Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro: what, just 108 megapixels?
Xiaomi has built a camera system and cobbled a smartphone around it. The Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro impresses, leaves you wanting more and shows that smartphone cameras are far from obsolete.
Xiaomi has introduced a smartphone with a camera system that records and processes 108 megapixels. The Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro takes familiar concepts from the smartphone camera world, brings them to the cutting edge and amazes us. But the question is: if other flagships - like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 - can handle 16 megapixels, why do we need 108 megapixels?
Xiaomi seems to answer the question with "Because we can do it."
Five cameras that can do just about anything
The Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro looks a little crowded at the back. There's a normal lens space as we're used to with a bunch of other phones. Three cameras are fitted. Another field includes the 20-megapixel wide-angle lens. And just below that is a camera for macro photography.
This makes a total of five cameras - the first "pentacam" configuration on a smartphone.
- Telephoto lens x5
- Telephoto lens 2x
- Ultra wide-angle 20MP <2MP macro lens4. 108 MP lens
By way of comparison: with its 108-megapixel lens, the Mi CC9 Pro beats the competition from the world of medium-format cameras. The Fuji GFX 100 is, with 102 megapixels, a market leader.
The big difference between the GFX 100 and the Mi CC9 Pro is not the lens, but the sensor. Fuji's is 15 times larger than Xiaomi's. Nevertheless, Xiaomi's sensor has a lot to offer. Indeed, the smartphone uses Samsung's 108MP Isocell Bright HMX sensor. Xiaomi developed it with Samsung.
Savings in the wrong place? Or a tactical decision?
The amount of data coming from cameras has to be processed and displayed somehow. Xiaomi surprises us, because at first glance analysts would expect more. The whole system runs on a Snapdragon 730G, an Octa-Core system-on-chip running on 2.2 GHz.
This is complemented by a 6.47-inch Amoled display with a surprisingly low Full HD+ resolution. Talking of the front of the phone... it houses a 32-megapixel camera in a small notch.
That's the way it looks.
It does look like Xiaomi made a camera first and then cobbled a smartphone around it, out of necessity. However, this doesn't necessarily have to have been produced for performance reasons or because of a design error. The 730G sounds good enough to handle the amount of data. And as the Mi CC9 Pro is competitively priced, savings have certainly been made somewhere.
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