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SONY IMX363 Exmor RS: Everything you need to know about this Sensor and the Xiaomi Poco F1 Camera29/9/2018
Sony has been known to pioneer the development of smartphone camera sensors since almost a decade now. Their phones might not make it to the top-selling shelf in the markets but their camera sensors are definitely the most sought after by various multi-national smartphone manufacturers.
So this article is about a particularly famous sensor by Sony that has suddenly ushered into the limelight about two years since its debut; thanks to manufacturers like Xiaomi and Asus to equip their newly launched smartphones with this beast of a sensor.
Which then brings us to our device in hand i.e. the PocoPhone by Xiaomi or the Xiaomi Poco F1.
Xiaomi has launched a lethal combination of hardware at at extremely competitive price point. Most of us are already very much aware about this so lets move on and find out whether the implementation of the IMX363 sensor on the Poco F1 has been a compromise or not.
Some Numbers for the Geeks Below!
As a matter of fact looking just at the diagonal size of the sensor of the IMX 363, it is amazing to know that the Poco F1 has a larger sensor area that than of the primary rear and the secondary rear cameras of the OnePlus 5/5T, and the OnePlus 6. Not just that, the sensor size is bigger than that of the Mi MIX 2, Mi A2, Google Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the Galaxy S9 Plus.
Yes, it is true that the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the Galaxy S9 Plus ship with the Sony IMX 345 Sensors. Samsung has been using sensors manufactured by Sony for quite sometime now. In most of their Flagship S series devices they selectively ship some, with their own in-house ISOCELL sensors and while the rest of them are equipped with the Sony's Exmor RS sensors. In only the very recent years has Samsung been able to catch up to the pace of developments and progress made by Sony in the field of smartphone camera sensors, especially their latest addition to the lineup that came by last year; the IMX 400 sensor where Sony implemented a 3-layer sensor system. The Sony Xperia XZ is propped with an IMX 400 sensor.
The IMX 363 on the Xiaomi's MI8
Sony's IMX 363 also makes it onboard the flagship device of 2018 by Xiaomi - the MI8 Lineup. Considering that the MI8 is the top of the line product from the company it is safe to assume that Xiaomi chose the best to represent their camera in their flagship line-up.
So is the IMX 363 great on the MI8? Well, if not the best; it definitely does a fantastic job. DXOMark states that the camera of the MI8 performs better than that of an iPhone 8 and the iPhone X. The camera scores a phenomenal rating of 105 for photography and a score of 88 for videography and a overall package score of 99. Let me remind you that a score of 99 is higher than that of the iPhone 8/ iPhone X, Google Pixel / Pixel 2 and even the OnePlus 6. So one could easily call it one of the best smartphone cameras in the market right now. So does the same apply to the Poco F1 because it uses the same sensor as that of MI8? Well, on pen and paper it should, but when it comes down to real life testing and usage the Poco F1 tells quite a different story. One would say it will give out the same level of output as compared to the camera system of the MI8, but personally and quite frankly I feel this isn't the case here and it all boils down to the in-camera software optimization. To do a live head-on comparison between the Poco F1 and the Mi8, you can simply click here and see for yourself at gsmarena.com What you will notice is that the camera of Mi8 gives out much cleaner and sharper photographs than the Poco F1. Remember by sharper I do not mean the sharpness in a picture but the amount of details captured in comparison to the noise captured.
But all of this is on a very macro level and most of you won't even bother cropping in or zooming in so much into a photograph and going into all the fine details.
How does it perform on the Poco F1?
I would say the camera on the Poco F1 is definitely not as superior when compared to the likes of the Xiaomi Mi8 but it is definitely a great camera setup and has potential to be even better. So what's exactly wrong with the camera setup on the Poco F1? Well, there is nothing wrong but things could've definitely been better. A lens with f/1.8 aperture would've been a boon on this phone but you simply just cannot complain about the f/1.9 on a $300 phone. But the problem isn't the aperture here, the problem is having such a great camera setup and yet the photographs somehow turn out to be not so great. The dynamic range of the camera is great! It is able to capture a good deal of details in the shadows, highlights are captured great but the camera tends to focus more on adding details to the shadows than preserving the highlights in my personal experience, especially when clicking a HDR picture. The colour reproduction is nothing short of being phenomenal, though it tends to over-saturate the colours but it is not as bad as the saturation levels on a Samsung device. The potrait mode is good, accurate and super fast as well.
But the real problem is that the camera severely fails to capture the details in a photograph. This is specially noticed if you are trying to click landscape photographs. Parts of the image, if not the whole image looks like a watercolour painting or a picture straight out of a VGA camera. Yes, that is bad and is perhaps the only drawback on the camera system of the Poco F1. It almost feels like the camera isn't trying hard enough to capture the details at all. This get even worse when you try clicking a photograph in 16:9 resolution because the camera bumps down the resolution as well and with barely any details in the picture the photo looks crappy. Especially we live in an era where most of the social media apps have gone 16:9 as their go to photographic aspect ratio while the Poco F1 does a terrible job at getting us a decent, usable 16:9 photograph. So I feel it is justified to conclude that the camera software is doing a pretty bad job here on the Poco F1. Maybe the photographs are okay for posting it on the internet or sending it over through whatsapp but if I wanted to print a photograph out, it definitely cannot be clicked on the Poco F1. The way forward for the POCO F1's camera |