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Today at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Xiaomi pulled the wraps off an audacious smartphone designed with professional photographers in mind. The company’s Xiaomi 14 Ultra smartphone blurs the line between camera and phone by adding many features photographers will appreciate. Those features include a giant 1-inch sensor, variable aperture on one of its cameras, and lenses designed by Leica.
The role of photography in this phone’s arsenal is evident just looking at it, as it sports a gigantic circular housing on the back that holds four cameras. According to Cnet, the main camera offers 50MP resolution and a 1-inch sensor, which is quite large for a mobile phone and allows more light to be captured, reducing noise and assisting in low-light photography. This main camera sports a variable aperture ranging from f/1.63 to f/4.0 and a 23mm full-frame equivalent focal length. It’s unclear how the user would adjust the focal length, but it brings a level of manual control not typically found in a smartphone.
The 14 Ultra includes the option of adding this battery grip for even more manual control over your photography.
Credit: Xiaomi
The other three cameras/lenses on the back include two telephoto lenses and an ultra-wide lens. The telephotos include a “floating” 3.2x 75mm focal length lens and a 5x 120mm “periscope” lens. There’s also a super-wide 12mm lens, giving the operator quite a bit of flexibility. In total, the phone offers a total of four cameras with six different focal lengths, according to Xiaomi. The chassis is also made from aluminum, which the company says makes it extremely rigid.
If all that wasn’t enough, the company also offers an add-on photography kit. The kit is essentially a battery grip that attaches to the bottom of the phone and makes it look like an actual camera. The grip includes controls you’d typically find on top of a camera, including buttons for video recording, a physical shutter button, and a dial. The shutter button can wake the phone from sleep mode, and if the phone is active, pressing it once will activate the auto-focus, just like how an actual camera usually works. Pressing the shutter a second time takes a photo.
There’s also a zoom lever around the base of the button, letting you zoom in and out to switch between lenses. The included dial adjusts exposure by default but can be customized to control aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and “other functions.”
Sadly, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra will not be available in the US, as it’s reserved for the UK and Europe only.