Xiaomi’s “Ultra” camera phone has a grip, screw-on lens filters.

Xiaomi’s latest flagship smartphone is the 13 Ultra and it wants to be the best smartphone camera. There’s a large 1-inch sensor, a double aperture lens, and a shutter button on the camera’s grip. Along with the faux leather back panel and the large round camera bump, if you squint, it almost looks like a point-and-shoot camera.

The main feature is a 50-megapixel camera with a 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor. We’ve already seen this sensor make headlines as the biggest and most powerful sensor on the market in phones like the non-Ultra Xiaomi 13, the Vivo X90 Pro Plus, the Sharp Aquos R7, and the Leica rebrand of this Sharp phone. phone Leitz 2.

Xiaomi takes Sony’s big sensor and adds a gimmick we haven’t seen since the Samsung Galaxy S9: a dual aperture lens. Samsung’s dual aperture lens in 2018 can switch from f1.5 to f2.4. While technically interesting, it wasn’t a big enough range to do anything. The purpose of a smaller aperture on a real camera is to 1) get less light if the environment is too bright and 2) have a greater depth of field so more objects are in focus. None of this scales to a smartphone camera. First, tiny lenses mean they never get enough light, so smaller apertures tend to be bad for your photos. Second, smartphone cameras don’t have a focal length long enough to really do anything with depth of field effects.

Professional camera lenses have large canisters for some reason, and that’s not exactly what a smartphone needs. Smartphones get around this with a lot of software effects, but they’re all just pretend. On the Galaxy S9, a subtle change in aperture only made your shots a little darker and uglier, and it was dropped on subsequent phones.

Xiaomi’s dual aperture has a slightly larger range than Samsung’s: it can switch from f1.9 to f4.0. Mechanically, the diaphragm looks identical to Samsung’s implementation, with two blades, one shaped like a C and the other blade smaller and completing the circle. For a DSLR, the 12-blade mechanical aperture gives you a variable aperture that you can adjust to any degree you want – from f1.4 to f22 with any microscopic step in between. These twin-bladed apertures only have two states: f1.9 “open”mode, when the petals are retracted and out of the way of the camera lens, and f4.0 “closed”mode, when the petals are extended to form a smaller circle. As with the Samsung phone, the physics isn’t fully at work here, so we don’t expect much benefit from the hardware.

There are four rear camera lenses in total. The other three are 50-megapixel 1/2.51-inch Sony IMX858 sensors. The lenses consist of an ultra wide-angle, 3.2x telephoto lens and a 5x telephoto lens. I couldn’t tell you why there are two telephoto lenses. Packing all that camera hardware into a phone creates an interesting camera bump design. The Xiaomi phone starts to make room for the cameras halfway through the phone, where the whole body starts to thicken and protrude beyond the phone’s metal frame. A black circular camera bump sits on top of this thicker body, giving the whole phone a big difference in thickness. Unfortunately, Xiaomi lists the phone with only one depth measurement of 9.06mm (we’re guessing this is the thinnest part of the phone).

If you’re serious about smartphone photography with limited size, Xiaomi has a pretty nice “Professional Camera Kit”for 799 Yuan, or about $116. There are two parts to this: First, it’s a phone case that adds a 67mm adapter ring around the camera bump. This allows you to screw in standard size lens filters such as a circular polarizer or ND filter, or attach the included lens cap. There’s also a grip part that, in addition to a large handle, includes a physical two-stage shutter button surrounded by a point-and-shoot style rotating zoom switch and a strap. Camera grips are usually also where the battery is, including the tiniest drop of lithium-ion: you get an extra 330 mAh.did it first. There was a 1200 mAh battery in the LG camera grip.

Hidden under a large set of camera features is the usual flagship smartphone of 2023. 6.73-inch, 120Hz, 3200×1440 OLED, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, 12GB RAM, 256GB storage and 5000mAh battery. Xiaomi’s charging technology sounds great, with a 90W wired option and a 50W wireless charger.

As always, none of the fun phones are coming to the US. This one is only for China for now and will go on sale April 21 for 5,999 yuan (about $872).

Listing image from Xiaomi