A 200 Mpix camera in a smartphone is dry numbers and a marketing hoax? We check if it makes sense [TOPtech]

Redmi Note 12 Pro + has now fallen into my hands, a smartphone distinguished by a camera with a matrix with a resolution of up to 200 Mpix. Let’s check what this phone can do and whether its camera is actually as good as the specification indicates.

Appearance, specification and battery

Redmi Note 12 Pro+ is a typical mid-range smartphone with a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen. The manufacturer has opted for a rather hackneyed, but at the same time elegant design. The whole thing looks really good, even though the material covering the back is plastic. Unfortunately, the new Redmi does not fit well in the hand. This is mainly due to the above-average thickness of the device. The smartphone is also quite heavy.

The heart of the phone is the MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor supported by at least 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of data space. This set does not impress in benchmarks, but in everyday use it works really well. Ah, the typical middle shelf. The whole thing is powered by a battery with a capacity of 5000 mAh and support for extremely fast charging with a power of 120 W. Redmi Note 12 Pro+ lasts about 1.5 days of intensive work away from the socket, and it takes only a few minutes to recharge the energy from zero to one hundred percent. The downside is, unfortunately, the lack of inductive charging.

Three cameras

The island on the device’s plates hides three cameras, of which the main one takes pictures in the already mentioned 200 Mpix resolution. Redmi Note 12 Pro + is of course not the first phone with such a detailed matrix, but – costing PLN 2,300 – it is definitely cheaper than competitors. Interestingly, the Chinese manufacturer does not boast about the presence of a camera with such a powerful resolution at every step. On the contrary, it hides it from us. By default, the main camera takes pictures in 12 Mpix, and to enable the 200 Mpix mode, you have to click a bit. We’ll come back to that in a moment, though.

When using the default shooting mode, the effects are really good. The photos are properly exposed, detailed, stand out with the right contrast and color saturation, and have the correct white balance. They do really well even compared to much more expensive smartphones. The tonal range is also quite good, which is probably due to the automatic HDR function.

In difficult lighting conditions, Redmi Note 12 Pro + also positively surprises. Even despite the lack of light – for this price range – it’s really good. Unfortunately, it is much less optimistic in the case of a wide-angle camera. During the day it copes quite average, showing low detail and huge distortions on the edges of the frame. At night, it is better not to use it at all, because such photos are not even suitable for publication on social media.

200 Mpix in a smartphone. Does it make sense?

Let’s go back to the main camera and 200 Mpix resolution. First of all, such a large number of pixels gives us almost unlimited possibilities of framing and zooming in on the taken shots. In this way, we can see details that were not visible from a distance. Therefore, it provides a lot of flexibility in correcting the composition already in post-production. We don’t have to worry about the lack of details either, because there are definitely enough pixels here. However, looking at a very small section of the frame, you can clearly see the degradation of details in the photo. This may be due to e.g. too low optical resolution of the lens in relation to the number of pixels on the matrix.

In practice, however, the daily use of 200 Mpix resolution is rather pointless. Such photos take up many times more space than standard photos, and in practice we will use the possibility of enlarging already taken photos sporadically. A much better idea would be to use a camera with a telephoto lens, but the manufacturer unfortunately forgot about it.