The Ultra: Xiaomi's Top-of-the-Line Flagship Phone

Xiaomi's latest flagship phone is called the Ultra, and it's designed to be an absolute powerhouse of technology. As its name suggests, this phone is meant to be ultra-high-end, with all the bells and whistles that come with it. The phone's specs are truly impressive, featuring a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, 12 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of fast storage, and a 5000 milliamp hour battery. But what really sets this phone apart is its fast charging capabilities - with 67 watt wired charging and 67 watt wireless charging on an optional Xiaomi wireless charger, the Ultra can charge up quickly and efficiently.

The display on the Ultra is also worth noting, featuring a massive 6.81 inches of 1440p OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The result is a smooth and responsive viewing experience that's perfect for gaming, video watching, or just browsing the web. And with an in-screen fingerprint reader, curved edges, and super bright 1700 nits maximum brightness, this phone is designed to be used both indoors and outdoors.

But what really gets me excited about the Ultra is its feature set. It's got pretty much every other high-end spec you can think of - from great haptics to IP68 water resistance and even reverse wireless charging. And with Harman Kardon dual stereo speakers on top and bottom, this phone is equipped to deliver clear and immersive audio. The software on the Ultra is also worth mentioning, as Xiaomi's interface has been steadily improving in recent years.

One thing that does stand out about the Ultra is its design. Specifically, the camera bump on the back of the phone - some people have suggested that it could be made thinner or even eliminated altogether. But I found that once you start using the phone, your finger naturally rests underneath the camera, propping it up in a way that makes it less noticeable. And besides, as heavy as the Ultra is, I didn't find it to be too top-heavy - it's definitely a unique look.

Retro Tech Season 2: Exploring Ideas from the Past

Last season of Retro Tech explored six gadgets that changed the course of history and affected everything that came after them. This season, however, we're taking a different approach. Instead of looking at historical artifacts, we're going to explore some of the ideas from the past that we thought would be our future by now - but aren't.

Every day this week, starting tomorrow, we'll be dropping new episodes of Retro Tech Season 2. They'll all be at 9am Eastern sharp, so make sure you mark your calendars and tune in for a new episode each day. We're going to take a deep dive into some of the technologies that were supposed to revolutionize our lives but have yet to come to fruition. From hoverboards to futuristic cities, we're going to explore what could have been.

The Future is Already Here (But Is It Really?)

When people think about the future, they often imagine technologies that will change the way we travel, look, and live. And for decades, those ideas were just that - ideas. But as technology advanced, it seemed like our futuristic dreams were finally within reach. We had hoverboards, self-driving cars, and even smart homes. But are any of these actually happening?

For me, my experience with hoverboards was a letdown. I thought they would be a game-changer, something that would make transportation fast and easy. But in reality, they're just not practical yet. And as for self-driving cars? They're still stuck in development, with many concerns about safety and regulation.

But what's even more frustrating is that some of the technologies we've been promised are actually happening - but not quite as expected. Take smart homes, for example. We were told that our homes would be completely automated, with everything from lights to appliances controlled by a voice command. But in reality, those systems are often clunky and unreliable.

So what's going on? Why haven't we reached our retro futuristic dreams yet? The answer is simple: innovation takes time. New technologies don't just appear out of thin air - they're the result of years of research and development. And sometimes, even when we think we've finally cracked it, there are still challenges to overcome.

The key to progress is pioneers who see how these ideas can come together in a way that works for everyone. They're the ones who will take our visions of the future and make them a reality. So let's keep looking forward, even if it takes time. The future is worth waiting for.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhmm all right so this 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 i posted a picture of this phone on twitter and i asked just would you rock a phone like this and the answers were 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 shall we also stay tuned to the end of this video where i have a trailer for retro tech season two it's finally ready and it's dropping daily starting tomorrow on this channel 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 a 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 ultra wide of any i've seen in a smartphone and 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 is 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 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 and 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 make 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 mi 11 ultra versus a three second exposure from the iphone 12 pro and same deal here they're both very detailed photos and they look very similar but the xiaomi is a little brighter and more importantly it took less time than the other one all right so then the ultrawide this ultra wide camera with a 128 degree field of view so look i've seen a lot of ultrawides on the back of phones in my day ever since that lg g5 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 ride but it's nice to have the extra flexibility of a camera that can just capture everything in one shot for sure 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 a 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 20x 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 staggered 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 and 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 but aside from that whether you like the color tuning or not they've gotten it very consistent between all the cameras it's good stuff but something else i've noticed with me 11 ultra it seems to be working really hard doing this camera stuff so it's you know there's a couple features that are enabled by the snapdragon triple eight 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 one the battery plummeted look at this graph this is a 5 000 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 apps 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 i actually 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 pretty funny fun fact it's actually the same display that's in xiaomi's me band 5. it's like they realized they had some extras left over and just thought hey why don't we put these in the back of the phone so it's a 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 things it can show you the time your battery status and a notification light if you have any waiting for you and 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 back 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 is 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 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 watt wired charging and 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 120 hertz 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 oh double check there's 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 mi 11 video but that i do think is also getting really good this phone 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 and i was kind of nice and so i know a lot of you were saying oh just 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 and 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 ultra wide the big time zoom and the screen on the back would you be into that let me know in the comment section below it's probably going to keep getting more extreme from here on out okay retro tech time it's finally back season two of retro tech is finally ready for your eyeballs and it's a little bit different this time so last time on season one of retrotech we went through six gadgets that changed the course of history and affected everything that came after them right left a ripple in our universe things like the walkman and the mac and the dynatac this season it's a little different this time we're exploring some of the ideas from the past that we thought would be our future by now and whether or not we got there so every day this week starting tomorrow we're dropping daily new episodes of retro tech season two it's gonna be so sick they'll all be at 9am eastern sharp just like this video was so whatever timezone you're in write that down you can do the calculations but come back here at the same time every day for this week for a new episode i'll see you there roll the trailer i don't know what exactly we're about to take out the box let's find out together oh my god when you think about the future what comes to mind for decades people dreamed of technologies that would change the way we travel look and live so have we already reached our retro futuristic dreams and if not what could possibly lie ahead let's energize yes my dreams have been realized what is your experience with hoverboards almost none okay oh geez oh my god this season on retrotech we're doing technology this is gonna explode if we keep pumping how does the technology of the past i got an eye in predict our vision you're about to see everything for the future all your particles will disappear simultaneously and then show up in another place we need pioneers to see how this can all come together youhmm all right so this 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 i posted a picture of this phone on twitter and i asked just would you rock a phone like this and the answers were 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 shall we also stay tuned to the end of this video where i have a trailer for retro tech season two it's finally ready and it's dropping daily starting tomorrow on this channel 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 a 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 ultra wide of any i've seen in a smartphone and 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 is 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 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 and 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 make 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 mi 11 ultra versus a three second exposure from the iphone 12 pro and same deal here they're both very detailed photos and they look very similar but the xiaomi is a little brighter and more importantly it took less time than the other one all right so then the ultrawide this ultra wide camera with a 128 degree field of view so look i've seen a lot of ultrawides on the back of phones in my day ever since that lg g5 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 ride but it's nice to have the extra flexibility of a camera that can just capture everything in one shot for sure 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 a 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 20x 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 staggered 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 and 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 but aside from that whether you like the color tuning or not they've gotten it very consistent between all the cameras it's good stuff but something else i've noticed with me 11 ultra it seems to be working really hard doing this camera stuff so it's you know there's a couple features that are enabled by the snapdragon triple eight 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 one the battery plummeted look at this graph this is a 5 000 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 apps 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 i actually 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 pretty funny fun fact it's actually the same display that's in xiaomi's me band 5. it's like they realized they had some extras left over and just thought hey why don't we put these in the back of the phone so it's a 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 things it can show you the time your battery status and a notification light if you have any waiting for you and 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 back 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 is 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 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 watt wired charging and 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 120 hertz 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 oh double check there's 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 mi 11 video but that i do think is also getting really good this phone 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 and i was kind of nice and so i know a lot of you were saying oh just 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 and 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 ultra wide the big time zoom and the screen on the back would you be into that let me know in the comment section below it's probably going to keep getting more extreme from here on out okay retro tech time it's finally back season two of retro tech is finally ready for your eyeballs and it's a little bit different this time so last time on season one of retrotech we went through six gadgets that changed the course of history and affected everything that came after them right left a ripple in our universe things like the walkman and the mac and the dynatac this season it's a little different this time we're exploring some of the ideas from the past that we thought would be our future by now and whether or not we got there so every day this week starting tomorrow we're dropping daily new episodes of retro tech season two it's gonna be so sick they'll all be at 9am eastern sharp just like this video was so whatever timezone you're in write that down you can do the calculations but come back here at the same time every day for this week for a new episode i'll see you there roll the trailer i don't know what exactly we're about to take out the box let's find out together oh my god when you think about the future what comes to mind for decades people dreamed of technologies that would change the way we travel look and live so have we already reached our retro futuristic dreams and if not what could possibly lie ahead let's energize yes my dreams have been realized what is your experience with hoverboards almost none okay oh geez oh my god this season on retrotech we're doing technology this is gonna explode if we keep pumping how does the technology of the past i got an eye in predict our vision you're about to see everything for the future all your particles will disappear simultaneously and then show up in another place we need pioneers to see how this can all come together youhmm all right so this 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 i posted a picture of this phone on twitter and i asked just would you rock a phone like this and the answers were 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 shall we also stay tuned to the end of this video where i have a trailer for retro tech season two it's finally ready and it's dropping daily starting tomorrow on this channel 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 a 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 ultra wide of any i've seen in a smartphone and 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 is 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 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 and 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 make 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 mi 11 ultra versus a three second exposure from the iphone 12 pro and same deal here they're both very detailed photos and they look very similar but the xiaomi is a little brighter and more importantly it took less time than the other one all right so then the ultrawide this ultra wide camera with a 128 degree field of view so look i've seen a lot of ultrawides on the back of phones in my day ever since that lg g5 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 ride but it's nice to have the extra flexibility of a camera that can just capture everything in one shot for sure 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 a 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 20x 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 staggered 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 and 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 but aside from that whether you like the color tuning or not they've gotten it very consistent between all the cameras it's good stuff but something else i've noticed with me 11 ultra it seems to be working really hard doing this camera stuff so it's you know there's a couple features that are enabled by the snapdragon triple eight 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 one the battery plummeted look at this graph this is a 5 000 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 apps 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 i actually 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 pretty funny fun fact it's actually the same display that's in xiaomi's me band 5. it's like they realized they had some extras left over and just thought hey why don't we put these in the back of the phone so it's a 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 things it can show you the time your battery status and a notification light if you have any waiting for you and 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 back 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 is 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 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 watt wired charging and 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 120 hertz 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 oh double check there's 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 mi 11 video but that i do think is also getting really good this phone 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 and i was kind of nice and so i know a lot of you were saying oh just 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 and 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 ultra wide the big time zoom and the screen on the back would you be into that let me know in the comment section below it's probably going to keep getting more extreme from here on out okay retro tech time it's finally back season two of retro tech is finally ready for your eyeballs and it's a little bit different this time so last time on season one of retrotech we went through six gadgets that changed the course of history and affected everything that came after them right left a ripple in our universe things like the walkman and the mac and the dynatac this season it's a little different this time we're exploring some of the ideas from the past that we thought would be our future by now and whether or not we got there so every day this week starting tomorrow we're dropping daily new episodes of retro tech season two it's gonna be so sick they'll all be at 9am eastern sharp just like this video was so whatever timezone you're in write that down you can do the calculations but come back here at the same time every day for this week for a new episode i'll see you there roll the trailer i don't know what exactly we're about to take out the box let's find out together oh my god when you think about the future what comes to mind for decades people dreamed of technologies that would change the way we travel look and live so have we already reached our retro futuristic dreams and if not what could possibly lie ahead let's energize yes my dreams have been realized what is your experience with hoverboards almost none okay oh geez oh my god this season on retrotech we're doing technology this is gonna explode if we keep pumping how does the technology of the past i got an eye in predict our vision you're about to see everything for the future all your particles will disappear simultaneously and then show up in another place we need pioneers to see how this can all come together you\n"