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00:00Hey what's up guys, MKBHD here, and this is the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 that I've been using
00:10for about a week for exactly one reason.
00:13It has a 108 megapixel camera on the back.
00:17So that is a wild number, 108 megapixels, but I should mention we have seen this megapixel
00:24push in smartphone cameras before, I remember there was a little streak back when I was
00:28in college.
00:29We had a bunch of 4 and 8 megapixel cameras, then a bunch of 12, and then a bunch of 20
00:33somethings, and then we got that 41 megapixel Nokia Lumia 1020, which for a while was basically
00:39the king of smartphones, and it was pretty good, but it seemed like every time we got
00:43a new higher megapixel number, then that became the smartphone camera king, even though megapixels
00:49didn't mean everything.
00:51Just because something has a 16 megapixel camera doesn't mean it's necessarily better
00:56than the 12 megapixel camera.
00:58In fact, a lot of times it's the other way around.
01:00So anyway, now I'm sure you've noticed that we've sort of settled around pretty much everyone
01:04having 12 megapixel cameras, but 108 megapixels, that's gotta mean something, there's gotta
01:12be something there, right?
01:15Well let's start with what that actually means.
01:17The resolution of one photo from a typical 12 megapixel camera, like the iPhone, is
01:21around 4,000 by 3,000, so that totals around 12 million pixels, 12 megapixels.
01:28So the same scene from this new Xiaomi camera comes in at 12,000 by 9,000, which is multiplied
01:35to get you 108 million pixels, or 108 megapixels.
01:40So you're getting about three times the vertical and horizontal resolution to make these numbers,
01:45and the file size for me has ranged from about 20 to 30 megabytes per photo, so that's pretty
01:51big.
01:52And you've probably already noticed, there are actually five total cameras on the back
01:56of this phone.
01:57The 108 megapixel main camera, then there's a 12 megapixel 2x telephoto, a 20 megapixel
02:04ultra wide, a 5 megapixel super telephoto at 5x, and a 2 megapixel macro camera.
02:11And there's also two flashes, two pairs of flashes.
02:14Like it is a lot of hardware, clearly, so much in fact that it sticks out from the back
02:18of the phone and you end up with it rocking on the table and everything, but that's a
02:22sacrifice you make if you want all these pixels and all this camera quality.
02:26So the question is, how good do the photos actually look?
02:30And the answer is, really good, sometimes.
02:34So I've said before, there are a lot of things that contribute to the quality of a smartphone
02:38photo.
02:39Color accuracy, exposure, dynamic range, contrast, etc.
02:44But the main thing you're going to notice, of course, with such a high resolution here,
02:48is sharpness and detail.
02:50The photos in the 108 megapixel mode are significantly sharper, more detailed than
02:55any other smartphone I've ever used, especially when you give it a lot of light.
02:59So in the daytime, under bright lights, basically.
03:03But I will modify it to say this, it's mostly center sharpness.
03:07See, the center of these frames are super crisp and sharp, but when you move out to
03:12near the outer edges and corners of the frame, it's rarely anywhere near as sharp.
03:17This is a perfect example.
03:19In the center here, you can see the details in this merch, the fibers in the cotton.
03:23You can practically feel the softness.
03:25I mean, you can feel the softness in person for yourself.
03:28Everything's back on sale at shop.mkbhd.com.
03:31But yeah, you get the idea.
03:33Super high detail here.
03:35But the edges of the frame, especially the corners, get very quickly distorted and fall
03:40out of focus.
03:41Even on flat landscape shots like this, which is crazy, you still have that lack of center
03:46sharpness.
03:47Normally, if you have a subject in the middle of a frame and you want that tack sharp focus
03:51and don't really care about the edges, then that's fine.
03:55But in a landscape or something wider, you really notice the edge distortion.
03:58I think a great way to show this is to give context.
04:00So iPhone 11 Pro, we all know, great set of cameras.
04:04I could use any other Pixel 4 or a high-end smartphone system, but I took the same photo
04:08on iPhone 11 Pro and Mi Note 10 back to back, 12 megapixels, 108 megapixels.
04:16So here's an alleyway.
04:17Very similar, of course, with each photo.
04:19Different color temperatures slightly, different exposures a little bit.
04:23But again, pretty similar.
04:25But the advantage of so many pixels is you can zoom in and keep clarity.
04:29And you're actually kind of able to read this tiny security sign over here on the Xiaomi
04:34where it's literally just blurred lines on the iPhone.
04:37Here, this shot of the river is pretty similar.
04:40Where you're zoomed out, you'll notice the Xiaomi is a little more contrasty, while the
04:43iPhone is a bit more flat.
04:45That's typical.
04:46That's more shadow exposure detail.
04:47But as soon as you zoom in, again, you start to see the difference in levels of detail,
04:51especially in the trees and really anything that's near the middle of the frame.
04:55Like the links in the chain link fence with 108 megapixels versus 12 is super obvious.
05:01And the theme keeps going kind of no matter what your subject is, as long as it's in
05:04the middle of the frame.
05:05When you're zoomed all the way out, they're pretty similar with their images.
05:08Just the iPhone usually being a bit flatter.
05:11And then zooming in gets you this immense amount of detail and sharpness.
05:15And this stayed true in well-lit shots.
05:18It definitely falls apart pretty dramatically, though, in low light.
05:21The iPhone has significantly less noise, so it does way less noise reduction in low light
05:27and has not so much smoothing to do because of it.
05:29While the Xiaomi software is struggling and smoothing over everything to the point where
05:35108 megapixels with all this noise reduction is less detailed than 12 megapixels with
05:41excellent image processing.
05:43So we've sort of known it already, but software is clearly a big part of a camera's experience.
05:48And I can't talk about this camera without actually talking about the photo taking experience.
05:52Not just the image quality, but using it.
05:54For starters, there's a separate mode for taking 108 megapixel photos.
05:58Typically, when you just open the camera in photo mode, you're going to take scaled
06:03roughly 27 megapixel photos.
06:05Still high end.
06:06That's still a lot of pixels, but that's where it performs well.
06:09You can zoom in and out, and with the extra lenses, you can get to 2x, to 5x, and then
06:14even further with hybrid zoom.
06:16Macro shots are cool.
06:17There's the ultra-wide.
06:18It feels fairly solid.
06:20But then you switch over to the 108 megapixel mode and things slow down quite a bit.
06:27Now there's a noticeable shutter lag of over a second as it captures the entire 12,000
06:33lines of resolution and processes the whole frame, writes them to the not-so-fast storage,
06:39and then you can't view the photo you've taken until after another few seconds of
06:43that processing and writing the photo.
06:44And then you can see it sort of spinning for a bit.
06:47And once it's done, you can view it.
06:49And once you view the huge photo, it doesn't actually load the whole image right away.
06:54It loads a smaller proxy until you actually zoom in, in which case it decides, oh, okay,
06:58you're looking for that extra resolution.
07:01And then it loads up the full-size preview, and you can see it sharpen up.
07:04And so it's doing all this mainly to avoid having you deal with that not-so-great experience
07:08all the time.
07:09It's smart, but this is not the highest-end phone in the world.
07:12I'd call it upper-mid-range.
07:15Specs are a Snapdragon 730G chip, and you're looking at 6 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage
07:20as the only spec.
07:22And so in general, it's not going to be the best-equipped for spitting out 20-megabyte
07:26image files and manipulating them in real time.
07:28The rest of the phone, I'd say, is actually pretty well-considered, if you ask me.
07:32It's really solidly built.
07:34It's got a 5,260 mAh battery, and there's a 30-watt fast charger in the box.
07:39And around the front, I don't like the curved screen.
07:41I've talked about that before, but generally, the display itself is nice.
07:45It's a 1080p AMOLED with just that small notch at the top.
07:49There's an in-display fingerprint reader.
07:51There is even a headphone jack and an IR blaster.
07:54And you can see it's running Xiaomi's UI, MIUI 11, on top of Android, which has plenty
07:59of its own quirks and features.
08:01It's clearly an improvement over the previous version, from what I've used, but clearly
08:04still skinned.
08:05So overall, my take is, it's pretty sweet that we have a legitimate, like an actual
08:10108-megapixel sensor that can fit in a smartphone today.
08:14Just for the number on paper, that's really cool.
08:16It's not some faked composition adding up detail from three different cameras.
08:21It's real.
08:22Is it good?
08:23Yes, sometimes.
08:27It's legitimately really useful to take like landscapes and be able to use that center
08:31of frame, which is super detailed, and crop it and do whatever you want with that.
08:36But the sensor is so new and so big that the image processing pipeline makes not so
08:41great photos of close-up subjects and low-light scenes.
08:45So it's clearly not flawless.
08:46I really became most interested in the camera in this phone because of the rumor that some
08:51camera phones next year, specifically Galaxy S11, will have a 100-plus megapixel sensor.
08:59That is exciting because that's going to be on a higher-end phone that can put the resources
09:03towards making that a reasonable experience.
09:07Faster storage, higher-end CPU, more RAM, just more processing power, and then you of
09:11course get a more tried-and-true Samsung image processing pipeline.
09:15So all these things can maybe make a 100-megapixel smartphone photo normalized and normal-feeling
09:22instead of sort of like an add-on or an extra mode, which is the way it is on this camera.
09:27So I'm excited for that potential future, not just for the number on paper, but because
09:31of the actual improvement we've seen in smartphone camera tech and just camera tech in general
09:37since those Nokia Lumia 1020 days.
09:40Fingers crossed we don't lose sight of that.
09:42Either way, thanks for watching.
09:45Catch you guys in the next one.
09:46Peace!