See Xiaomi's Insane 50X Zoom Phone Camera In Action

The Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro is shaping up to be a truly insane Android phone. It’s packed with features, especially its five rear cameras — one of which is capable of delivering sharp 50X zooming thanks to a combination of zoom and digital trickery. 

Check out how it works in this video:

The video — originally attached to an official Weibo post — shows how Xiaomi’s zoom works by closing in on an ophthalmologist eye sight test chart. Mounted on a tripod to reduce shaking, the 5x optical periscope works in combination to whatever digital trickery Xiaomi has implemented to take images that look extremely sharp — at least on the screen. We will have to wait to see how this looks in actual photo samples.

The five rear cameras are impressive — on paper. One uses the Samsung Isocell Bright HMX 108-megapixel sensor. This is twice the size of the Pixel 3 XL’s sensor, much larger than the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s sensor, and only 40% smaller than the 1-inch sensor inside the Sony RX107 $1,300 point-and-shoot camera. The 108MP sensor also uses tetracell technology to group pixels and get 27MP images that can rival some traditional cameras in quality.

(Image credit: Xiaomi)

The CC9 Pro also has a 20-megapixel camera with an ultrawide angle lens, a 12MP camera made for portraits, and a macro camera. It sounds like the CC9 can photograph any subject you can imagine. The company has released photos taken with the macro lenses, which could take photos of subjects as close as 1.5 centimeters.

The phone also has a 6.46-inch curved OLED screen, 12GB of RAM, and a maximum of 256GB of storage. The icing on the cake: a gargantuan 5260mAh battery with 30W fast charging. And it looks really nice too.

(Image credit: Xiaomi)

I can’t wait to get my hands on this beast. Xiaomi will launch it on November 5. No price has been announced yet.

Jesus Diaz

Jesus Diaz founded the new Sploid for Gawker Media after seven years working at Gizmodo, where he helmed the lost-in-a-bar iPhone 4 story and wrote old angry man rants, among other things. He's a creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, and currently writes for Fast Company and Tom's Guide.