Xiaomi has now officially announced its new Xiaomi 12S Ultra smartphone, bringing with it a pair of half-inch sensors for the ultra-wide and periscope zoom cameras parked alongside a huge 1-inch sensor main camera. It’s Sony’s flagship 1-inch IMX989 sensor, with 50.3-megapixel resolution and a 23mm equivalent focal length wide-angle lens. This is the largest sensor of any smartphone on the market.

In its 4-in-1 Quad Pixel mode, it also features the largest individual pixels at 3.2µm, which should help with low-light and low-noise images. Leica’s contribution, according to GSM Arena, is its 8P element lens and software. The phone itself is powered by Qualcomm’s latest SM8450 Snapdragon S8+ Gen 1 processor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WozIXS0rdM

The front of the Xiaomi 12S Ultra sports a 6.73″ AMOLED display, with 1-120Hz AdaptiveSync Pro technology. It’s IP68 dust and water resistant, a 4860mAh battery with up to 67W wired or 50W wireless charging, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, dual 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and all the other features usual features you’d expect from such a flagship phone today. But on the back is where things get interesting.

The main camera is this 1 inch Sony IMX989 sensor with an 8P aspherical lens. The lens itself is made from a cyclic olefin copolymer with anti-reflective ink and lens edge coatings and features an infrared light filter to help protect against ghosting, flare, chromatic aberrations and to minimize color pollution. It is capable of shooting 8K video at 24 fps, 4K at up to 60 fps, or 1080p at up to 240 fps.

Next to it are two half-inch Sony IMX586 sensors, one for the 128° ultra-wide-angle lens and one for the 120x optically stabilized periscope zoom lens (5x optical). There’s also a dual LED flash here to help produce a more consistent fill light no matter what color temperature of light you’re trying to balance. Naturally, you get all the usual smartphone shooting modes like HDR, panorama, etc., but you also get Leica Authentic Look and Leica Vibrant Look photography styles.

This isn’t the first time a company has put a 1-inch sensor in a smartphone. There are others there, but not many. So this whole “largest sensor in a smartphone” is shared and not unique. Still, they’re not exactly standard in smartphones (yet?), so I think bragging rights still apply.

However, I’ve yet to see any real sample photos taken with it, so I’d be curious to see how they stack up. Let’s just hope the 8K HDR footage is a bit better than in the original Xiaomi 12!

The Xiaomi 12S Ultra will first launch in China for around $900 for the 8GB/256GB version. A top-end version with 12GB/512GB is expected to cost around $1,050. There are also a few lower-end models, but they lack the Ultra’s 1-inch sensor. These are the 12S and 12S Pro whose prices start at around $600 and $700 respectively. It is not yet known when it will start rolling out to the rest of the world.