**Experience with the Camera Phone's 108 Megapixel Sensor**

Using the camera phone's 108 megapixel sensor is an experience unlike any other. The separate mode for taking high-resolution photos typically results in scaled-down photos, roughly 27 megapixels in size. While this may seem like a drawback at first, it actually allows for more control when zooming in and out. With the extra lenses provided, users can achieve 2x to 5x magnification, with even further zoom capabilities available through hybrid zoom. Macro shots are also a unique feature of this camera, allowing for up-close photography.

**Shutter Lag and Image Processing**

However, switching to the 108 megapixel mode brings about some drawbacks. The noticeable shutter lag of over a second is caused by the camera's attempt to capture the entire frame and process the resolution. This results in a delay of several seconds before viewing the photo, during which time it appears as if the image is "spinning." Once the processing is complete, the full-size preview loads, allowing for sharp images.

**Phone Specifications and Performance**

The phone itself boasts impressive specs, including a Snapdragon 730G chip, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. While these specifications may not make it a top-tier device, they do provide a solid foundation for everyday use. The battery life is respectable at 5260 milliampere-hours (mAh), and the fast charger provides a convenient option for topping up on-the-go.

**Display and Design**

The phone's display is also noteworthy, featuring a 1080p AMOLED screen with a small notch at the top. This design choice may be polarizing, but it does provide a clean aesthetic. The in-display fingerprint reader adds an extra layer of security, while the headphone jack and IR blaster offer convenient connectivity options.

**Software and User Interface**

The phone runs on Xiaomi's MIUI 11 software, which has its own set of quirks and features. While some may find it overwhelming, others appreciate the additional customization options. Overall, the user interface is a significant improvement over previous versions, offering a more streamlined experience.

**Impressions and Future Prospects**

The camera phone's 108 megapixel sensor is undoubtedly a highlight, providing an unparalleled level of detail in landscape photography. However, its performance in low-light scenes and with close-up subjects is still subpar. The upcoming Galaxy S11, rumored to feature a 100+ megapixel sensor, holds significant promise for future camera smartphones. With higher-end specs, faster storage, and more powerful processors, manufacturers may finally be able to normalize the experience of high-megapixel photography, rather than relegating it to an "extra mode" or add-on.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys mkbhd here and this is the xiaomi me note 10 that i've been using for about a week for exactly one reason it has a megapixel camera on the back so that is a wild number 108 megapixels but i should mention we have seen this megapixel push in smartphone cameras before i remember there's a little streak back when i was in college like we had a bunch of four and eight megapixel cameras then a bunch of 12 and then a bunch of 20 somethings and then we got that 41 megapixel nokia lumia 1020 which for a while was basically the king of smartphones and it was pretty good but it seemed like every time we got a new higher megapixel number then that became the smartphone camera king even though megapixels didn't mean everything like just because something has a 16 megapixel camera doesn't mean it's necessarily better than the 12 megapixel camera in fact a lot of times it's the other way around so anyway now i'm sure you've noticed that we've sort of settled around pretty much everyone having 12 megapixel cameras but 108 megapixels like that's gotta mean something there's gotta be something there right well let's start with what that actually means the resolution of one photo from a typical 12 megapixel camera like the iphone is around four thousand by three thousand so that totals around 12 million pixels 12 megapixels so the same scene from this new xiaomi camera comes in at 12 000 by 9000 which is multiplied to get you 108 million pixels or 108mb so you're getting about three times the vertical and horizontal resolution to make these numbers and the file size for me has ranged from about 20 to 30 megabytes per photo so it's pretty big and you've probably already noticed there are actually five total cameras on the back of this phone the 108 megapixel main camera then there is a 12 megapixel 2x telephoto a 20 megapixel ultra wide a 5 megapixel super telephoto at 5x and a 2 megapixel macro camera and there's also two flashes two pairs of flashes like it is a lot of hardware clearly so much in fact that it sticks out from the back of the phone and you end up like with it rocking on a table and everything but that's the sacrifice you make if you want all these pixels and all this camera quality so the question is how good do the photos actually look and the answer is really good sometimes so i said before there are a lot of things that contribute to the quality of a smartphone photo color accuracy exposure dynamic range contrast etc but the main thing you're gonna notice of course with such a high resolution here is sharpness and detail the photos in the 108 megapixel mode are significantly sharper more detailed than any other smartphone i've ever used especially when you give it a lot of light so in the daytime under bright lights basically but i will modify it to say this it's mostly center sharpness see the center of these frames are super crisp and sharp but when you move out to near the outer edges and corners of the frame it's rarely anywhere near as sharp this is a perfect example in the center here you can see the details in this merch the fibers in the cotton you can practically feel the softness i mean you can feel the softness in person for yourself everything's back on sale at shop.mkbhd.com but yeah you get the idea super high detail here but the edges of the frame especially the corners get very quickly distorted and fall out of focus even on flat landscape shots like this which is crazy you still have that lack of center sharpness normally if you have a subject in the middle of a frame and you want that tack sharp focus and don't really care about the edges then that's fine but in a landscape or something wider you really notice the edge distortion i think a great way to show this is to give context so iphone 11 pro we all know great set of cameras i could use any other pixel 4 or a high-end smartphone system but i took the same photo on iphone 11 pro and me note 10 back to back 12 megapixels 108 megapixels so here's an alleyway very similar of course with each photo different color temperatures slightly different exposures a little bit but again pretty similar uh but the advantage of so many pixels as you can zoom in and keep clarity and there's you're actually kind of able to read this tiny security sign over here on the xiaomi where it's literally just blurred lines on the iphone here this shot of the river is pretty similar where you zoomed out you'll notice the xiaomi is a little more contrasty while the iphone is a bit more flat that's typical keeps more shadow exposure detail but as soon as you zoom in again you start to see the difference in levels of detail especially in the trees and really anything that's near the middle of the frame like the links in the chain link fence with 108 megapixels versus 12 is super obvious and the theme keeps going kind of no matter what your subject is as long as it's in the middle of the frame when you're zoomed all the way out they're pretty similar with their images it's just the iphone usually being a bit flatter and then zooming in gets you this immense amount of detail and sharpness and this stayed true in well-lit shots it definitely falls apart pretty dramatically though in low light the iphone has significantly less noise so it does way less noise reduction in low light and has not so much smoothing to do because of it while the xiaomi software is struggling and smoothing over everything to the point where 108 megapixels with all this noise reduction is less detailed than 12 megapixels with excellent image processing so we've sort of known it already but software is clearly a big part of a camera's experience and i can't talk about this camera without actually talking about the photo taking experience not just the image quality but using it for starters there's a separate mode for taking 108 megapixel photos typically when you just open the camera in photo mode you're going to take scaled roughly 27 megapixel photos still high-end that's still a lot of pixels but that's where it performs well you can zoom in and out and with the extra lenses you can get to 2x to 5x and then even further with hybrid zoom macro shots are cool there's the ultra wide it feels fairly solid but then you switch over to the 108 megapixel mode and things slowed down quite a bit now there's a noticeable shutter lag of over a second as it captures the entire 12 000 lines of resolution and processes the whole frame writes them to the not so fast storage and then you can't view the photo you've taken until after another few seconds of that processing and writing the photo and then you can see it sort of spinning for a bit and once it's done you can view it and once you view the huge photo it doesn't actually load the whole image right away it loads a smaller proxy until you actually zoom in in which case it decides oh okay you're looking for that extra resolution and then it loads up the full size preview and you can see it sharpen up and so it's doing all this mainly to avoid having you deal with that not so great experience all the time it's smart but this is not the highest end phone in the world i'd call it upper mid-range specs are you know a snapdragon 730 g chip and you're looking at six gigs of ram and 128 gigs of storage as the only spec and so in general it's not going to be the best equipped for spitting out 20 megabyte image files and manipulating them in real time the rest of the phone i'd say is actually pretty well considered if you ask me it's really solidly built you've got a 5 260 milliamp hour battery and there's a 30 watt fast charger in the box and around the front i don't like the curved screen i've talked about that before but generally the display itself is nice it's a 1080p amoled with just that small notch at the top there's an in-display fingerprint reader there is even a headphone jack and an ir blaster and you can see it's running xiaomi's ui miui 11 on top of android which has plenty of its own quirks and features definitely an improvement over the previous version from what i've used but clearly still skinned so overall my take is it's pretty sweet that we have a legitimate like an actual 108 megapixel sensor that can fit in a smartphone today like just for the number on paper that's really cool it's not some faked composition adding up detail from three different cameras it's real is it good yes sometimes it's it's legitimately really useful to take like landscapes and be able to use that center of frame which is super detailed and crop it and do whatever you want with that but the sensor is so new and so big that the image processing pipeline makes not so great photos of close-up subjects and low-light scenes so it's clearly not flawless i really became most interested in the camera in this phone because of the rumor that some camera phones next year specifically galaxy s11 will have a 100 plus megapixel sensor that is exciting because that's going to be on a higher end phone that can put the resources towards making that a reasonable experience faster storage higher end cpu more ram just more processing power and then you of course get a more tried and true samsung image processing pipeline so all these things can maybe make 100 megapixel smartphone photo normalized and normal feeling instead of sort of like an add-on or an extra mode which is the way it is on this camera so i'm excited for that potential future not just for the number on paper but because of the actual improvement we've seen in smartphone camera tech and just camera tech in general since those uh nokia lumia 1020 days fingers crossed we don't lose sight of that either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace this portion of the video is sponsored by nordvpn so a virtual private network secures your internet traffic encrypts it and routes it through a remote server so it essentially protects it through anyone locally trying to snoop on it's one of the most popular and secure tools that you've seen people using to protect their data including myself so nordvpn is offering 70 off the three-year plan which comes to 349 per month plus four additional months free and so you can find out about all this at nordvpn.com mkvpn or you can check out the link below so that that's a pretty wild number we've seen 108 megapixels no we haven't\n"