About 16 years ago, smartphones utterly decimated the camera industry. It's taken all this time for the market to even remotely recover – and it has done so just in time for the most powerful phone cameras ever made to challenge traditional cameras all over again.
So, can the best camera phone of 2026 outperform the best mirrorless camera on the market when it comes to photography? And I'm not talking about an iPhone versus a random Canon here.
I'm talking about two best-in-class photo machines built on the same industry-leading color science: the 200MP Oppo Find X9 Ultra with its Hasselblad Master camera Mode versus the 100MP Hasselblad X2D II 100C with its Hasselblad Natural Color Solution.
ABOVE: Watch the video and see who won the shootout!
Of course, while both systems are built on the same imaging pipeline, there are important differences – not least sensor size. The X2D II packs a massive medium format sensor, while you could put all four of the X9's sensors together (those being a 1/1.12-inch, 1/1.28-inch, 1/1.95-inch and 1/2.75-inch) and they still wouldn't be as big.
Four sensors also means four lenses (and cameras) on the phone: a main 200MP 23mm f/1.5, a 50MP 14mm f/2.0 ultrawide, and a pair of telephotos in the form of a 200MP 70mm f/2.2 and a 230mm f/3.5 – all equivalent 35mm focal lengths.
So to make this comparison as fair as possible, given that all those lenses are fixed in the phone, I paired the camera with a single zoom lens: the Hasselblad XCD 35-100E, which gave me an equivalent 27-78mm f/2.8-4 focal range (I left the 230mm lens out of the equation, for sake of ease).
Rather than setting up fixed scenes, I thought the most neutral thing to do was take both systems on a gentle stroll (around The Regent's Park in London, England) to see how they performed in spontaneous real-world conditions.
Oppo Find X9 Ultra vs Hasselblad X2D II
There's no doubt about it: the Oppo is hands-down the best camera phone you can buy right now. Between its excellent lenses and the Hasselblad Master image tuning, this is the most "camera-like" performance you can get on a phone.
In ideal conditions, I think you would be very hard pressed to tell that its photos weren't taken on a mirrorless camera… but what about non-ideal conditions like blazing direct sunlight, harsh contrasty backlight and hue-torturing green grass gardens?
This is why we always field test equipment in our reviews on Digital Camera World, because fixed setups and carefully controlled studio shoots only tell you so much.
I dare say that, in a straight-up portrait or landscape or still life shoot, the results might be much closer. But head to head, in unflattering wildcard conditions, the Hasselblad truly outclasses the Oppo.
Colors
The first thing that jumped out to me was the color. If you've ever tried to shoot grass, gardens or flowers, you'll know how tricky it can be for even the best cameras to render authentic hues and tones.
Green plays havoc with most cameras' imaging engines, but Hasselblad cameras are renowned for their ultra-faithful reproduction of even these challenging colors. However, the Oppo would start to struggle when magenta tones were introduced to the scene, as you can see in the above image of the bees feeding on flowers.
Indeed, the Oppo is apt to skew towards magenta in general – and it can be prone to punching up the blues to compensate, which is visible in the shot of the parked Mini where the highlights are overcooked with blue tones.
Dynamic range
That "overcooking" is a byproduct of the Oppo's heavy reliance on computational HDR (high dynamic range), which uses software-based masking and stacking to artificially boost the shadows while dimming the highlights.
In the crosswalk / zebra crossing shot above, you can see that this does really funky things to skies, looking like you've used the Magic Wand selection tool in Photoshop to do a very crude sky selection.
In the top image of the backlit building in the garden, the Oppo is trying so hard to HDR its way to even exposure that it has rendered the building completely flat – there's no sense of shadow or dimension. It's like the Shadows slider has been cranked all the way up while the Highlights sliger has been dragged right down.
The middle shot of the parked BMW is probably the happiest medium, but in all three images you can see that the Hasselblad – with 15.3 stops of dynamic range – is able to render faithful tonality without any computational correction.
Lenses
Even without adding the fantastic 300mm teleconverter, the Oppo's integrated 230mm telephoto lens absolutely smokes the 78mm maximum reach of the Hasselblad lens, as you can see in the top image of the water feature.
However, while the Oppo's 230mm camera produces a 50MP image, the Hasselblad captures images at 102MP.
And thanks to the superior optical formula of the much larger lens, coupled with the superior optical performance of the much larger sensor, you can perform a like-for-like crop into the Hassy image and actually achieve superior detail – as evidenced by the middle image.
Speaking of optical performance, the lenses on the Oppo (like all smartphones) is very prone to lens flare. But as you can see in the above image, thanks to premium lens coatings, the Hasselblad lens wasn't affected at all – even without deploying the lens hood.
Bokeh / blur
As if there was any doubt, the Oppo simply can't match the Hasselblad when it comes to subject separation – aka blurry backgrounds, aka shallow depth of field, aka bokehliciousness.
Its sensors are so small that they struggle to achieve a shallow depth of field, even though its lenses are pretty fast (ranging from f/1.5-3.5) while the XCD lens on the Hasselblad is more sedate (at f/2.8-4).
While you can "cheat" background blur by increasing the distance between your subject(s) and background, you can see just how much more blur is achieved with the Hasselblad when shooting things that are close together.
Long exposure
Some might think this one is a bit unfair, but since we passed a beautiful waterfall I wanted to shoot a long exposure image where the flowing water turns silky smooth.
This requires shooting with a very slow shutter speed, which typically means using a tripod to keep the image steady – and in sunny conditions it usually necessitates an ND filter, too, as a slow shutter speed will quickly overexpose the image.
Sadly, I simply couldn't juggle the shutter and aperture enough on the Oppo to do anything other than freeze the water into unpleasant, static splashes – not the effect I wanted.
As you can see above, though, the Hasselblad had no problem shooting handheld for a full second – a piece of cake, thanks to the generous lens aperture and ten stops of in-body image stabilization – giving me the silky water I wanted.
So I tried cheating and slapped an ND filter onto the Oppo – but even then, as you can see, the phone wasn't able to shoot a handheld full second exposure without blurring the image (and blowing it out), as it simply lacks the stabilization and exposure finesse of the Hasselblad.
Verdict
I know that this reads very one-sidedly, so I feel it's important to say that – in its own right – the Oppo Find X9 Ultra performed heroically. I took a few pictures on my iPhone during the same shoot, and honestly it's embarrassing just how much better Oppo's camera tech is than Apple's.
The X9 Ultra takes impressively "camera-like" photographs and offers an amazing degree of manual control and impressive color processing. However, in a straight shootout with the X2D II, there's no contest here.
The Hasselblad is the finest stills camera ever made, boasting a gigantic medium format sensor with 100MP resolution, 15.3 stops of dynamic range, 10 stops of image stabilization and some of the finest lenses money can buy. As good as the Oppo is, there's simply no way it can match that firepower.
But let's add some context here. The fact that a £1,400 phone can come as close as it does to a £6,400 camera – with a £4,100 lens on the front – is absolutely astonishing.
Yes, the Hasselblad is better. But is it £9,100 better? I'll let you be the judge of that…
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