Xiaomi has announced the Mi 11 Ultra, a smartphone that takes the original Mi 11 that already boasted pretty great camera performance and racks it up to another level with a giant camera bump that features a 50MP wide, a 48MP ultra-wide, a 48MP telephoto, and a tiny OLED display.
The first noticeable thing about the Mi 11 Ultra is the absolutely enormous camera bump; compared to the thinness of the whole device, it’s noticeably huge and what it houses is a definite upgrade over the standard Mi 11.
That bump houses those three cameras. First is the main wide-angle camera which houses a 1/1.12-inch 50-megapixel GN2 sensor equipped with an f/1.95 aperture lens. The GN2 was announced by Samsung earlier this year and features what the company calls Dual Pixel Pro autofocus, which it promises offers a dramatic improvement in autofocus performance.
The size of the sensor itself is dramatic: it’s not far from a 1-inch sensor:
Xiaomi uses that GN2 sensor to claim the Mi 11 Ultra is capable of fast, “laser-sharp” autofocus. That main sensor also boasts dual native ISO and staggered HDR. In addition to the main camera, which is designated as a “wide” camera (85-degree field of view), Xiaomi also equipped the Mi 11 Ultra with a 48-megapixel ultra-wide and a 48-megapixel 5x periscope telephoto. Periscope technology allows for a much more powerful optical zoom and is a technology that Apple is rumored to be at least a couple of years away from implementing in its own devices. You can read more about periscope cameras here.
The 48-megapixel 1/2.0-inch sized ultra-wide has a 128-degree field of view and an f/2.2 lens. The 48-megapixel periscope camera Is the same 1/2.0-inch sensor size, but at f/4.1. It supports optical image stabilization and phase-detection autofocus, 5x optical zoom, 10X “hybrid zoom,” and 120x digital zoom. All three cameras support 8K video recording and Night Mode.
That giant camera bump not only houses the three aforementioned cameras, but also a dedicated OLED that can be used as an always-on display (to display time and date, for example), notification bar, or as a selfie camera viewfinder.
The phone’s other specifications are otherwise pretty similar to the Xiaomi Mi 11, including the 6.8-inch 120Hz 1440p OLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. However, the Mi 11 Ultra gets a bigger battery at 5,000mAh and can be fast-charged (what Xiaomi refers to as “turbo charging”) at 67W both wirelessly and with a cable.
The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra was not given a final price or release date at the time or announcement.
