The World's Largest Smartphone Camera! By Marques Brownlee

Hmm all right, so this is the Xiaomi mi 11, ultra Xiaomi's latest and greatest creation for 2021, with a camera bump the size of the moon on the back. It's a big one, so you might have seen that I posted a picture of this phone on Twitter and I asked just: would you rock a phone like this, and the answers were mostly two things: one uh no just make the rest of the phone thicker to match the thickness of the camera bump just add some battery and make it flush or two yeah if the camera is actually amazing, all right. Well, that being said, let's just jump straight into this camera. Shall we also stay tuned to the end of this video, where I have a trailer for retro tech season, two, it's finally ready, and it's dropping daily starting tomorrow on this channel? It's going to be lit, but this is the world's largest smartphone camera in more than one way. So it's not even like it's that many cameras by today's standards. Anyway, it's got three on the back, along with a triple led flash and a whole touch screen which I'll get to, but each of these cameras on the back of this thing appears to be a world's largest in some way.

So the primary sensor is the world's largest camera sensor in a smartphone, then the ultra-wide gives you the world's largest field of view, the widest ultrawide of any I've seen in a smartphone and the zoom at 120x is the biggest zoom in any smartphone so far, so right off the bat on paper, pretty impressive, so all right, the main camera. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a one over one point one two inch sensor that is really close to one inch. You know what else has a one-inch sensor: the Sony rx100 now, of course, that also has a whole real optical zoom lens, and it can do a lot more. It's a dedicated point-and-shoot, but to fit nearly the same size sensor inside a smartphone is pretty incredible. It's kind of hard to understand how awesome that is so that 50 megapixel sensor bends down to 12 megapixels has an f, 1.95, aperture and is. Now, if the question is, can this phone hang with the rx100? The answer is still mostly no, because that glass does make a huge difference to a photo, even if you do have a similar sensor, but that huge sensor does deliver a certain look and that look is high detail and shallow depth of field all the time.

So literally anytime, you have a close-up subject. You can count on the background being blurred out of focus. None of these shots are portrait mode. This is just straight snapping photos. It absolutely epitomizes that big sensor look in a smartphone, but guess what that also means.

If you have even more close-up subjects like, I do you're going to start to see fringing around the outsides, because the plane of focus is so thin that most of the object, unless it's flat is actually going to be slightly out of focus. We've seen this from other big sensor smartphones. I do really like the processing, though I have to say it's very naturally sharp. It's not like this over-processed hyper-sharpened. Look like I've seen a lot lately, so these are just some of the photos I've been taking with it, there's plenty of detail and information and when you zoom in they retain that detail, so that parts really nice.

Aside from that, though, the colors aren't really all that amazing to me the HDR works. Well, though, it does still occasionally overdo it and the fringing sometimes gets really annoying when you have very close up subjects- and I take a lot of those, but generally this camera is quite nice and not looking over processed until nighttime, so that huge sensor is specifically letting in tons of light. So at night you can pretty easily take low noise photos with a pretty fast shutter speed. Some phones just like to make shots at night, look like they were taken during the day, maybe you're into this look. Maybe you're not.

There's. No doubt, though, about the light gathering advantage of such a huge sensor. This is the same shot in a one and a half. Second, exposure from the mi 11 ultra versus a three-second exposure from the iPhone 12 Pro and same deal here, they're both very detailed photos, and they look very similar, but the Xiaomi is a little brighter and, more importantly, it took less time than the other one. Alright.

So then the ultrawide, this ultra-wide camera with a 128 degree field of view. So look I've seen a lot of ultrawide on the back of phones in my day ever since that lg g5, and I think it's safe to say this- is the widest ultra-wide. I've seen yet gives you the biggest field of view, and it has a lot of the same processing characteristics as the main camera. It's 48 megapixels, and it's got the detail, the pretty flat color the HDR. But what I noticed is because it's so incredibly wide the outer edges of the frame like near the corners are much softer and more distorted than most of the middle.

So, by the time you crop in from that super soft corner, you end up with a pretty normal looking ultra ride, but it's nice to have the extra flexibility of a camera that can just capture everything in one shot for sure. I literally never had to worry about backing up from a subject. So then. Lastly, your zoom, you got yourself another 48 megapixels at a 5x optical zoom, which can take you up to a 120x on the digital zoom side, which that's the biggest number. That's the furthest digital zoom you're gonna, find today in a smartphone camera.

Now the usability of a 120x zoom is very debatable. You know they do the same software trick. Samsung does by showing you where you are in the overall frame when you're zooming in so you at least have an idea of what you're looking at but most stuff you shoot past about.50X just looks not great and the 120x photos just look like a smear of pixels like a guessing game. Unless you know exactly what you're looking at it's not going to be great. I file this directly into the novelty drawer, but there is no doubt that you can get much, much sharper like 5 to 20 x, zoom photos from this camera, and they still have shallow depth of field, which is pretty nuts.

All three of these cameras will shoot night mode photos and all three of these cameras will also shoot 8k video, which is pretty great, although 8k video is locked up to 24 fps, so I found myself shooting in the correct frame rate at 4k 30. You can also do 4k 60, but pretty impressive on the video front, and you can see the staggered HDR really working here. I feel like I can see way more into the shadows with this video camera like in clips like this, you can switch also somewhat smoothly between all three cameras, while shooting video at 4k, which is sweet, and I was impressed with the color consistency between all three cameras. Now, the minimum focus distance is not nearly the same from the telephoto when it kicks in. So if you're shooting something close up, probably don't switch the telephoto.

But aside from that, whether you like the color tuning or not they've, gotten it very consistent between all the cameras, it's good stuff, but something else I've noticed with me: 11 ultra. It seems to be working really hard doing this camera stuff. So it's you know, there's a couple features that are enabled by the snapdragon 8, but just because they're enabled doesn't mean they're efficient or easy for it, so with heavy camera use. I actually noticed two things: one: the battery plummeted. Look at this graph.

This is a 5 000 William hour battery, going from about 45 percent to near 25 in a couple of minutes and Xiaomi. Software is just straight up telling me like yeah, it's the camera, that's killing your battery. The built-in battery setting lets you play around with the graph and look at exactly how much battery certain apps drain in certain time periods and the camera was the culprit here. But the other thing I noticed is shutter lag, or at least I thought it was shutter lag, but it's actually just a lag of the shutter animation. The photo you're taking is actually as soon as you touch the button, but then the animation plays a split second late, so it kind of feels like the opposite problem.

The OnePlus 9's have where you think you got the picture, but then you didn't with this camera. You might think you missed it, but you actually did get it, so it feels a bit slow overall, but the shots are in fact very quick if that makes sense. So now you got the world's largest smartphone sensor, the world's largest field of view ultra-wide, the deepest zoom in any smartphone camera might as well finish it off by making it the world's largest camera bump by adding a screen to the back, because why not? So? Actually I had to think about this, I'm not sure if it actually is the biggest ever camera bump by volume, just because phones like the Lucia 1020 exist, but this display on the back here is pretty funny fun. Fact: it's actually the same display. That's in Xiaomi's me band 5.

, it's like they realized. They had some extras left over and just thought hey. Why don't we put these in the back of the phone? So it's a 1.1-inch ammo LED touch screen with a 126 by 294 resolution. It's not super sharp at all. I can literally see pixels, and it's also not very bright, but it can show you a couple of things.

It can show you the time your battery status and a notification light if you have any waiting for you- and I can also show you any number of pre-loaded images with a black background- that's kind of cool if you just want a cactus on back your phone all the time, but there's also a whole customizer built into the software where you can put a text quote permanently on the back of your phone or even upload your own custom image. Hence, the thumbnail for this video, not quite as custom as the ROG phone 5 ultimate, but it's up there, but really the only actually useful thing I've seen it do is act as a tiny viewfinder for the main camera. So you can take high quality selfies on those massive sensors. You can zoom in and out, and everything and that'll be a much higher quality selfie than the perfectly average 20 megapixel selfie camera could ever manage other than that honestly, not super useful. It's pretty cool.

Of course. It's a touch screen, but yeah. I think you spend most your time looking at the front of the phone, but here's what I guess you can say here is that screen brought the camera bump all the way to the other side of the phone here. So now you have this big square camera bump that doesn't rock side to side on a table. So I guess, if it's between screen and no screen, then I'll take the screen all day by the way the rest of this phone is sick.

It's called the ultra for a reason, this is Xiaomi's, absolutely high-end, top-of-the-line flagship, and it's got all the specs and the features to back it up. It's a snapdragon triple eight like we talked about 12 gigs of ram 256, gigs of fast storage and the 5 000 William hour. Battery, like you talked about, is pretty impressive, but not as impressive as 67 watt, wired charging and 67 watt wireless charging on an optional Xiaomi wireless charger. I don't have that specific wireless charger, but it's definitely good that a phone that can run down your battery like this can also charge up real quick like this, and so it also has an ultra-high end display, as you can see, 6.81 inches 1440p 120hz OLED, with an in-screen fingerprint reader curved edges and a super bright 1700 nits maximum brightness. That makes it very readable indoors outdoors pretty much everywhere and honestly, it's got pretty much every other high-end spec you can actually think of in a phone like just name a high-end spec in your head.

This phone's got it all right. Great haptics check, ip68 check, reverse wireless charging, yeah check, 10 watts. It's got an IR, blaster, okay, great speaker, quality, oh double check, there's Herman, pardon, dual stereo speakers on the top and the bottom, and it's all wrapped up in Xiaomi software that I've talked about a little more in my me 11 video, but that I do think is also getting perfect. This phone. Does it all short of levitating, but I just do want to land back on that build one more time you see the photos and the crazy bump on the back of the phone, and it just looks like a lot, but once you actually start to use the phone, I found that my finger, I naturally like kind of rested right underneath the camera sort of propped it up like that, and I was kind of nice, and so I know a lot of you were saying.

Oh, just make this phone thicker, give it a ten thousand William hour battery and get rid of the camera bump, but this phone is already quite heavy. It's a ceramic back phone first and if I weight it, which I did literally up against some other flagships, it's one of the heaviest, and so, if you add all of that battery, you lose the grip of the camera, and then it's just one big slick thing like I get where you're coming from, but I feel like it's surprisingly not too top-heavy with this current design, and I actually don't mind it so just something that you get a difference between seeing the phone and actually using the phone, but hey at the end of the day. It comes down to you. Would you rock a phone with a gigantic camera bump like this or not for the big time sensor, the big time ultrawide, the big time zoom and the screen on the back? Would you be into that? Let me know in the comment section below it's probably going to keep getting more extreme from here on out: okay, retro tech time, it's finally back season, two of retro tech is finally ready for your eyeballs, and it's a little different this time. So last time on season.

One of retrotech we went through six gadgets that changed the course of history and affected everything that came after them right left a ripple in our universe, things like the Walkman and the mac and the dynamic this season. It's a little different this time, we're exploring some ideas from the past that we thought would be our future by now, and whether we got there so every day this week, starting tomorrow, we're dropping daily new episodes of retro tech season. Two, it's going to be so sick, they'll all be at 9 00 a. m. Eastern sharp, just like this video was so whatever time zone you're in write that down, you can do the calculations, but come back here.

At the same time. Every day for this week for a new episode, I'll see you there roll the trailer. I don't know what exactly we're about to take out the box. Let's find out together. Oh my god, when you think about the future.

What comes to mind for decades people dreamed of technologies that would change the way we travel look and live so have we already reached our retro futuristic dreams and if not, what could possibly lie ahead? Let's energize! Yes, my dreams have been realized. What is your experience with hoverboards? Almost none? Okay, oh my god, this season on retrotech we're doing technology. This is going to explode. If we keep pumping, how does the technology of the past, I got an eye in predict our vision, you're about to see everything for the future. All your particles will disappear simultaneously and then show up in another place.

We need pioneers to see how this can all come together. You.

Source : Marques Brownlee