On July 4, Xiaomi introduced a trio of new smartphones, and one of them comes with a pretty huge new feature: a 1-inch camera sensor, which is relatively giant for a smartphone. Everything about Xiaomi’s new flagship smartphone, the Mi 12S Ultra, is big. It has a 6.73-inch OLED display, a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 system on a chip, and a camera-lens shaped bulge on that back that takes up about a third of the phone’s rear side.
Inside that faux-lens are the phone’s three cameras: a 48 megapixel ultrawide, a 48 megapixel telephoto with 5x optical zoom (and “120x” digital zoom that will probably not look very good), and finally, the 50 megapixel main camera, which uses that 1-inch sensor.
As The Verge reports, a few different companies (Panasonic, Sharp, and Leica) have put 1-inch sensors in their phones before, but it hasn’t been very common — you’re more likely to find 1-inch sensors in higher-end point-and-shoots like Sony’s RX100 series. The larger size allows the sensor to gather more light and capture more detailed images. It won’t turn a phone into a DSLR, but it could be a step up from the typical smartphone camera; the iPhone 13 Pro, for instance, has a sensor size of 1/1.65-inch, according to DPReview. (Though for reference, the actual size of a sensor’s imaging area is smaller than its stated measurement lets on.)
Xiaomi says the phone’s camera system was “co-engineered with Leica,” and the company told Engadget that it split the cost of developing the 1-inch image sensor with Sony. According to The Verge, Sony actually released a phone using a 1-inch sensor late last year, however it only captured on part of the sensor, whereas Xiaomi’s phone will reportedly use the whole thing.
—
Photo Credit: testing / Shutterstock.com