Redmi Note 9 Pro Detailed Camera Review By TecworkZ

"Music" Hey guys its Sagar from tecworkz, and here is my detailed camera review of the Redmi Note 9 Pro. In the past, Redmi’s Note series smartphones have had the best set of cameras in the budget segment. Will the Redmi Note 9 Pro carry the torch forward? Let us find out. Like the Note 8 Pro, Note 9 Pro also comes with 4 cameras at the back. And they are placed in a square cluster. Primary camera gets a 48 Megapixel sensor with F/1.8 aperture and a 26mm lens. Then there is a 8 megapixel sensor with F/2.2 aperture and it is coupled with a 13mm ultra-wide lens. Macro camera now gets a 5 megapixel sensor with F/2.4 aperture. And there is a 2 megapixel depth sensor wit F/2.4 aperture. With the primary camera, you can shoot 4k unstabalised videos at 30fps.

And 1080p videos at upto 120fps. For slow motion videos, you can shoot 120/240 and 960fps videos in 720p resolution. At the front you get a 16 megapixel selfie camera, and with 1080p 30fps videos, now you can even shoot 720p 120fps slow motion videos. Interface of the camera app is pretty much similar to other Redmi smartphones. There is a macro mode, but it is hidden in the secondary menu.

In the Pro mode, you can adjust various settings like white balance, focus, shutter speed, ISO and exposure. You can also turn on focus peeking, which makes it easier to see which areas of the scene is in focus, or you can turn on Zebras, which lets you know which areas of the image are being over exposed. There is also an option to shoot RAW images, and all these settings are even available for shooting videos. Range for shutter speed from 1/4000th of a second, all the way ups to 30 seconds. And the range for ISO is from 100 to 3200.

Now before we get back to the image and video samples, if you are new to this channel, please make sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon next to it. That way, youtube will make sure, you are notified when a new video goes up on this channel. Let us start with the daytime images. This the new GM2 sensor from Samsung, and Redmi Note 9 Pro is the first smartphone to use it. And as you can see, It can capture lot of details in various bright lighting situations.

I feel that the camera tries to over expose most of the times, so I had to manually pull the brightness slider down a bit, for most of these shots. I don’t think its big issue, but I hope Redmi takes care of it in the next update. It is a 48 megapixel sensor, but these are 12 megapixel images. Which means, they use pixel binning, and combine information from 4 pixels into 1 pixel, giving us sharper results. Note 9 Pro seems to be adding a slight warmer tone to most of its images.

Other than that, colours seem good from it. There is also a Pro colour mode, which boosts and saturates the colours even further. So if you like an extra bit of punch in the colours of your images, you can use this mode. Coming to the HDR shots. This is an image with the HDR mode turned off.

It looks nice, curtains are nicely exposed, but the parts outside the window are a bit blown out. With the HDR mode turned on, you can get back most of those details, and the image looks really good. This mode helps the camera preserve lot of the details in the brighter areas, while also bringing up more details from the shadows. In some situations like this, it helps the image look so much better. If you zoom in, you can see there is noise in the darker parts of this image, but zooming out, overall image looks really good, thanks to the HDR mode.

These have all been 12 megapixel images, but you can switch to the 48 megapixel mode, and take higher resolution images. Just like with the GM1 sensor, it is still difficult to make out the difference between the 12 and 48 megapixel images. In fact, in most of these shots, 12 megapixel images turn out to be sharper. It is in very bright lighting conditions, that we see the images shot in the 48 megapixel mode show more details. But you have to zoom way in, on these images.

And these 48 megapixel images are 4 times bigger in terms of file size. I think the difference is between these images is not very obvious, so it is best to stick to the 12 megapixel mode for all of your shots. Now the secondary camera on this phone gets a wide lens, and here is how much more of the scene it lets you get in the shot, compared to the primary camera. Although images from these wide lens are not as sharp as the ones from the primary camera, and there is noticeable distortion towards the edges of the shot. But it is still nice to have this lens on our smartphone, as it lets you capture a different perspective of the scene.

It specially comes in handy in the situations, where you have to get a lot in your image, and you don’t have any more space to move back. Before we move on to the close up and macro shots, here is a quick focusing speed test, of the primary camera. It is not the quickest to switch the focus from far to a near object. And sometimes it just fails at focusing. I don’t know if this is a problem which could be fixed with a software update, but if it is, I really hope some at Redmi is working on fixing it.

When it does manage to set the focus, here are how the close up shots turned out. The subject that you are trying to focus on is nice and sharp. And since it gets a wide F/1.8 aperture, background of this close up shots, gets a good amount of optical blur. The size of the sensor is also large, so as you get close to the subject, the plane of focus stats getting narrower, making it even harder to keep things that are closer to the camera in focus. To fix this, and to let you get even closer to the subject, there is a dedicated macro camera.

By switching to this, you can get as close as 2 cm from your subject, and still be able to set the focus. This sensor is not the best at capturing accurate colours, and there is a lot of noise, if you try taking these images in anything but ideal lighting conditions. But it is still cool to be able to get so much closer to the subject, and take these macro shots. Now moving on to Portrait shots. I have always said, that portrait mode on smartphones, is the easiest way to give you images a professional look.

Thanks to the dedicated depth sensor, Redmi smartphones have got almost perfect at detecting the edges, and separating the subject from its background. I would have liked if the main subjects had even more details in them, but nevertheless I really like how these portrait shots turned out. You can adjust the amount of blur to the background, while or even after you have clicked the portrait shot. And you can even add various Light trail, and studio lighting effects to these portrait shots. You can do all of this, right from within the galleries app.

Another one of my favourite modes is the Movie mode, that Redmi has started including in their smartphones. It lets you take 21:9 portrait shots, with black bars at the top and bottom, to give you portrait shots a cinematic look. And it works really well. Look at how amazing these shots look. I have started clicking many of my portrait shots in movie mode, and I hope this mode gets even better with time.

Accurate edge detection is carried forward while taking portrait of objects. Note 9 Pro does really well, even if the object has complex edges, and the background is busy. If anything, I think the edge detection gets even better when taking portraits of objects. I just think it still tries to over expose these images, and I had to pull the brightness slider down few notches, for all of these shots. Moving on to low light images.

This is the part, where the Redmi Note 9 Pro struggles a lot. I don’t know if it’s the new GM2 sensor, or if Redmi hasn’t optimised the software for low light photography, but the images are just not up to the mark, for these lighting conditions. You can switch to the night mode, but even then the images are just average at best. Night mode images do keep the exposure in check, and make the colours look good, but other than that, there aren’t too many details in them as well. I think the Redmi Note 8 Pro still takes better low light images than this Note 9 Pro.

So I really think Redmi needs to fix this soon. And until they fix it, if you take lot of images in lower or artificial light, you should look at some of the other phones in this price range. That brings is to the only remaining camera. This 16 megapixel front facing camera captures enough details to make your selfies look good. If you don’t want your selfies to appear soft, you will have to turn the beauty mode off, every time you switch to the selfie camera.

As it is on by default. There is HDR mode, so even if the background is bright, your face will be properly exposed, like in all these shots. Even without a separate depth sensor, Note 9 Pro does well to accurately detect the edges for these portrait selfies. And even if you have multiple people in the shot, it manages to keep their faces in focus, while blurring rest of the background. Dynamic range takes a big hit while taking this portrait selfies.

Here is a video from the front facing camera of the Redmi note 9 pro. You can see how it handles overall colours of the scene, exposure, and stabilisation when I am walking around with it.4K 30fps videos are over saturated, and they don’t get any king of stabilisation. If you want electronically stabilised videos, you will have to lower the resolution down to 1080p and shoot at 30fps. These videos, while not as detailed as the 4K ones, still look good. So those were all the image and video samples from the Redmi Note 9 Pro.

It does really well when there is ample light around. it is always good to have a secondary wide lens, as it lets you capture the same scene from a slightly different perspective. And the macro lens is treat for anyone who love to get as close to their subject as possible. Portrait shots are amazing, which should be no surprise, as Redmi has been doing this well for quite some time now. Only disappointing part is the Note 9 Pro’s low light performance.

I have seen phones that came out 1 or 2 years before it, taking better low light images than this. So I hope Redmi has people working on all their cylinders to fix Note 9 Pro’s low light performance. These have been my thoughts about the cameras on this Redmi Note 9 Pro. You guys just saw over 85 image and video samples, what do you guys think about the cameras on this phone? Do let me know in the comments. And if you are planning on getting this phone, I will really appreciate, if you get it from the affiliate link in the description section.

It helps the channel a lot, at no extra cost to you. That is it for this video guys. Please hit the like button if you enjoyed this video, and subscribe to the channel for more quality tech videos like this. You can also check out some of the other videos from this channel. This has been Sagar, and I’ll catch you guys in the next video Take care.

Source : TecworkZ