A mere glimpse of a triple-lens phone camera placed face down on the table used to signal good taste, keen interest in photography, stupid money, or all of the above. That calculus is changing, though, and the agents aren’t coming out of Cupertino. The Chinese giant BBK , which owns brands like Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, and others, has been feeding its R&D departments with a seemingly unending supply of resources to come up with the greatest camera phones ever. So much so that it would be safe to call them cameras with WiFi and 5G connectivity at this point! The narrative of Chinese brands being fast followers is a tired one, and in fact, contrary to reality when you consider two of the newest releases.
This week specifically has seen the launch of two flagships from sister brands Vivo and Oppo, with the X300 Ultra and Find X9 Ultra, respectively. The Vivo X300 Ultra, built around what the company is calling the ZEISS Master Lenses Collection, uses prime focal lengths like 14mm, 35mm, and 85mm on the phone itself, and the option of adding two external telephoto extender lenses offering 200mm and 400mm capabilities. It comes with three rear cameras featuring two 200MP sensors for the primary and periscope telephoto lens, and a 50MP ultrawide at 14mm. If you happen to also pony up for the 400mm Vivo Zeiss telephoto extender Gen 2 Ultra, with digital cropping, it can produce a wild 1600mm equivalent reach. That’s almost the equivalent of 70x optical zoom. Of course, with computational aids, you could get some weird artefacts like a three-winged bird, but thankfully, Vivo gives the option to keep “enhancements” off completely. While they work well on monuments and buildings, sharpening out edges and etching in more detail, humans and animals are outside their realm of magic.
Sure, it’s not the point-and-shoot that always stays in your pocket, but if you’re willing to put in 30 seconds to set it up, you can push the boundaries of mobile imaging into professional-grade optical territory. For context, the iPhone 17 Pro Max tops out at 200mm of optical-quality zoom from its tetraprism 8x telephoto mode. The Vivo, with its clip-on extender, reaches twice that distance before it even switches to computational assistance.
Meanwhile, Oppo arrived with something equally ambitious with its Find X9 Ultra, which introduces a 50MP 10x optical zoom telephoto enabled by a "quintuple prism" periscope system that folds light five times to accommodate a 10x lens while reducing module size by around 30 per cent. Alongside this are dual Hasselblad 200MP cameras: A main sensor featuring the 1/1.12-inch Sony LYTIA 901 and a 3x super-portrait telephoto housing a massive 1/1.28-inch sensor claimed to be the largest in its category. Taking a page from Vivo, Oppo, also, offers an optional Hasselblad 300mm Explorer Teleconverter, a 16-element external lens that mounts to the telephoto module and enables up to 13x optical zoom. It might be easy to attribute the legendary photography brands like Zeiss and Hasselblad to mere marketing gimmicks and while it may have been true in the early days of their collaboration, these days it's not decorative.
Built on five years of intensive R&D collaboration, the New-Generation Hasselblad Master Mode bypasses the aggressive tone mapping typical of smartphones, ensuring photographers capture ultra-detailed, natural images free from artificial over-processing. Support for RAW capture across six distinct focal lengths is possible, so choose your pick between 14mm, 23mm, 47mm, 70mm, 139mm, and 230mm. That is the kind of creative latitude that, until recently, you would only find in a dedicated mirrorless system. For content creators, Oppo adds O-Log2 profile support, ACES workflow compatibility, and the ability to import or burn in LUTs directly.
The Find X9 Ultra's design is inspired by the Hasselblad X2D 100C Earth Explorer. Although now out of production, it is a classic pro 100MP medium-format model featuring classic leather finishing, sharp metal trim, and orange accents that make it feel, unmistakably, like a baby Hasselblad. It offers luxury and class as few other phones can.
So, to the question that hangs over all of this: Does choosing a Vivo or Oppo over an iPhone 17 Pro Max make it more of a flex, or less? Well, in the right context, it honestly is more. The iPhone 17 Pro Max remains the default symbol of luxury and peak smartphone, recognised globally with the same social status ranking. Apple's control of its software ecosystem, extremely tight tolerances in quality control, and its role as a cultural totem are real. Choosing it is not a failure of imagination; it’s just the safest and most dependable choice. Their new triple 48MP lens system is a genuine improvement, and no other company integrates multi-sensor zoom transitions as seamlessly, especially in video. There are no colour shifts going from one lens to the other, and the accuracy of the iPhone screen matches that of a colour grading monitor more closely than any Android phone.
But for the prosumer who actually shoots in RAW, who travels with intent, who thinks about focal lengths before thinking about filters, the Vivo X300 Ultra and Oppo Find X9 Ultra represent a clear hardware-first commitment to the craft. Something that the iPhone still cannot do with its triple-lens camera system. When you pull out a phone with the extender attached, you speak directly to other people who know what an apochromatic lens design means, and why it matters.
Speciality phones are no longer designed to be halo products for brands headed for oblivion. Vivo shipped 46 million units in China alone in 2025, while Oppo moved 42.8 million units. When you merge industrial-scale manufacturing with the R&D budgets and optical partnerships to match, you move from “boutique” to mainstream in no time. The era of dismissing a Chinese phone because it was "not quite there yet" is over. It ended quietly, somewhere between the X200 Ultra and the Find X8 series, and most of the West simply was not paying attention.
Apple and Samsung battled for years on marketing grounds, claiming rights over optical supremacy. But we have photography legends entering the arena that come with genuine authority of medium format cameras, space missions, and lens-making legacies. They are also no longer ‘budget’ alternatives, with price tags upwards of INR1.5 lakhs with the extender lens kits, making them a serious investment for a narrow band of dedicated shooters. The Vivo X300 Ultra retails at Rs. 1,59,999 standalone, with the full advanced mobile photography kit reaching INR 2,09,999 — figures that put it firmly in professional tool territory, and will reasonably give many buyers pause.