There has always been a debate when it comes to smartphone camera picture quality versus the number of megapixels it packs. Xiaomi has been teasing the idea of a 108-megapixel camera for a few months now, and it’s finally here: the CC9 Pro aka Mi Note 10 outside china , is the company’s first smartphone.
I have personally seen 12 megapixels phones from Apple and Google Pixel produce a better quality image than smartphones that come with over 40 mega pixel. Smartphone makers like Google rely mainly on their camera software and machine learning to produce great pictures. So can we get excited with higher megapixels? Well, no we already have the mind-blowing wraparound-screen Mi Mix Alpha that the company showed off earlier this year, which Xiaomi promises will also feature the 108-megapixel sensor. (That phone is presumably still set for a limited release in December, though.)
The Mi Note 10 packs five rear cameras: the aforementioned flagship 108-megapixel wide angle lens, a 5-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical zoom (and 10x hybrid zoom), a 12-megapixel telephoto camera designed for portrait mode shots, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide with a 117-degree field of view, and a 2-megapixel macro lens for close-up shots. There’s also a sixth 32-megapixel camera on the front of the phone, which is housed in a teardrop-style notch.
Xiaomi uses a 108-megapixel sensor from Samsung that the company designed together with them, which was announced earlier this year. The 1/1.33-inch sensor is unusually large (for a phone, at least). By default, it’ll shoot 27-megapixel shots that combine four pixels together, as is fairly standard on ultra-high megapixel-count smartphones. There is an option to shoot in the full 108-megapixel resolution should you want to.
Leaving the 108-megapixel camera on the phone, the rest of the Mi Note 10 sounds like a fairly competent phone, with a huge 5,260mAh battery, a curved 6.47-inch AMOLED display with an in-display fingerprint sensor, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730G processor. It even has a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the software side, it’ll run Xiaomi’s MIUI 11 skin on top of last year’s Android 9 Pie.
