A phone brand you’d forgotten just dropped the most incredible camera phone I’ve ever seen

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Not long ago I criticized the likes of Apple, Google and Samsung for being lazy; for producing flagship phones with minimal improvements to camera hardware, year after year. By contrast, Chinese brands like Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi are continually upping the ante in this area, the most obvious example being bespoke teleconverter lenses, such as the Oppo Hasselblad 300mm Explorer Teleconverter.

But there's another Chinese phone manufacturer we in the West tend to overlook now: Huawei. Ever since Google banned Huawei from accessing Google Mobile Services in 2019, the brand all but died in the US and Europe, but it continues to thrive in its Chinese homeland. So much so that it's just launched what is quite possibly the most audacious piece of camera hardware for a phone I've ever seen.

Not content with simply copying Oppo or Vivo by offering another fixed focal length telephoto lens, Huawei has produced a lens for a camera phone that boasts 10x continuous optical zoom, equating to a 24-240mm focal range (in full-frame terms), plus you get a respectable f/2-4.5 max aperture.

And if that wasn't impressive enough, Huawei has teamed the lens with its own, dedicated 1-inch-type, 50-megapixel RYYB image sensor. This is capable of ISO6400 maximum sensitivity, 4K/60p video recording, and up 960fps slow motion video capture.

The result is the Ruiying Z10: an entire camera attachment that can be mounted directly to the camera island of a Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max, or Mate 90 RS phone – no intermediary case or separate mounting system required. The Z10 takes over all camera hardware duties from the phone, leaving the phone to handle image processing, the control interface, and image preview.

The Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max – one of two Huawei phones compatible with the Ruiying Z10 | Credit: Huawei

Sure, at approximately 80mm x 70mm in size and weighing 346g, the Z10 is a chunky piece of kit. But it's not unreasonably bulky: the Oppo Hasselblad 300mm Explorer Teleconverter is even heavier at 400g, and let's face it, none of these big lens attachments are going to fit in a jeans' pocket anyway. You really need to think of the Z10 not as an add-on lens you take out with you on a daily basis, but as a camera converter. It gives you the option to turn your phone into a full-on camera with genuine, continuous 10x optical zoom. No switching between your phone's own individual camera modules and getting varied image quality as a result. No relying on AI zoom, with its sometimes sketchy interpretation of reality. For everyday use you'd shoot with the cameras in the Mate 90 Pro Max or Mate 90 RS, and that'd be no hardship, as these phones are imaging powerhouses in their own right. We're talking a main camera with a 1/1.28-inch, 50MP sensor and an f/1.4-f/4.0 variable aperture lens, a 200-megapixel 4x periscope telephoto module, also using a 1/1.28-inch sensor, and a 40-megapixel ultrawide camera. But for holidays, events, or other special occasions when you might otherwise want a 'proper' camera, you'd simply attach the Z10 and away you go.

The Panasonic Lumix ZS300 costs roughly the same as the Ruiying Z10, and also has a 1-inch image sensor | Credit: Matthew Richards

And the price for all this versatility? RMB 5,999, or around $895 US. Sure, that's far from cheap – the same money would buy you a 256GB Pixel 11 phone. But let's consider the alternative: you already have a high-end phone, but also want a dedicated compact camera with a 1-inch sensor and at least 10x optical zoom. An obvious choice would be the Panasonic ZS300/TZ300, which costs $897, and while this does have 15x zoom reach, I'd bet my left arm that its image quality won't be as impressive as that from the Mate 90/Ruiying Z10 combo.

But sadly I'm ignoring the elephant in the room here: the Ruiying Z10 looks incredible, it'll probably perform very well, but unless you live in China, you'll never actually get the chance to find out. Who could have predicted in 2019 when the US was doing its best to kill off Huawei's consumer phone division that in 2026 the brand wouldn't just be prospering in this sector, it'd actually be at the cutting edge of camera phone innovation.