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

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  The Xiaomi 13 Ultra in its full camera mode regalia. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Xiaomi's newest flagship smartphone is the 13 Ultra, and it wants to be the ultimate smartphone camera. There's a big 1-inch sensor, a dual-aperture lens, and even a camera grip shutter button accessory. Along with the faux-camera-leather back and big, round camera bump, if you squint this almost looks like a point-and-shoot camera.

The headline feature is the 50 MP camera powered by a 1-inch Sony IMX989. We've seen this sensor make headlines before as the biggest, 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 that Sharp phone, the Leitz Phone 2.

Xiaomi takes Sony's big sensor and adds a gimmick to it that we haven't seen since the Samsung Galaxy S9: a dual-aperture lens. Samsung's dual-aperture lens back in 2018 could switch from f1.5 to f2.4. While that's technically interesting, that was not a big enough range to do much of anything. The goal of a smaller aperture on a real camera is to 1) take in less light if the environment is too bright, and 2) have a bigger depth of field so more things are in focus. None of that scales to a smartphone camera. First, the tiny lenses mean they can never get enough light, so a smaller aperture tends to be detrimental to your photos. Second, smartphone cameras don't have a big enough focal length to really do anything with depth-of-field effects.

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