The World's Largest Smartphone Camera!

 - Okay, so this is the Xiaomi 12S Ultra. It's a smartphone, sure, but I think we can all tell it's all about the camera. I mean, look at this thing.

Almost half the back of the phone is this massive camera module.

The first 20 pages of their website

for this thing is all camera, camera, camera stuff before it talks about anything else.

They even have this video on their site of it morphing from a camera into this phone. And it has the world's largest smartphone camera sensor

inside. Can you imagine being the person at a party where everyone's got their phones?

They're like, hey, we wanna take a group picture. Does anybody have a good smartphone camera?

And you just, yeah, that's, I got it. I guess what I'm trying to say is,

this phone better have a great camera.

So there's been quite a bit of hype around this brand new Xiaomi 12S Ultra recently,

so I had to give it a shot. The headline that caught my eye about it is

that it's rocking the world's largest smartphone camera

with a one-inch sensor.

But a couple funny things about that. First, one-inch sensors aren't actually one inch.

They're a little smaller than that. I actually did a video where I talked about that. I'll break that down, down in the description

I'll have a link by the Like button. You can check it out.

But second, it's not the first smartphone with a one-inch sensor.

Matter of fact, there's been a couple before

but it is the first one with Sony's new IMX989 sensor, which is the first one built for a smartphone camera rather than repurposing a one-inch sensor to go into a smartphone. So it technically beats Samsung to the punch,

who we know they're working on their ISOCELL camera that's gonna be a one-inch sensor, probably coming to the Galaxy S23 Ultra sometime next year.

So Xiaomi beat them to the punch. And as a matter of fact, that's kind of the whole point of this phone is to one-up Samsung's Ultra phone

in as many ways as possible, and to slap the same exact name on it.

So they can do it better.

That's the statement they're making. So when I got my hands on this phone that's what I wanted to find out. Does it actually beat the king of the hill,

Galaxy S22 Ultra at its own game? And most importantly, is it actually worth it

to have the world's largest smartphone camera? By the way, it's this one, not this one in the middle,

that's the ultra wide, and it's not this bottom one here, that's the 5X telephoto.

That one. That one is the world's largest smartphone sensor.

So I've taken quite a few photos and videos over the past few days,

testing this phone's camera in both normal conditions

and crazy more and more extreme conditions at its limits.

And it turns out, yeah, this camera is phenomenally capable and is really,

really good very often.

So the 50 megapixel main camera kicks out great detail  and sharpness binning down to 12 and a half megapixels, and has a knack for reeling in exposure even in harsh conditions, taking photos into the sun and with high dynamic range and all that. But what I really noticed is two main things

that were est here that made good photos really, really good on this phone.

And that's the shutter speed and the auto focus are consistently really fast, because that huge sensor lets in so much light here.

So if we're taking pictures of moving objects like kids and vehicles,

pets sprinting around a studio with endless energy, all that stuff, it's great.

And that's awesome.

It freezes the action and nails focus very reliably and that is super confidence-inspiring in a camera. It also handled low light very well,

which shouldn't surprise me

given the light gathering ability of a huge sensor. But I did decide to do a little head-to-head against the phone it's trying to one-up so bad,

Galaxy S22 Ultra, so I did a blind side-by-side on Twitter. I should have done a poll, but just based on reading the replies, a lot of you guys

really did actually prefer the 12S Ultra shot here, despite it being more saturated.

Mostly because it reeled in the bloom from the streetlight better,

thanks to better lens coatings, et cetera,

and it still kept all the details on the rest of the exposure and had very low noise.

You might have noticed the Leica branding up in the corner on the back of the phone.

They did actually have some help from Leica

on the optics and the coating over the glass

to reduce things like fringing and chromatic aberration,

and it works great.

Gut also the color science.

So when you first fire it up, the phone asks you

if you wanna shoot with Leica authentic look

or the Leica vibrant look.

Basically you can think of them

as the same thing as photographic styles on the iPhone.

The authentic look is a little less saturated,

while the vibrant kicks out a more

instantly shareable, traditional look.

But neither of them are particularly great to my eye.

Now that I've shot with both.

So yeah, the typical photo from the 12S Ultra is a clean

and sharp shot with shallow depth of field

for close up subjects, pretty punchy

and saturated usually and with a lot of dynamic range.

But here is my hot take on this camera though.

While it isn't perfect, it has the highest ceiling

of any camera I have ever seen in a smartphone.

So it doesn't always hit, but when it does, it is amazing.

I have two shots I wanna show you

that specifically just make me feel very

strongly about this.

So the first one I was up on the roof of this building.

There's some plants up there, it's windy up on the roof.

And so I'm taking a picture of these plants

and they're moving quickly in and out of the frame.

I'm just sort of like pointing and shooting and boom.

The photo I get back is this tack-sharp shot

with incredibly shallow depth of field

and this immense dynamic range.

The movement is completely frozen in time,

like the plants aren't even moving.

I kind of couldn't believe it.

Just seeing how fast the stuff was moving around

in and out of the frame.

It's a shock that auto-focus even worked,

but it locked on, it kept it in focus,

and it nailed it, and it did it again and again,

and over and over again.

And then the other one is,

I was at practice the other day way out

on an island somewhere.

I had put my cleats on.

I was just about to put my phone back in my bag

but I took a photo of the ground

and just like my cleats on the ground before I got up.

Boom.

And with this one, this isn't even a

particularly difficult shooting condition, right?

It's not much moving.

It's just a still subject of my feet,

but optically, this might be the most impressive photo

I have ever seen come out of a smartphone camera.

Keep in mind, there is no portrait mode here.

This is normal depth of field.

My cleats are tack-sharp,

there's a clear, shallow depth of field,

and you can see the slight roll off

of the blur, getting stronger and stronger

the further you go back in the frame,

and the exposure and the contrast and the color

of the entire shot are all so nice.

So, you know, it's just a random off-center snap of my feet

but Jesus, from a phone?

I kind of love this photo.

So I've said a lot of good things about this camera

but I also said it wasn't perfect.

So it's a flagship.

I'm gonna pixel peep, and I'm gonna go through

those things too.

It does have some of the more classic weaknesses

of a big sensor smartphone like this.

So the huge sensor makes for a nice natural depth

of field, which we know is awesome.

It's amazing for those mid-range shots,

like two to four feet away,

but when you get too close it definitely,

definitely starts to fringe,

like any other smartphone with a huge sensor.

So you can get close up to a subject

and there's real blur but often part

of the subject is in focus and then some of it isn't.

And the blur is pretty ugly when this happens.

Now they try to combat this, like a lot of others do,

by auto switching to macro mode,

which comes from the ultra wide camera.

Unfortunately the ultra wide camera has a

dramatically different look and color science to it.

It just looks so different overall.

And in my opinion, it looks worse.

It solves the fringing problem,

but yeah, it looks worse.

And then speaking of color science,

it is dramatically inconsistent between the lenses.

You can easily see if you just

quickly switch between them, like go from 4.9X to 5.2X,

there's a pretty big difference in color, in exposure

in contrast, in everything.

And the same thing happens in the ultra wide.

This is a pretty common thing with smartphones

but it's particularly bad here.