Redmi Note 9pro detailed camera review

Hey guys its Mohammed farooq, and here is my detailed camera review of the Redmi Note 9 Pro.

 




In the past, Redmi’s Note series smartphones have had the best set of cameras in the budget segment. Will the Redmi Note 9 Pro carry the torch forward? Let us find out. 


Like the Note 8 Pro, Note 9 Pro also comeswith 4 cameras at the back. And they are placed in a square cluster. Primary camera gets a 48 Megapixel sensorwith F/1.8 aperture and a 26mm lens. Then there is a 8 megapixel sensor with F/2.2aperture and it is coupled with a 13mm ultra-wide lens. Macro camera now gets a 5 megapixel sensorwith F/2.4 aperture. And there is a 2 megapixel depth sensor witF/2.4 aperture.


 With the primary camera, you can shoot 4kunstabalised videos at 30fps. And 1080p videos at upto 120fps. For slow motion videos, you can shoot 120/240and 960fps videos in 720p resolution. At the front you get a 16 megapixel selfiecamera, and with 1080p 30fps videos, now you can even shoot 720p 120fps slow motion videos. Interface of the camera app is pretty much similar to other Redmi smartphones. There is a macro mode, but it is hidden in the secondary menu. 






In the Pro mode, you can adjust various settings like white balance, focus, shutter speed, ISO and exposure. You can also turn on focus peeking, which makes it easier to see which areas of the scene is in focus, or you can turn on Zebras,which lets you know which areas of the image are being over exposed. There is also an option to shoot RAW images,and all these settings are even available for shooting videos. Range for shutter speed from 1/4000th of a second, all the way ups to 30 seconds. And the range for ISO is from 100 to 3200. Now before we get back to the image and video samples. Let us start with the daytime images. This the new GM2 sensor from Samsung, and Redmi Note 9 Pro is the first smartphone to use it. And as you can see, It can capture lot of details in various bright lighting situations. I feel that the camera tries to over expose most of the times, so I had to manually pull the brightness slider down a bit, for most of these shots.


I don’t think its big issue, but I hope Redmi takes care of it in the next update. It is a 48 mega pixel sensor, but these are12 mega pixel images. Which means, they use pixel binning, and combining formation from 4 pixels into 1 pixel, giving us sharper results. Note 9 Pro seems to be adding a slight warmertone to most of its images. Other than that, colours seem good from it. There is also a Pro colour mode, which boostsand saturates the colours even further. So if you like an extra bit of punch in the colours of your images, you can use this mode. Coming to the HDR shots. This is an image with the HDR mode turned off. It looks nice, curtains are nicely exposed,but the parts outside the window are a bit blown out. With the HDR mode turned on, you can get back most of those details, and the image looks really good. This mode helps the camera preserve lot of the details in the brighter areas, while also bringing up more details from the shadows. In some situations like this, it helps theimage look so much better. If you zoom in, you can see there is noisein the darker parts of this image, but zooming out, overall image looks really good, thanksto the HDR mode. These have all been 12 megapixel images, but you can switch to the 48 megapixel mode, and take higher resolution images. Just like with the GM1 sensor, it is still difficult to make out the difference between the 12 and 48 megapixel images. In fact, in most of these shots, 12 megapixel images turn out to be sharper.



Accurate edge detection is carried forward while taking portrait of objects. Note 9 Pro does really well, even if the objecthas complex edges, and the background is busy. If anything, I think the edge detection gets even better when taking portraits of objects. I just think it still tries to over expose these images, and I had to pull the brightness slider down few notches, for all of these shots. Moving on to low light images. This is the part, where the Redmi Note 9 Pro struggles a lot. I don’t know if it’s the new GM2 sensor,or if Redmi hasn’t optimised the software for low light photography, but the images are just not up to the mark, for these lighting conditions. You can switch to the night mode, but even then the images are just average at best. Night mode images do keep the exposure in check, and make the colours look good, but other than that, there aren’t too many details in them as well. I think the Redmi Note 8 Pro still takes better low light images than this Note 9 Pro. So I really think Redmi needs to fix this soon. And until they fix it, if you take lot of images in lower or artificial light, you should look at some of the other phones in this price range. That brings is to the only remaining camera. This 16 megapixel front facing camera captures enough details to make your selfies look good. If you don’t want your selfies to appear soft, you will have to turn the beauty mode off, every time you switch to the selfie camera. As it is on by default. There is HDR mode, so even if the background is bright, your face will be properly exposed, like in all these shots. Even without a separate depth sensor, Note9 Pro does well to accurately detect the edges for these portrait selfies. And even if you have multiple people in the shot, it manages to keep their faces in focus, while blurring rest of the background. Dynamic range takes a big hit while taking this portrait selfies. Here is a video from the front facing camera of the Redmi note 9 pro. You can see how it handles over all colours of the scene, exposure, and stabilisation when I am walking around with it. 4K 30fps videos are over saturated, and they don’t get any king of stabilisation. 


If you want electronically stabilised videos,you will have to lower the resolution down to 1080p and shoot at 30fps. These videos, while not as detailed as the 4K ones, still look good. So those were all the image and video samples from the Redmi Note 9 Pro. It does really well when there is ample light around. it is always good to have a secondary wide lens, as it lets you capture the same scene from a slightly different perspective. And the macro lens is treat for anyone wholove to get as close to their subject as possible. Portrait shots are amazing, which should beno surprise, as Redmi has been doing this well for quite some time now. Only disappointing part is the Note 9 Pro’slow light performance. I have seen phones that came out 1 or 2 years before it, taking better low light images than this. So I hope Redmi has people working on all their cylinders to fix Note 9 Pro’s low light performance. These have been my thoughts about the cameras on this Redmi Note 9 Pro. You guys just saw over 85 image and video samples, what do you guys think about the cameras on this phone? Let me know in the comments section. So guys take care and had a great day🤗

Post a Comment

0Comments
Post a Comment (0)