter kit unlocks a very unique, never-before-seen photography experience on a smartphone, and by that virtue alone, it’s my favorite camera phone of this year.

Video is superb

Photos are just the tip of the iceberg, Oppo’s teleconverter lens for videos is even more remarkable than photos. The level of subject separation from the lens for videos is simply unmatched. While I wouldn’t recommend shooting without a tripod, you can still use this with one hand and get a good amount of stabilisation.

However, my problems with Oppo’s teleconverter lens haven't changed even after switching to video. Firstly there’s no way to shoot RAW videos so if you want to colour match your videos with other cameras in your arsenal. Secondly, the lens only works with the 200MP 3x telephoto lens of the smartphone. There’s no way to adjust the mounting plate for the primary 50MP which comes with a Sony LYT828 sensor. Which in my opinion has a fast shutter and more light capture. If Oppo wants to seriously target the photography audience with this product and the lens kit, it needs to add more features that are more tuned with an enthusiast audience that this caters to and put more joy in the pockets of photographers and videographers alike.

Regardless of these missed opportunities, the Oppo Find X9 Pro with the Hasselblad teleconverter kit remains a solid option for smartphone photography enthusiasts and purists alike. This is a useful tool and Oppo will only continue to polish it in the coming years if there’s an audience for it, which I think there is but only time will tell.

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Oppo Find X9 Pro Hasselblad Teleconverter kit review