- 6 months ago
Marques Brownlee examines the Oppo Find X9 Ultra to explore whether modern flagships have achieved a definitive peak for slab-style smartphones. By evaluating display, battery, performance, build, and camera standards, Marques Brownlee highlights the evolving balance between computational photography and the physical limitations of mobile imaging systems.
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00:02so this is peak slab phone for now anyway we got to talk about it so this is the oppo
00:09find x9 ultra
00:10by the time you see this i've been testing it for almost a month it's their newest maxed out
00:14flagship that makes samsung's s26 ultra feel not so ultra snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 7 000 milliamp
00:21hour battery 6.8 inch super bright oled and an insane 200 megapixel camera system on the back
00:27it is ridiculous and it's got me thinking a lot about peak slab phone which is of course the moving
00:34goal post see i called oppo find n6 peak foldable a couple weeks ago because it just feels like we
00:40finally reached the watermark of just being a great phone that happens to fold in half they'd one by one
00:46engineered away all of the downsides of a foldable from the front bezels to the cameras to the crease
00:52to get to that point and that's really exciting peak slab phone though it's a little harder to
00:58define like there's obviously going to be a better slab phone in a year but you know there's so many
01:03things that make a great smartphone and as far as special watermarks that we're trying to achieve
01:10i think we've achieved basically all of them except for one and hot take we're not going to achieve
01:17that last one so hear me out if you've if you've been following smartphones like me for the past
01:21decade plus you've seen lots of trends come and go and then some of them stick around so curved screens
01:27they just came and went pop-up cameras they came and went too ultra wide cameras though those stuck
01:33around and so now as boring as it is we've we've kind of settled on this final form of a
01:38default
01:39high-end maxed out flagship smartphone easiest way to see it is to just look at my five pillars of
01:45a great
01:45smartphone i've always said if one phone can have great display great battery great build great
01:52performance and great cameras like if you can ace all five of those things then you have a great phone
01:57now each of these things you know is exciting at different times as we get different innovations and
02:01they're all changing in different rates but for the past 20 years all of these categories have felt
02:06like they're chasing something that like drives everything to get better so display right let's just take
02:13that as the first example everyone for the entire history of smartphones has just wanted a screen
02:18on a phone that just looks good all the time that's the watermark and so over the years of smartphone
02:24screens they've gotten bigger and bigger they've gotten thinner bezels you know they tried curved edges
02:30for a while but it turns out that wasn't it and now we've essentially settled on a large flat bright
02:36OLED high refresh rate high resolution fingerprint reader underneath and a whole punch up at the top for a selfie
02:42camera
02:42they look good outside in the sun now because they get insanely bright and they also look good in the
02:47dark because they all get all the way down to one nit and have high frequency pwm dimming so we
02:52still get
02:53higher peak brightness numbers and contrast ratios and occasionally special features like the privacy
02:57display in the bleeding edge phones but for the most part now in flagships they have great displays
03:06box checked watermark achieved so then what about battery okay everybody wants a great battery in their
03:11smartphone what does that mean honestly just i want my phone to last all day no matter what then that's
03:17a great battery now when we first got 4g phones i remember my htc thunderbolt didn't even last till
03:23the end of the school day they were terrible batteries but phones have gotten more efficient and batteries
03:28have gotten bigger and more dense so there was like a 3000 milliamp hour barrier that all these
03:32flagships hit and then 3500 and it just kept getting better and better the average screen on time for a
03:38good
03:38phone before it died went from two hours to three to four and then five anybody spending five hours
03:45on their phone in a single day to kill it that's getting a bit ridiculous but you could still do
03:52it
03:52i guess but then silicon carbon batteries came along like in the last two years and so in a few
03:57short
03:57months the normal flagship battery size went from 5000 milliamp hours to 6000 and even higher than that
04:03the x9 ultra here has a 7050 milliamp hour battery so now these phones are just they're just too good
04:10to die in a single day regular use they're gonna work no matter what i gave my battery award last
04:15year to a phone that could get me seven to eight hours of screen on time every single day most
04:20of
04:20the time that's actually a two-day phone like i'll end a normal day with 60 left and then i
04:23just don't
04:24even charge it overnight but then if you do actually kill it in a day with some insane day then
04:28they'll have
04:28like 100 watt wired charging or 50 watt wireless charging like this with the right accessories so
04:33basically we got there these phones have incredible batteries kind of no matter what
04:38box checked watermark reached now great performance is maybe a little more subjective since that includes
04:43the software and people have different preferences there but generally if you have a high-end chip
04:48smooth animations and a responsive display keep that thing updated for a long time and most people are
04:54gonna feel pretty good about it the improvements we get year over year these days are like in the
04:58highest end that you might notice in like graphically intensive games or benchmark scores basically
05:03so i you know performance is definitely box checked and then great build quality is just i mean it's all
05:09there now metal rails square built like a tank slightly improved glass every year that's still glass and
05:17then ip69 dust and water resistance as long as the design isn't ugly we're all good here so then there's
05:23great cameras and this is the one where we get kind of stuck a little bit because okay we want
05:29great
05:29cameras what what does that mean exactly you've probably noticed every smartphone presentation now
05:34is more camera than ever it used to be like one or two slides now a new phone is like
05:3820 slides about
05:40just camera stuff actually just did this little experiment that i've been posting on shorts and
05:43maybe leave a like or comment on this video if you want to see like a long form breakdown of
05:48it all but we
05:48took a picture on every generation of the same phone and put them back to back to see the differences
05:55and they were fascinating i did iphones i did also every samsung phone i did every google phone we did
06:01daylight low light backlit but the one thing that struck me as i was sitting there you know getting my
06:07picture taken by 17 phones in a row and i'm looking at these phones i couldn't help but notice how
06:12massive
06:12these cameras got over the years it went from a literal pinhole webcam on the back to this huge
06:20plateau multi-camera system just dominating the back of the phone i think the camera watermark people
06:26want to use now in 2026 is that a smartphone camera system is as good as a regular camera
06:33and if we can achieve that then we can say it's a great camera unfortunately this is a battle against
06:40physics that can never fully be won as much as these are doing a hell of a job at getting
06:46close
06:47like this x9 ultra is the most ridiculous camera system i've ever seen and next year sure there's
06:52probably going to be an even more ridiculous one but let's look at this the whole phone is built
06:56around this camera system from the design like the faux leather on the back the orange accent the
07:01Hasselblad and Oppo text being sideways to the specs themselves it's five camera sensors back here
07:06and each one of them is either the best or among the best numbers on paper i've ever seen 200
07:13megapixel main camera with the biggest 200 megapixel sensor we've ever seen in a phone with a wide
07:19aperture and ois then a 200 megapixel 3x telephoto camera literally the biggest telephoto sensor we've
07:25ever seen in a phone bigger than a lot of phones main cameras there's also a second zoom there's a
07:2950
07:30megapixel 10x camera with sensor shift stabilization and there's a 50 megapixel ultra wide and a
07:36dedicated color sensor that they're calling this true color camera to help get the most accurate
07:40white balance in photos and videos and a shocker to absolutely no one this is a great camera system
07:46Oppo's x9 pro already won my smartphone camera of the year last year this is the ultra version of that
07:51phone so it's got a lot of the same tasteful relatively minimal processing with just better
07:56hardware and so that's just a treat there's still plenty of processing going on and it takes a while
08:01you can actually snap a shot and then wait two to three seconds to see it finalize everything and it
08:06can get a bit hdra sometimes but for the most part any shot you can imagine any shot you're thinking
08:11of
08:12getting you can probably get it and it'll come out really good there's just so much versatility with
08:17these focal lengths too but there is a difference there there's a difference between super versatile
08:23and as good quality as a regular camera those are two different things
08:28the irony with this you know oppo is they clearly want you to think of this as like a Hasselblad
08:33camera
08:34they bought the licensing and they use the same accent colors and it's got the knurling around the camera ring
08:39and this is based on the Hasselblad x2d mark ii they say it on their website
08:45uh i actually own the Hasselblad x2d mark ii and these are these are like opposite cameras they
08:52could not be further apart the whole point of an incredible smartphone camera system is to be the
08:58most capable versatile convenient camera possible no matter where you are no matter what situation
09:04you're in this computer is going to try its absolute hardest to not let you take a bad picture
09:10or video that's why it's called computational photography the x2d mark ii is a professional
09:17very deliberate camera that doesn't have computational photography it doesn't even have a video mode so i
09:24think it's actually kind of a mistake to compare these two the smartphone will never i'll just say it
09:29will never actually replace a high-end professional camera at what it does it's just physics you know
09:36they these sensors get bigger and better every year but so do these i actually think that's true about
09:41everything probably over like an rx100 type of camera but i think what we're settling on is that a truly
09:47great smartphone camera is obviously really good quality but it's one that minimizes the misses and maximizes
09:54the makes like it's like that self-moving basketball hoop that uh stuff made here a youtuber made a couple
10:00years ago
10:00where no matter what your skill level no matter how bad any of your shots are you can always end
10:06up
10:06with a make you just can't miss and if you don't know better you might even think that that's your
10:11skill wow every shot looks so great i'm killing it that's what computational photography is trying to do
10:17a lot of us you know enthusiasts don't love that look so if you can do that without the over
10:23-processed
10:24look then that would be great so anyway the updated watermark i think that we're chasing
10:30is that a great smartphone camera can take a really good photo or video anytime that's what we're
10:38chasing now that's not to say you can't have a little fun because not only does this and phones
10:43like it try to defy physics with things like portrait mode to simulate a larger sensor and even the
10:48hasselblad modes with lens emulation to mimic the bokeh of these bigger better lenses but they're also
10:55making literal lens attachment accessories to unlock even more incredible capability this and also the
11:02vivo x300 pro are at the forefront of that with these attachments that are honestly kind of insane
11:08like oppo has it with hasselblad vivo is doing it with zeiss this phone has a whole specialized case
11:13and lens attachment and battery grip with a two-stage shutter button
11:18it's truly hilarious that you can carry all this stuff around and actually take some pretty incredible
11:23400 millimeter zoom photos that you can technically say you shot on your smartphone but at the end of
11:29the day as good and as fun as this is it's really impressive uh it's still mimicking the real thing
11:36as good as it's gotten so the strength is definitely still in its versatility like it really reminds me
11:42all the parallels of when someone tries to turn their ipad into a laptop you it's a you could you
11:52can kind of do it kind of like the software is still not exactly desktop software but you can multi
11:57window mostly the same way and the web browser is mostly desktop class and there's a file manager now
12:03so that's nice and if you ignore the kind of wobbly weight distribution
12:07uh kind of a laptop it's cool that it's gotten that good but nobody sane would say that it's a
12:14one-to-one replacement for a high-end pro level laptop but for regular use stuff that most people
12:24are doing youtube video watching social media web browsing word processing basic stuff even some light
12:31photo editing and video editing it is actually as good as anyone will need and that's the smartphone
12:37camera professional cameras of course will always have their place that's what i keep shooting these
12:41videos with that's what us hobbyists and professionals love uh but i will also keep
12:46shooting the autofocus channel exclusively on smartphones because that's also really fun and it
12:51demonstrates the capabilities and how good that these keep getting over the years the latest
12:55episode was actually shot on this x9 ultra so if you want to see what the footage from this
12:59phone looks like i'll link up below the like button it is so good thanks for watching and i'm very
13:04curious to see your comments below what you think of peak slab phone in 2026. catch you in the next
13:10one
13:10peace
13:11oh
13:12oh
13:15oh
13:15oh
13:16oh