The 108 Mega Pixel Camera Phone; Xiaomi CC9 Pro/Note 10 pro review

This is the Xiaomi.

Which for a while was basically the king of smartphones and it was pretty good but it seemed like every time we got a new higher mega pixel number then that became the smartphone camera king even though megapixels didn't mean everything but just because something has a 16 megapixel camera doesn't mean it's necessarily better than the 12 megapixel camera, in fact a lot of times it's the other way around so anyway now I'm sure you've noticed that we sort of settled around pretty much everyone having 12 megapixel cameras but a hundred and eight megapixels like that's gotta mean something it's gonna be something.

The hair right well let's start with with that actually means the resolution of one photo from a typical 12 megapixel camera like the iPhone is around four thousand by three thousand so that totals around twelve million pixels twelve megapixels, so the same scene from this new Xiaomi camera comes in at twelve thousand by nine thousand which is multiplied to get you a hundred and eight million pixels or a hundred eight megapixels, so you're getting about three times the vertical and horizontal resolution to make these numbers and the file size for me has ranged from about.

Twenty to thirty megabytes per photo so it's pretty big and you probably already noticed there are actually five total cameras on the back of this phone the hundred eight megapixel main camera then there's a 12 megapixel 2x telephoto a 20 megapixel ultra wide a 5 megapixel super telephoto at 5x and a 2 megapixel macro camera and there's also two flashes two pairs of flashes like it is a lot of hardware clearly so much in fact that it sticks out from back to the phone and end up like with it rocking on a table and everything but that's the sacrifice you make if you.

Want all these pixels and all this camera quality, so the question is how good do the photos actually look and the answer is really good sometimes so I said before there are a lot of things that contribute to the quality of a smartphone photo color accuracy exposure dynamic range contrasts, etc, but the main thing you're gonna notice of course with such a high resolution here is sharpness and detail the photos in the 108 megapixel mode are significantly sharper more detail than any other smartphone I've ever used special when you give it a Lot of light so on the daytime.

Under bright lights basically but I will modify it to say this. It's mostly center sharpness. See the center of these frames are super crisp and sharp but when you move out to near the outer edges and corners of the frame, it's rarely anywhere near a sharp. This is a perfect example.

In the center here, you can see the details in this merch the fiber is in the cotton. You can practically feel the softness and then you can feel the softness in person for yourself everything's back on sale at shop.mkbhd.com, but yeah the idea super high detail here, but the, Edges of the frame especially the corners get very quickly distorted and fall out of focus Even on flat landscape shots like this which is crazy.

You still have that lack of center sharpness. Normally if you have a subject in the middle of a frame and you want that tack sharp focus and don't really care about the edges then that's fine, but in a landscape or something wider you really noticed the edge distortion. I think a great way to show this is to give context so iPhone 11 Pro we all know great set of cameras.

I can use any other pixel for a high-end smartphone system, but I took the same photo on iPhone 11 Pro. And me no 10 back to back 12 megapixels 108 megapixels So here's an alleyway very similar of course with each photo different colored temperatures slightly different exposures a little bit but again pretty similar but the advantage of so many pixels as you can zoom in and keep clarity and there's you actually kind of able to read this tiny security sign over here on the Xiaomi where it's literally just blurred lines on the iPhone.

Here the shot of the river is pretty similar where you zoomed out you'll notice the Xiaomi is a little more contrasty while the iPhone is a bit more flat that's typical. Keeps more shadow exposure detail but as soon as you zoom in again you start to see the difference in levels of detail especially in the trees and really anything that's near the middle of the frame like the links and the chain link fence with a hundred eight megapixels versus twelve is super obvious and the theme keeps going kind of no matter what your subject is as long as it's in the middle of the frame.

When you're zoomed all the way out, they're pretty similar with their images just the iPhone usually being a bit flatter and then zooming in gets you this immense amount of detail and sharpness and this stayed true in well-lit shots. It definitely falls apart pretty dramatically. To go in low light The iPhone has significantly less noise so it does way less noise reduction in low light and has not so much smoothing to do because of it while the Xiaomi software is struggling and smoothing over everything to the point where 108 megapixels with all this noise reduction is less detailed than 12 megapixels with excellent image processing.

So we sort of known it already but software is clearly a big part of a camera's experience and I can't talk about this camera without actually talking about the photo taking experience not just the image quality, but using it. For starters, there's a step. Forward mode for taking 108 megapixel photos typically when you just open the camera and photo mode, you're gonna take scaled roughly 27 megapixel photos.

Still high-end that's still a lot of pixels, but that's where performs well. You can zoom in and out and with the extra lenses you can get to 2x to 5x and then even further with hybrid zoom macro shots are cool. There's the ultra wide. It feels fairly solid but then you switch over to the 108 megapixel mode and things slow down quite a bit.

Now, there's a noticeable shutter lag of over a second. As it captures the entire 12,000. Resolution and processes the whole frame rights them to the not so fast storage and then you can't view the photo you've taken until after another few seconds of that processing and writing the photo and then you can see it sort of spinning for a bit and once it's done you can view it and once you view the huge photo it doesn't actually load the whole image right away it loads a smaller proxy until you actually zoom in in which case it besides out, okay, you're looking for that extra resolution and then it loads up the full-size preview and you can see it sharpen up and so it's doing all this mainly to avoid having you do with that not so great experience.

All the time it's smart but this is not the highest and phone in the world I'd call it upper mid-range specs are you know a snapdragon 730G chip and you're looking at six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage as the only spec and so in general it's not gonna be the best equipped for spinning out 20 megabyte image files and manipulating them in real time the rest of the phone.

I'd say is actually pretty well considered if you ask me it's really solidly built you've got a 5,260 million power battery and there's a 30 watt fast charger in the box and around the front. I don't like the curve screen I've talked about that before but generally the Display itself is nice it's a 1080p ammo lead with just that small notch at the top there's an in display favorite reader there is even a headphone jack and an IR blaster and you can see it's running Xiaomi's UI MIUI 11 on top of Android which has plenty of its own quirks and features definitely an improvement over the previous version from what I've used but clearly still skin so overall my take is it's pretty sweet that we have a legitimate like an actual hundred and eight megapixel sensor that can fit in a smartphone today, like just for the number on paper that's really cool, it's not some faked composition.

Adding up detail from three different cameras, it's real is it good? Yes sometimes it's it's legitimately really useful to take like landscapes and be able to use that center of frame which is super detailed and crop and do whatever you want with that but the sensor is so new and so big that the image processing pipeline makes not so great photos of close-up subjects and low-light scenes, so it's clearly not flawless.

I really became most interested in the camera in this phone because of the rumor that some camera phones next year specifically Galaxy S. 11 will have a hunt. 100 plus megapixel sensor as exciting because that's gonna be on a higher-end phone that can put the resources towards making that a reasonable experience faster storage higher NCPU more ram just more processing power and then ease course get a more tried and true Samsung image processing pipeline, so all these things can maybe make a hundred megapixel smartphone photo normalized and normal feeling instead of sort of like an add-on or an extra mode which is the way it is on this camera, so I'm excited for that potential future, not just for the number on paper, but because of The actual improvement we've seen in smartphone camera.

Camera tech in general since those Nokia Lumia 1020 days. Fingers crossed we cited that. Either way. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys next one. Peace.