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Xiaomi 13 Ultra: “Real camera” phone makes Samsung, Apple shake nervously

24 points by metadat 4y ago

cs702 4y ago
I doubt this is going to make Apple "shake nervously" (LOL), but props to Xiaomi for coming out with a phone that has a big sensor (1-inch, same size as the Sony RX100) capable of optical bokeh, and four high-quality Leica lenses with full-frame-equivalent focal lengths ranging from 12mm to 240mm. There's a market for it. Here's the official announcement: https://www.mi.com/global/discover/article?id=2922 https://www.mi.com/global/discover/article?id=2922
- akudha 4y ago
  I don’t know why non-photographers need phones with super powerful camera features. It would be nice if these manufacturers put serious effort into improving battery performance instead of camera stuff. Tired of my phone battery charge lasting not even a day
  - haswell 4y ago
    Simply put: people want to preserve high quality memories of their lives, and better cameras make better photos/videos. With that said, a “real camera” phone seems most likely to attract customers with specific photography goals, so there’s no reason to conclude that these phones are for people who don’t share those goals. Neither does the creation of photography-focused phones have much bearing on the existence of phones with good batteries. Single anecdote, but I charge my iPhone every 2-3 days depending on how heavily I use it, and it still manages to take excellent pictures.
  - cududa 4y ago
    Well, my phone battery usually lasts the full day, even though the battery is old/ degraded. I’m fairly certain most others do too. If you have an iPhone the magnetic battery works great. If you prefer android, there are plenty of phones with bulky batteries. Plus, it’s not like battery engineering and camera engineering are even remotely the same skill sets
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    What phone do you have that doesn’t even last a day?
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      Any that's over two years old. I'm very frustrated with the battery on my Samsung S21. Smartphones now improve at a glacial, minutely iterative pace, so for the first time, I see no compelling reasons to upgrade -- except due to the total lack of battery health management, the battery is by now basically ruined. I'll try for a replacement.
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    Well, mostly nobody need what high-end smartphones offer. Cheaper smartphones (say, in the low hundreds of bucks range) cover 100% of the needs of the average user. Still, a lot of people buy the high end ones. My conclusion is that people like expensive toys (especially true when it comes to iPhones) So, nothing wrong about Xiaomi going after that market. It certainly exists.
izacus 4y ago
That's ok, US government will ban them for security reasons if it turns out their products are competitive in their market.
- colordrops 4y ago
  What has the US banned besides Huawei? It's tit for tat anyway, China has banned order of magnitude more US products.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Can you link to a source of the banned hardware products?
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      The US doesn't make hardware. It makes software and China has banned plenty of it. Basically every big name software maker in the US has faced or is under a Chinese ban by now.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        That's not new though? There's been restrictions on software products since the 1990s and probably even earlier. Such as the ban on export of cryptography software. What was attention grabbing in the last few years with Huawei was that physical tangible consumer products you could hold in your hands were banned.
        Fatnino 4y ago
        You are mixing several unrelated concepts. The cryptography export restriction was a US initiative with obvious reasons. The software bans I am talking about are from the Chinese side. For example China's bans on sites like google. What Chinese consumer hardware manufacturers did recently (or rather, finally got noticed doing recently) is making their devices into spying toeholds in other countries. Even if nothing of interest to the Chinese takes place on your 17 year old daughter's phone, it's still on your home LAN exposed to the potential large attack surface area of Mom's work devices. Or even worse, imagine a Chinese government ear permanently installed in the middle of our 5g infrastructure. The ideology of the US government does not align with that of the Chinese government. Hasn't for a very long time. The only surprising thing about this whole situation is how long the US went along with Chinese shenanigans. I would have slammed the door on China over 20 years ago.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
can16358p 4y ago
In the side-by-side comparison, I found Apple's results much better. Of course that's personal taste but they should have put in better comparisons IMO.
- version_five 4y ago
  I saw some iphone pictures for the first time recently at a family event (I have a very old phone and don't take many pictures). They looked fine and I'd say more "professional" when zoomed out buy zoomed in they looked horrible and you could see all kinds of artifacts from whatever enhancement algorithms they use. For posting selfies on Instagram, iPhone is probably better, but for pictures of family for posterity I'd rather have the less processed version. That's what they're trying to show I belive.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Much better how?
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Visually aesthetically pleasing.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Most of them have artifacts.. I prefer actual physics to do depth of field
colordrops 4y ago
If LineageOS gets ported to this I'm 100% getting one.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Before you do so make sure that the camera is useable under LineageOS as that is not always the case, especially when it comes to more "advanced" features which are only available when using stock firmware and the stock camera app.
tambourine_man 4y ago
“Interestingly, despite packing four large camera sensors on its back and a 5000 mAh battery, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra isn’t bigger or heavier than a Galaxy S23 Ultra or an iPhone 14 Pro Max.” If by bigger you consider only 2 dimensions, sure.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  Also “not bigger than the largest iPhone available” isn’t exactly small.
bitL 4y ago
I expected real camera lens in a "real camera" phone instead of multiple tiny lenses covered by a shield that introduces its own problems.
- arghwhat 4y ago
  All camera lenses are real lenses. When the lens is not interchangeable, and the sensor is small (while huge compared to a normal smartphone, this is tiny compares to a camera), the lens really does not have to be that big. Being behind a shield is also not itself weird - many people use filters as front element protection on interchangeable lens cameras. Nothing different there.
  - blincoln 4y ago
    When I bought my Xperia Pro-1, I hacked together a custom case for it that has a 67-72mm step ring grafted over a circular hole where the cameras and flash are. Normally I just have a clear glass ("UV protector") filter there.[1] The result looks a lot like Xiaomi's phone, but I can replace the glass if it gets damaged. Not sure if that's an option for their phone. There are some side-effects. Sometimes there will be flicker from the flash (or maybe the active focus sensor?) that's reflected in the glass. Because phone cameras have such tiny apertures, dust and debris is more likely to be visible on the filter than on a full-size camera. I'm sure Leica can do a better job than me at minimizing those issues, but I wouldn't be sure they're non-existent. [1] But of course it also works for circular polarizers, IR-bandpass filters, or anything else that comes in 72mm camera filter form.
- hulitu 4y ago
  The bigest problem is the jpeg compression though. For some reason, Android defaults to a shitty compression ratio for jpeg which you cannot change.
expertentipp 4y ago
Reminds me the "fuck you project" by Nokia's engineers from the period when the company had been burning down - Nokia 808 PureView.
CrampusDestrus 4y ago
So we've gone back 10 years to the era of the S4 Zoom [1] but we don't even get the nice zooming and optical qualities of a point and shoot? Call it innovation, I guess... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4_Zoom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4_Zoom
blincoln 4y ago
Nitpick: the author claims there hasn't been a camera-style grip available for phones since 2013, but Sony's Xperia Pro-1(I?)[1] can be used with their Bluetooth grip.[2] The Pro-1 was designed with a similar goal - try to make a pretty solid point-and-shoot camera in a phone form factor - and IMO it was fairly successful. It doesn't capture images as vividly (especially in low light) as phones that do more post-processing, but the results are also more genuine. It can save in JPEG+RAW like a serious camera. Like the other Xperias I've had, it's close to the stock Android, and there are only a few annoying changes/non-removable apps. I'm curious if Xiaomi is able to do better here, especially with more room in the case. [1] I own one,and I'm still not sure if it's supposed to be the number 1, a Roman numeral I, the letter I, a vertical pipe, or something else. [2] e.g. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1669529-REG/sony_xperia_pro_i_512gb_5g.html/qa https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1669529-REG/sony_xper...
bloggie 4y ago
Looks like a product launch of a phone with the new Sony IMX989 1" sensor. Some other phones have it to: Xiaomi 13 Pro Xiaomi 12S/Ultra Vivo X90 Pro+ Sharp Aquos R6 AKA Leitz Phone 1 Aquos R7 Xperia Pro-I According to: https://curioussteve.com/tech/explained/sony-imx989-explained/ https://curioussteve.com/tech/explained/sony-imx989-explaine... Also: Oppo Find X6 Pro
ecopoesis 4y ago
It feels like Xiaomi is chasing a market that doesn’t really exist. Smartphone cameras are good enough for most people. And for folks who want more, mirrorless and DSLRs start cheap and much, much better. Even worse, this phone looks to use the same small sensors and small lenses all smartphones are saddled with. A bulkier form factor and slapping Leica’s logo doesn’t make a “real” camera. Big sensors and big lenses do.
- cudgy 4y ago
  I am inclined to agree, but I applaud the effort. It is worth investigating the size of this market, which might be large enough to support a few of these phones. It might even push the technology envelope further so that standard smartphones gain some of the benefits of these niche camera-phones.
- wenc 4y ago
  Not sure about that. A lot of us non-photographers do care about taking nice pictures and videos but don't really want to get into DSLRs because you never seem to have them around when you need them. These days though most people don't care about more pixels, but better filters. There's still a ways to go before smartphone cameras get there. (imagine building in Moment-type lenses in smartphone cameras).
  - ecopoesis 4y ago
    I agree. The only real use for more pixels is for crop-to-zoom. I want big glass and big sensors so we can get real bokeh. My ideal phone camera would be a single APS-C sized sensor replacing all three current iPhone cameras. The lens should be a f1.2, 50mm equivalent pancake. Yes that’s hard to do, but using fancy fresnel lenses and a pile of CPU to correct things I bet you could make it work. Make the sensor ~30 megapixels so you can digital zoom. Add a mount that includes communication so if you want you can add fancy lenses and they can be active parts of the autofocus system. This design actually competes with low-end mirrorless and is probably even possible to build (the lens might be pushing what’s possible, but I bet we can get close).
bee_rider 4y ago
Every time I see one of these phones with a bunch of little cellphone lenses on the back, it just makes me wish the Light L16 had worked out.
RobotToaster 4y ago
It's interesting, and hopefully more companies will go in this direction, but 1" is still quite a bit smaller than even a M4/3 sensor, and I had really hoped for interchangeable lenses when it said "real camera".
dingaling 4y ago
Samsung made a series of actual camera-phones about a decade ago, the Galaxy Camera https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0677420709/samsung-announces-galaxy-camera-wi-fi https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0677420709/samsung-announces...
mgdlbp 4y ago
I guess the one with the actual M mount didn't work out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZm4gg5CvWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZm4gg5CvWc)

24 points by metadat 4y ago

I doubt this is going to make Apple "shake nervously" (LOL), but props to Xiaomi for coming out with a phone that has a big sensor (1-inch, same size as the Sony RX100) capable of optical bokeh, and four high-quality Leica lenses with full-frame-equivalent focal lengths ranging from 12mm to 240mm. There's a market for it. Here's the official announcement: https://www.mi.com/global/discover/article?id=2922 https://www.mi.com/global/discover/article?id=2922

akudha 4y ago
I don’t know why non-photographers need phones with super powerful camera features. It would be nice if these manufacturers put serious effort into improving battery performance instead of camera stuff. Tired of my phone battery charge lasting not even a day
- haswell 4y ago
  Simply put: people want to preserve high quality memories of their lives, and better cameras make better photos/videos. With that said, a “real camera” phone seems most likely to attract customers with specific photography goals, so there’s no reason to conclude that these phones are for people who don’t share those goals. Neither does the creation of photography-focused phones have much bearing on the existence of phones with good batteries. Single anecdote, but I charge my iPhone every 2-3 days depending on how heavily I use it, and it still manages to take excellent pictures.
- cududa 4y ago
  Well, my phone battery usually lasts the full day, even though the battery is old/ degraded. I’m fairly certain most others do too. If you have an iPhone the magnetic battery works great. If you prefer android, there are plenty of phones with bulky batteries. Plus, it’s not like battery engineering and camera engineering are even remotely the same skill sets
- jamiek88 4y ago
  What phone do you have that doesn’t even last a day?
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    Any that's over two years old. I'm very frustrated with the battery on my Samsung S21. Smartphones now improve at a glacial, minutely iterative pace, so for the first time, I see no compelling reasons to upgrade -- except due to the total lack of battery health management, the battery is by now basically ruined. I'll try for a replacement.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  Well, mostly nobody need what high-end smartphones offer. Cheaper smartphones (say, in the low hundreds of bucks range) cover 100% of the needs of the average user. Still, a lot of people buy the high end ones. My conclusion is that people like expensive toys (especially true when it comes to iPhones) So, nothing wrong about Xiaomi going after that market. It certainly exists.

izacus 4y ago

That's ok, US government will ban them for security reasons if it turns out their products are competitive in their market.

colordrops 4y ago
What has the US banned besides Huawei? It's tit for tat anyway, China has banned order of magnitude more US products.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Can you link to a source of the banned hardware products?
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    The US doesn't make hardware. It makes software and China has banned plenty of it. Basically every big name software maker in the US has faced or is under a Chinese ban by now.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      That's not new though? There's been restrictions on software products since the 1990s and probably even earlier. Such as the ban on export of cryptography software. What was attention grabbing in the last few years with Huawei was that physical tangible consumer products you could hold in your hands were banned.
      - Fatnino 4y ago
        You are mixing several unrelated concepts. The cryptography export restriction was a US initiative with obvious reasons. The software bans I am talking about are from the Chinese side. For example China's bans on sites like google. What Chinese consumer hardware manufacturers did recently (or rather, finally got noticed doing recently) is making their devices into spying toeholds in other countries. Even if nothing of interest to the Chinese takes place on your 17 year old daughter's phone, it's still on your home LAN exposed to the potential large attack surface area of Mom's work devices. Or even worse, imagine a Chinese government ear permanently installed in the middle of our 5g infrastructure. The ideology of the US government does not align with that of the Chinese government. Hasn't for a very long time. The only surprising thing about this whole situation is how long the US went along with Chinese shenanigans. I would have slammed the door on China over 20 years ago.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

can16358p 4y ago

In the side-by-side comparison, I found Apple's results much better. Of course that's personal taste but they should have put in better comparisons IMO.

version_five 4y ago
I saw some iphone pictures for the first time recently at a family event (I have a very old phone and don't take many pictures). They looked fine and I'd say more "professional" when zoomed out buy zoomed in they looked horrible and you could see all kinds of artifacts from whatever enhancement algorithms they use. For posting selfies on Instagram, iPhone is probably better, but for pictures of family for posterity I'd rather have the less processed version. That's what they're trying to show I belive.
wiseowise 4y ago
Much better how?
- can16358p 4y ago
  Visually aesthetically pleasing.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Most of them have artifacts.. I prefer actual physics to do depth of field

colordrops 4y ago

If LineageOS gets ported to this I'm 100% getting one.

the_third_wave 4y ago
Before you do so make sure that the camera is useable under LineageOS as that is not always the case, especially when it comes to more "advanced" features which are only available when using stock firmware and the stock camera app.

tambourine_man 4y ago

“Interestingly, despite packing four large camera sensors on its back and a 5000 mAh battery, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra isn’t bigger or heavier than a Galaxy S23 Ultra or an iPhone 14 Pro Max.” If by bigger you consider only 2 dimensions, sure.

jon-wood 4y ago
Also “not bigger than the largest iPhone available” isn’t exactly small.

bitL 4y ago

I expected real camera lens in a "real camera" phone instead of multiple tiny lenses covered by a shield that introduces its own problems.

arghwhat 4y ago
All camera lenses are real lenses. When the lens is not interchangeable, and the sensor is small (while huge compared to a normal smartphone, this is tiny compares to a camera), the lens really does not have to be that big. Being behind a shield is also not itself weird - many people use filters as front element protection on interchangeable lens cameras. Nothing different there.
- blincoln 4y ago
  When I bought my Xperia Pro-1, I hacked together a custom case for it that has a 67-72mm step ring grafted over a circular hole where the cameras and flash are. Normally I just have a clear glass ("UV protector") filter there.[1] The result looks a lot like Xiaomi's phone, but I can replace the glass if it gets damaged. Not sure if that's an option for their phone. There are some side-effects. Sometimes there will be flicker from the flash (or maybe the active focus sensor?) that's reflected in the glass. Because phone cameras have such tiny apertures, dust and debris is more likely to be visible on the filter than on a full-size camera. I'm sure Leica can do a better job than me at minimizing those issues, but I wouldn't be sure they're non-existent. [1] But of course it also works for circular polarizers, IR-bandpass filters, or anything else that comes in 72mm camera filter form.
hulitu 4y ago
The bigest problem is the jpeg compression though. For some reason, Android defaults to a shitty compression ratio for jpeg which you cannot change.

expertentipp 4y ago

Reminds me the "fuck you project" by Nokia's engineers from the period when the company had been burning down - Nokia 808 PureView.

CrampusDestrus 4y ago

So we've gone back 10 years to the era of the S4 Zoom [1] but we don't even get the nice zooming and optical qualities of a point and shoot? Call it innovation, I guess... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4_Zoom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4_Zoom

blincoln 4y ago

Nitpick: the author claims there hasn't been a camera-style grip available for phones since 2013, but Sony's Xperia Pro-1(I?)[1] can be used with their Bluetooth grip.[2] The Pro-1 was designed with a similar goal - try to make a pretty solid point-and-shoot camera in a phone form factor - and IMO it was fairly successful. It doesn't capture images as vividly (especially in low light) as phones that do more post-processing, but the results are also more genuine. It can save in JPEG+RAW like a serious camera. Like the other Xperias I've had, it's close to the stock Android, and there are only a few annoying changes/non-removable apps. I'm curious if Xiaomi is able to do better here, especially with more room in the case. [1] I own one,and I'm still not sure if it's supposed to be the number 1, a Roman numeral I, the letter I, a vertical pipe, or something else. [2] e.g. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1669529-REG/sony_xperia_pro_i_512gb_5g.html/qa https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1669529-REG/sony_xper...

bloggie 4y ago

Looks like a product launch of a phone with the new Sony IMX989 1" sensor. Some other phones have it to: Xiaomi 13 Pro Xiaomi 12S/Ultra Vivo X90 Pro+ Sharp Aquos R6 AKA Leitz Phone 1 Aquos R7 Xperia Pro-I According to: https://curioussteve.com/tech/explained/sony-imx989-explained/ https://curioussteve.com/tech/explained/sony-imx989-explaine... Also: Oppo Find X6 Pro

ecopoesis 4y ago

It feels like Xiaomi is chasing a market that doesn’t really exist. Smartphone cameras are good enough for most people. And for folks who want more, mirrorless and DSLRs start cheap and much, much better. Even worse, this phone looks to use the same small sensors and small lenses all smartphones are saddled with. A bulkier form factor and slapping Leica’s logo doesn’t make a “real” camera. Big sensors and big lenses do.

cudgy 4y ago
I am inclined to agree, but I applaud the effort. It is worth investigating the size of this market, which might be large enough to support a few of these phones. It might even push the technology envelope further so that standard smartphones gain some of the benefits of these niche camera-phones.
wenc 4y ago
Not sure about that. A lot of us non-photographers do care about taking nice pictures and videos but don't really want to get into DSLRs because you never seem to have them around when you need them. These days though most people don't care about more pixels, but better filters. There's still a ways to go before smartphone cameras get there. (imagine building in Moment-type lenses in smartphone cameras).
- ecopoesis 4y ago
  I agree. The only real use for more pixels is for crop-to-zoom. I want big glass and big sensors so we can get real bokeh. My ideal phone camera would be a single APS-C sized sensor replacing all three current iPhone cameras. The lens should be a f1.2, 50mm equivalent pancake. Yes that’s hard to do, but using fancy fresnel lenses and a pile of CPU to correct things I bet you could make it work. Make the sensor ~30 megapixels so you can digital zoom. Add a mount that includes communication so if you want you can add fancy lenses and they can be active parts of the autofocus system. This design actually competes with low-end mirrorless and is probably even possible to build (the lens might be pushing what’s possible, but I bet we can get close).

bee_rider 4y ago

Every time I see one of these phones with a bunch of little cellphone lenses on the back, it just makes me wish the Light L16 had worked out.

RobotToaster 4y ago

It's interesting, and hopefully more companies will go in this direction, but 1" is still quite a bit smaller than even a M4/3 sensor, and I had really hoped for interchangeable lenses when it said "real camera".

dingaling 4y ago

Samsung made a series of actual camera-phones about a decade ago, the Galaxy Camera https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0677420709/samsung-announces-galaxy-camera-wi-fi https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0677420709/samsung-announces...

mgdlbp 4y ago

I guess the one with the actual M mount didn't work out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZm4gg5CvWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZm4gg5CvWc)