The Xiaomi 12S Ultra offers an incredible 1-inch sensor camera

the Xiaomi 12S Ultra camera it’s a remarkable achievement: it’s one of the few smartphones to offer a 1-inch-type sensor. Relatively speaking, it’s a huge sensor for a phone, and larger sensors generally lead to better image quality.

Pitching the 12S Ultra side by side with some of the current class leaders in smartphone cameras, there are clear situations where the larger sensor makes a difference. But more than anything, it highlights how advanced Apple, Google and Samsung imaging systems are, even with smaller sensors. The future of mobile imaging will not be won by better hardware alone.

First, let’s do a little road cleaning. A 1-inch type sensor is often called a 1-inch sensor to make life easier, but that doesn’t mean the sensor is literally an inch wide or diagonal. It’s an old naming convention that has something to do with the tubes of television cameras. What matters here is that a 1-inch sensor is much smaller than what you’ll find in a full-frame camera, but significantly larger than the sensor in almost any other smartphone camera. It’s the same size as the sensors used by Sony’s RX100-series cameras, so putting a 1-inch sensor in a smartphone camera potentially puts it on level ground with the best traditional pocket cameras out there. money can buy.

And as for the other specifications, the main camera of the 12S Ultra offers a resolution of 50.3 megapixels with a stabilized f/1.9 lens. By default, it creates 12 megapixel images from those 50 megapixels. There’s also a stabilized 5x telephoto lens (a 120mm full-frame equivalent) with a 48-megapixel sensor and a 48-megapixel ultra-wide. Xiaomi says it co-designed the camera with Leica, and the camera app offers two Leica-branded color processing profiles: Leica Vibrant and Leica Authentic. Video recording up to 8K/24p is supported, and on the front is a 32-megapixel selfie camera.

Oh, and there’s a phone attached, but we won’t go into that here. It is only sold in China and as such I was not able to test it as a phone.

Why is sensor size so important? For starters, it allows for larger pixels, which capture light better. The depth of field is also a bit shallower, so it opens up more creative control over how much of the background of your shot is in focus.

It also means that the lens it’s attached to can be larger, and the two combined will gather more light than a smaller lens/sensor combination. Smartphone cameras use multiple frames and computational methods to compensate for their comparatively small sensors and cameras. Still, starting with more image information gathered by a larger sensor could make a big difference in low-light conditions or how the camera copes with moving subjects in low light – big challenges for smartphone cameras.

Pairing a great sensor with the benefits of computational photography is something of a promised land of smartphone imaging. A Google Pixel 6 Pro already takes impressive photos in very low light with Night Sight, but it could look even better if the system had better data to work with a larger sensor. The 12S Ultra is capable of some incredible images, but it’s not the promised land.

Taking a look at some comparison images of the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Pixel 6 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, I have to look closely to see where the 12S can capture more detail. It’s easier to see in areas with shadow detail, especially in the scene below, where more leaves are visible in the vegetation rather than being lost in shadow. I also prefer how the 12S Ultra’s image is exposed; the ground-level lights don’t turn off like in the Pixel 6 Pro image. The images in the sliders below are 100 percent cropped for comparison.

The 12S Ultra also performs slightly better than the iPhone 13 Pro Max. The subtle but fine details on the bottles are a bit lighter. The 12S Ultra also hangs on to color details in the shadows where the 13 Pro can’t hang on and squashes them with blacks.

The Samsung S22 Ultra uses a 108-megapixel sensor for its main camera, which it also uses to produce 12-megapixel images. Even when competing against Samsung with twice the pixel resolution, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra does a better job of resolving very fine details, like the chain-link fence in the background of the image below.

This is all very impressive, but to see a noticeable difference, I have to look at both at 100 percent magnification. If you’re just taking snapshots and sharing them on social media, you’ll never notice the difference. On top of that, the 12S Ultra faces many of the same challenges that all other smartphone cameras face. Mixed lighting can sometimes result in weird exposure options.

And a 1-inch sensor is bigger, but naturally it won’t give you the kind of blurred background portraits that large-sensor cameras can do unless you get really close to your subject. So use portrait mode, like any other smartphone camera, and the results are inconsistent.

Sometimes they look fantastic. In moderate indoor lighting, I took some of my favorite portrait photos of my 10-month-old son that I’ve taken with any smartphone. To be clear, I take much of photos of my son with many different phones. Portrait mode appears by default, but you can choose between three different “pro lenses” with different preset color profiles to switch things up quickly: 35mm black and white, 50mm “swirl bokeh” and 90 soft focus. mm. I thought they would be clever, but I like them more than I thought. If this is the product of Leica influence, then I guess I’m a fan.

In a different situation with a couple of people in the background, portrait mode photos look much worse. He has difficulty distinguishing my subject from the people in the background and catches a missing arm and leg in focus. The Samsung S22 Ultra performs much better in the same situation, although its results are certainly not perfect. Portrait mode is a mixed bag for the 12S Ultra, as it is on basically every other smartphone camera we’ve seen so far.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed shooting with the 12S Ultra, and allowed myself to rely on it in more situations than with any other smartphone camera. That might not be entirely fair, either. I think knowing that I was working with a larger sensor convinced me to use it in more ways than with another phone’s camera. Still, it held up to many of these use cases surprisingly well, like taking a photo of my husband tossing our son into the air, or using portrait mode in less-than-amazing light with a moving subject. I got a lot more goalkeepers than I expected in both situations.

It may be due in part to the color processing, which is actually very good. It wouldn’t clearly identify it as Leica, and there are hundreds of ways you could get a similar color on another phone’s camera through third-party processing or apps. But I usually just take what I get from the native camera app, and I like what’s here.

But the biggest impression I’ve taken away from the experience is how good cameras like the iPhone 13 Pro Max, S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro are with significantly smaller sensors. It relegates most of the benefits of the 12S Ultra to pixel-level detail visible at 100 percent. What these other phone cameras do with computational photography to achieve such a narrow gap is very impressive. If this 1-inch sensor makes its way to Pixel and Galaxy phones with such strong computational imaging abilities, well, that’s a very exciting prospect.

Photograph by Allison Johnson/The Verge