All right so this is the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra Xiaomi’s latest and greatest creation for 2021 with a camera bump the size of the moon on the back. It’s a big one so you might have seen that people are asking mostly two things one uh no just make the rest of the phone thicker to match the thickness of the camera bump just add some battery and make it flush or two.
Yeah if the camera is actually amazing all right well that being said let’s just jump straight into this camera. It’s gonna be lit but this is the world’s largest smartphone camera in more than one way so it’s not even like it’s that many cameras by today’s standards.
Anyway it’s got three on the back along with a triple led flash and a whole touch screen which I’ll get to but each of these cameras on the back of this thing appears to be the world’s largest in some way so the primary sensor is the world’s largest camera sensor in a smartphone then the ultra-wide gives you the world’s largest field of view the widest ultrawide of any I’ve seen in a smartphone. The zoom at 120x is the biggest zoom in any smartphone so far so right off the bat.
On paper pretty impressive so all right the main camera that ladies and gentlemen are a one over one point one two-inch sensor that is really close to one inch you know what else has a one-inch sensor the sony rx100 now, of course, that also has a whole real optical zoom lens and it can do a lot more it’s a dedicated point-and-shoot but to fit nearly the same size sensor inside a smartphone is pretty incredible it’s kind of hard to understand how awesome that is so that 50-megapixel sensor bends down to 12 megapixels has an f 1.95 aperture.
Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra Full Tech Spec
And, ois now if the question is can this phone hang with the rx100 the answer is still mostly no because that glass does make a huge difference to a photo even if you do have a similar sensor but that huge sensor does deliver a certain look and that look is high detail and shallow depth of field all the time so literally anytime you have a close-up subject you can count on the background being blurred out of focus none of these shots are portrait mode this is just straight snapping photos it absolutely epitomizes that big sensor look in a smartphone but guess what that also means if you have even more close-up subjects like I do you’re going to start to see fringing around the outsides because the plane of focus is so thin that most of the object unless it’s flat, is actually going to be slightly out of focus we’ve seen this from other big sensor smartphones.
I do really like the processing though I gotta say it’s very naturally sharp it’s not like this over-processed hyper-sharpened look like I’ve seen a lot lately. So these are just some of the photos I’ve been taking with it there’s plenty of detail and information. And when you zoom in they retain that detail so that parts really nice aside from that though the colors aren’t really all that amazing to me the HDR works well though it does still occasionally overdo it and the fringing sometimes gets really annoying when you have very close up subjects.
I take a lot of those but generally, this camera is quite nice and not looking over-processed until night time so that huge sensor is specifically letting in tons of light so at night you can pretty easily take low-noise photos with a pretty fast shutter speed some phones just like to take shots at night look like they were taken during the day maybe you’re into this look.
Maybe you’re not there’s no doubt though about the light gathering advantage of such a huge sensor this is the same shot in a one-and-a-half-second exposure from the Xiaomi Mi 11 ultra the Xiaomi is a little brighter. Alright so then the ultrawide is this ultra-wide camera with a 128-degree field of view so look I’ve seen a lot of ultra wides on the back of phones in my day and I think it’s safe to say this is the widest ultra-wide I’ve seen yet gives you the biggest field of view.
And it has a lot of the same processing characteristics as the main camera it’s 48 megapixels and it’s got the detail the pretty flat color the hdr but what I noticed is because it’s so incredibly wide the outer edges of the frame like near the corners are much softer and more distorted than most of the middle so by the time you crop in from that super soft corner you end up with a pretty normal looking ultra-wide but it’s nice to have the extra flexibility of a camera that can just capture everything in one shot for sure.
In Detail Camera Operation And More
I literally never had to worry about backing up from a subject so then lastly your zoom you got yourself another 48 megapixels at a 5x optical zoom which can take you up to 120x on the digital zoom side which that’s the biggest number that’s the furthest digital zoom you’re gonna find today in a smartphone camera now the usability of a 120x zoom is very debatable you know they do the same software trick Samsung does by showing you where you are in the overall frame when you’re zooming in.
So you at least have an idea of what you’re looking at but most stuff you shoot past about 50x just looks not great and the 120x photos just look like a smear of pixels like a guessing game unless you know exactly what you’re looking at it’s not going to be great I file this directly into the novelty drawer but there is no doubt that you can get much much sharper like 5 to 20 x zoom photos from this camera and they still have shallow depth of field which is pretty nuts all three of these cameras will shoot night mode photos and all three of these cameras will also shoot 8k video which is pretty great although 8k video is locked up to 24 fps so I found myself shooting in the correct frame rate at 4k 30.
You can also do 4k 60 but pretty impressive on the video front and you can see the staggering hdr really working here I feel like I can see way more into the shadows with this video camera like in clips like this you can switch also somewhat smoothly between all three cameras while shooting video at 4k which is sweet.
I was impressed with the color consistency between all three cameras now the minimum focus distance is not nearly the same from the telephoto when it kicks in so if you’re shooting something close up probably don’t switch the telephoto.
Aside from that whether you like the color tuning or not they’ve got it very consistent between all the cameras it’s good stuff but something else I’ve noticed with mi 11 ultra is it seems to be working really hard doing this camera stuff so it’s you know there’s a couple of features that are enabled by the snapdragon 8 but just because they’re enabled doesn’t mean they’re efficient or easy for it so with heavy camera use I actually noticed two things.
Once the battery plummeted look at this graph this is a 5000 milliamp-hour battery going from about 45 percent to near 25 in a couple of minutes and Xiaomi software is just straight up telling me like yeah it’s the camera that’s killing your battery the built-in battery setting lets you play around with the graph and look at exactly how much battery certain app drain in certain time periods.
And the camera was the culprit here but the other thing I noticed is shutter lag or at least I thought it was shutter lag but it’s actually just a lag of the shutter animation the photo you’re taking is actually as soon as you touch the button but then the animation plays a split second late so it kind of feels like the opposite problem the OnePlus 9‘s have.
Where you think you got the picture but then you didn’t with this camera you might think you missed it but you actually did get it so it feels a bit slow overall but the shots are in fact very quick if that makes sense so now you got the world’s largest smartphone sensor the world’s largest field of view ultra-wide the deepest zoom in any smartphone camera might as well finish it off by making it the world’s largest camera bump by adding a screen to the back.
Because, why not so actually I had to think about this I’m not sure if it actually is the biggest ever camera bump by volume just because phones like the Lumia 1020 exist but this display on the back here is a pretty funny fun fact it’s actually the same display that’s in Xiaomi’s mi band 5.
It’s like they realized they had some, extras leftover and just thought hey why don’t we put these in the back of the phone so it’s 1.1-inch ammo led touch screen with a 126 by 294 resolution it’s not super sharp at all I can literally see pixels and it’s also not very bright but it can show you a couple of things it can show you the time your battery status and a notification light if you have any waiting for you.
I can also show you any number of pre-loaded images with a black background that’s kind of cool if you just want a cactus on the back of your phone all the time but there’s also a whole customizer built into the software where you can put a text quote permanently on the back of your phone or even upload your own custom image hence the thumbnail for this video not quite as custom as the ROG phone 5 ultimate but it’s up there but really the only actually useful thing I’ve seen it do is act as a tiny viewfinder for the main camera so you can take high-quality selfies on those massive sensors.
You can zoom in and out and everything and that’ll be a much higher quality selfie than the perfectly average 20-megapixel selfie camera could ever manage other than that honestly not super useful it’s pretty cool of course it’s a touch screen but yeah I think you spend most your time looking at the front of the phone.
But, here’s what I guess you can say here that screen brought the camera bump all the way to the other side of the phone here so now you have this big square camera bump that doesn’t rock side to side on a table so I guess if it’s between the screen and no screen then I’ll take the screen all day.
By the way, the rest of this phone is sick it’s called the ultra for a reason this is Xiaomi’s absolutely high-end top-of-the-line flagship and it’s got all the specs and the features to back it up it’s a snapdragon triple eight like we talked about 12 gigs of ram 256 gigs of fast storage and the 5 000 milliamp-hour battery like you talked about is pretty impressive but not as impressive as 67 watts wired charging.
67-watt wireless charging on an optional Xiaomi wireless charger I don’t have that specific wireless charger but it’s definitely good that a phone that can run down your battery like this can also charge up real quick like this and so it also has an ultra-high-end display as you can see 6.81 inches 1440p 120hz OLED with an in-screen fingerprint reader curved edges and a super bright 1700 nits maximum brightness that makes it very readable indoors outdoors pretty much everywhere and honestly it’s got pretty much every other high-end spec you can actually think of in a phone like just name a high-end spec in your head this phone’s got it.
All right great haptics check ip68 check reverse wireless charging yeah check 10 watts. It’s got an IR blaster, okay great speaker quality double-checks there are Harman Kardon dual stereo speakers on the top and the bottom and it’s all wrapped up in Xiaomi software that I’ve talked about a little more in my Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra review.
But, that I do think is also getting really good this Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra does it all short of levitating but I just do want to land back on that build one more time you see the photos and the crazy bump on the back of the phone and it just looks like a lot but once you actually start to use the phone I found that my finger I naturally like kind of rested right underneath the camera sort of propped it up like that.
Final Verdict
I was kind of nice and so I know a lot of you were saying oh just make this phone thicker give it a ten thousand milliamp-hour battery and get rid of the camera bump but this phone is already quite heavy it’s a ceramic back phone first of all and if I weight it which I did literally up against some of the other flagships it’s one of the heaviest and so if you add all of that battery you lose the grip of the camera.
Then, it’s just one big slick thing like I get where you’re coming from but I feel like it’s surprisingly not too top-heavy with this current design and I actually don’t mind it so just something that you get a difference between seeing the phone and actually using the phone but hey at the end of the day it comes down to you would you rock a phone with a gigantic camera bump like this or not for the big time sensor the big time ultrawide the big-time zoom. Overall Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra is a new generation Ultra camera phone that can easily give a battle to the OnePlus 9 Pro 5G.
Fellas are prone to click awesome pictures through smartphones I have found a few tricks and can follow these as tips on mobile photography to improve your clicks in the future.