The $435 phone with the AWESOME camera system! Xiaomi Mi Note 10 By The Art of Photography

This video is brought to you by Squarespace, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. This is the Xiaomi me note, 10 this phone actually was released in November, and it particularly interested me in that is a photography feature based device that actually comes in at a much lower price point than some big-name flagship souks. This is a four hundred and thirty-five dollar phone that oh yeah happens to feature six camera modules, including the main camera, which features a one hundred and eight megapixel sensor, similar to what you see on the Samsung s, 20 ultra, but that phone is like three times the cost of this one, and it has a five thousand two hundred sixty William battery and a headphone jack, which has become increasingly more and more rare these days. What makes this phone extremely attractive to me is that Xiaomi are clearly trying to deliver something that comes any more affordable package now, when a company does this, you've got to cut corners on things, and you have an overall reduced experience generally. They did not do that on this phone.

In fact, everything pretty much went into the battery and the camera features, and they do not disappoint. You've got pretty much everything from a 5x telephoto lens, clear down to an ultra-wide. You even have a macro lens on here, so this phone is gonna. Give you way more range in terms of photography, then pretty much anything that I've used so far. So breaking this down, we have, as I mentioned, no less than six camera modules.

There's a 32 megapixel selfie camera on the front of the phone, which is actually among the better ones that I've seen on the back of the phone. We have five, that's right, there are five camera modules that run across the side, and you also have two pairs of flashes. There is a lot of stuff going on here, so you've got the main camera which combines a 108 megapixel. This is a 1 over 1.3 3 inch sensor, which has a 7 element lens. There is also a 2 x, 12 megapixel portrait lens, a 5 x, 5 megapixel telephoto lens.

There is an ultra wide-angle lens that comes in at 20, megapixels and finally, you've got a 2 megapixel macro camera. This is a serious range, that's covered using physical optics. So how is the image quality on this phone? Well, in general, it is quite excellent. I do have a few things that I think are worth pointing out to be a little careful with I want to show you some images and, of course, when you have a phone that produces images at this quality, you're going to want to have a website to put them on to show them off, which brings us to our sponsor today, who are the awesome folks over at squarespace. com present your photography using Squarespace's, modern professional portfolios? The layouts are completely customizable, and you can use Squarespace's drag-and-drop based back-end system, which is really easy to use to present your work.

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So, first is just looking at it with everything into computational imaging and automation and letting the phone do its thing, and so this is honestly the experience that most people have with it. So we're not worried about RAW files, we're not worried about manual modes, we're just letting the phone to its thing and then the second way you can look at it is nerds like me who are going to come at it and really tear it apart and nitpick lens quality and things like that, so in general, when you're just letting the phone do its thing, it does an incredible job. The color contrast detail. Everything looks perfect. The only exception to this is when you want to go beyond that.5X zoom, and you go into a digital, zoom I. Don't think it looks good, that's my biggest complaint with it, but you do have five lenses, so you've cut an incredible range just with the optics here, so I.

Don't think it's a huge deal. The big surprise for me on this phone is the macro lens. As I mentioned, that's very unconventional! It's not something you see on phones very often, it allows you to get extreme close-ups, and it opens up a whole world of photography that you really don't get with most standard smartphones. In fact, I think this is a feature that I really wish. Most manufacturers would start, including in their lens arsenal.

Of course, it means a dedicated lens, but on this phone it makes it something that's unique, and for me that is a big plus. There is a pro mode on the camera app that will allow for full manual control, including manual focus, which is actually really nice, especially when you're working with the macro lens and your depth of field becomes very shallow, and you want to be selective about where your focus point is that something's really nice to have, and this mode will let you shoot. Raw DOG files from the ultra-wide lens, the standard wide and the macro lenses. Unfortunately, this does not do raw from either one of the two telephoto lenses, but this is actually rawer compatibility than you're going to get with most cameras. One I can think of in particular would be the iPhone which natively does not let you capture RAW images at all, they're, always JPEGs that have always been processed into do D and G files on an iPhone.

You have to use a third-party app like Lightroom mobile speaking of I use, Lightroom mobile, not so much for shooting. But this is where I kind of capture all my images, and then I'm able to upload them to the cloud they automatically download into my library and I can also apply presets from my own preset packs, which is really nice because it makes editing speed up. I can get perfect results really quickly and everything syncs back up into the library on my computer, so I would say that color exposure overall image quality is very consistent on this phone a lot of times when you have smartphones, which they all do now, where you have multiple lenses and multiple sensors. Sometimes there are some inconsistencies, particularly in color when you start switching back and forth between focal lengths and everything is spotless and seems very synced up on here and I. Think that when you're considering this is a $435 phone that that is something that's pretty amazing at this price point.

This is something that is hard to do on some flagship phones and ones that do typically sometimes cost three times the price of this phone. But there are a few little tiny caveats that I do want to mention. So let's start with this 108 megapixel sensor now this is something that's actually not unique. To the note, 10, we also have a similar issue with the 108 megapixel sensor. That's on the Sam, as 20 ultra I covered that in my preview, video with that phone as well.

In all fairness, this sensor was never designed to be a high resolution sensor. What it's designed to do is actually over sample the image, so you're using a hundred and eight megapixels to sample this large area and then through a process called pixel binning your, actually going to reduce that down. So, in the end, you get a roughly twenty-seven megapixel image, which is still pretty big in terms of resolution, but it allows you to get a cleaner image by doing that over sampling and then down scaling. However, marketing teams love stats like that, so they want to say that this phone is going to outdo any camera on the market, and so we're going to advertise as being a hundred eight megapixel sensor, and they actually put a hundred and eight megapixel mode into this. You have to go into specifically now when you shoot on this, it's the same problem that you have on the Samsung S 20 ultra and that all of a sudden you're going to start exposing all the blemishes that you're going to see on a lens which basically means this is sharp in the middle and as you go out towards the sides, you're gonna start seeing all kinds of strange blurry Distortion, and it really is tough to do a lens.

That is this size. This is a huge challenge, because one, it is a high resolution sensor and two. It is actually physically bigger sensor slightly than the sensors that you're used to getting your standard, 12, megapixel images out of a smartphone and so with a bigger sensor, means that you have a shallower depth of field and so sharpness issues. This starts to expose all the problems. You're going to have with teeny tiny, lens setups, and so this is going to be a challenge.

Moving forward as more and more phones start to adapt larger sensors. There are benefits to having a larger sensor in the phone, but it does create problems as well. We could be a little example, so you can see what I'm talking about. So this is a test that I typically do on much larger lenses that go on proper cameras when we're really picking apart the image quality and seeing what the lens can produce now I'm going to do this test on the standard, 108 megapixel camera in this phone in the lens that goes with it. So you can see I'm talking about so what you need to do is you have the lens at its widest setting, which a camera phone, the lenses are always on their widest settings and what you do is you pick a point of focus that is on some texture and I usually use the street out in front of the studio, and so what I do is I put that focus point a few feet away from me and what you do is you bring this into Photoshop and you something called the find edges filter.

This filter has no parameters on it. All it does. Is it just uses a black and white spectrum and anything that is sharp in the image is going to retain texture. It's going to go black. Anything that starts to lose sharpness is gonna, go white, so typically with a really nice lens, you're going to get a very thin line.

That typically is as straight as possible, and this is the area that's in focus. We use an image that was taken on something like the iPhone 11. This is a 12 megapixel sensor. It's got a perfect lens on it, but you can see that we have a much broader depth of field a lot more of these images. Just natively in focus now remember this is a larger sensor in the Minor 10, which means you're going to get a shallower depth of field, which is not a problem necessarily, but when I run this through the filter, you can see that really only the center.

This lens is really in focus everything else kind of falls off to the sides now. Does that mean it's a bad lens? Well, it does mean there are some shortcomings, but the fact that you know this, and you're going to use this device basically means that you understand what types of shots are really going to look good. So anything, that's gonna cover a lot of fine details at the edges, like a landscape or even some kind of close-up shot. That has a lot of detail, and it is going to be something you're going to start seeing problems with. However, if you like to shoot, portraits, or you shoot objects that typically have blurred areas that are out of focus around them, it will perform just fine, so I thought it was worth pointing out, and it's actually interesting when you actually visualize what that depth of field looks like you can see.

What's coming off the camera, don't tell the marketing crew. They won't like that at all another gripe, speaking of marketing, that I, don't particularly care for on this phone, is the longest telephoto lens, which is this 5x lens. It says it's a 5x lens. It's even printed right here on the front 5x optical. Furthermore, it's not it's actually a lens with a 3.7 X magnification factor, but it is sitting on an 8 megapixel sensor. Now what the Note 10 does.

Is it actually does a digital crop, so it crops it down to a 5 megapixel sensor, which is effectively going to give you a five-time magnification factor, but just know that it's really not optically correct to say that it's just cheating a little to give that up, so you're losing resolution, but you're gaining a zoom and of course you can pinch in to get a 30x magnify or a 50 X magnification I would skip this altogether. It just does not look good I. Think some camera companies have the artificial intelligence to pass this off a little better than others. It just depends. I think that Google do this particularly well with the pics of phones, I, think that Apple does it fairly well, while we did it fairly well, Samsung and you're getting into weird territory.

It takes a lot of processing power to actually zoom in that far, because what you're doing is you're, taking an image that zoomed in into a small section. So it's cropped, and then you're actually trying to magnify that by increasing the resolution on the back end, it's really difficult to do. But having said that, this is just not a long lens phone. It is a very versatile phone because it has many lenses, but I would keep it within the optical range if you want to get the best results. So a final verdict I actually really like the Men 10.

Now I was just getting nitpick about it and the reason why is when you start using specs in marketing terms like a hundred and eight megapixels or really long, telephoto lenses, you're, creating an expectation in the consumers mind, or at least a reason that you would want to go with this as a phone from a photography standpoint, and I'm going to be really honest with you, it's not, but the cameras that are in here the fact that you have things like the macro lens. If you use the hundred eight megapixels more as a standard lens as it was intended, where you're going to have some down sampling, you're still going to get a twenty-seven megapixel image. It looks absolutely great, and I think they've done an outstanding job packing a lot of photography features into a phone that comes in at a very reasonable price. Now this will have competition, especially when you look at the lower end offerings from people like Google or Apple, for instance the iPhone SE just came out that says one camera on the back. This one has five, and so there are reasons why you might want to consider the s II over something like this, but I'm just talking from purely a photography standpoint.

This isn't my favorite OS in the world. It's a skin, that's been built on to Android, it's kind of Huawei, is, there's no app door. Of course, you can just get an app scan and go with that, but the battery life is incredible on this. They're putting monster-sized battery in here I think the camera system is really well-thought-out and hey people love that headphone jack, and that's here too so anyway. I want to know what you guys think so drop me.

A link in the comments. I'll talk to you guys later until the next video see you.

Source : The Art of Photography