Hey guys in this article, I will review POCO X2 Detailed Camera Review. we are going to take a very detailed look at all the cameras on the POCO X2. I have over 80 image and article samples in various lighting conditions. So make sure you watch the complete article. I wanted to include the Gcam samples from the POCO X2 in this article. But even without those samples, this article was getting a lot longer.
So I decided to make a separate article about it. And that article will go live a day after this one. Let us quickly get the specs out of the way. There is a quad-camera setup at the back. The primary camera gets the 64-megapixel SONY IMX686 sensor, with F/1.9 aperture and 26mmlens.The next camera gets an 8-megapixel sensor with F/2.2 aperture. This sensor is coupled with a 13mm ultra-wide-angle lens. Then there is a 2-megapixel macro camera F/2.4 aperture. And finally, there is another 2 megapixel depth sensor with F/2.4 aperture. Why is my phone charging slowly all of a sudden?
At the front, we now get 2 cameras. The main camera has a 20-megapixel sensor and a 27mm lens, while the secondary camera has a 2-megapixel depth sensor with an F/2.4 aperture. I think if companies are including 2 cameras at the front, 2nd one should always get a wide lens, because even on phones without the depth sensor, edge detection is pretty good when it comes to portrait selfies. In the camera app, you do get a pro mode, which lets you adjust all settings like white balance, focus, shutter speed, ISO and exposure.
You can also switch between different lenses, turn on focus peaking, take 64-megapixel images and take RAW images from this Pro mode. For the Primary camera, the Range of Shutter speed is from 1/1000’s of a second, all the way up to 32 seconds. And Range for ISO is from 100 to 3200. Now before we get to the image and article samples, if you are new to this blog please make sure to share this article with your friends and the bell icon next to it. That way you won't miss out on any of the amazing articles coming up on this channel.
As always, we start with the daylight images. The 64 megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor captures incredible details when we have plenty of light around. Now these are 16 megapixel images, since in the normal mode, the phone uses pixel binning to combine information from 4 pixels into 1 pixel, giving us more details in each of the shots. These images are sharp and there is no shortage of detail, even when we zoom in on any part.
There seems to be a good amount of contrast in these images. As with the POCO F1 when it was launched and with most of the Redmi phones, there is a slight green tint in these images. You can easily fix it in editing, so I won’t say it's a big deal. And with the POCO F1, Xiaomi eventually fixed it with software updates, so we should not worry too much about it. Overall colors are nice and naturally saturated from the POCO X2. If you want New features in WhatsApp 2021.
Images don’t look overly processed, and the colors are nice and balanced. If you want more punchy-looking colors, you can turn on the AI scene detection mode, and that will add a bit more contrast and saturation to your images. I like to keep the AI scene detection turned off, for all of my shots. What I like to keep on is Auto HDR mode. POCO X2 is intelligent enough to know when it needs to turn the HDR mode on.
You can see, there is a difference in the images shot with the HDR mode. With this mode turned on, There are more details in the darker parts, and you can even see more details being preserved in the brighter areas of the image. We can see the same in this next set of images.HDR mode does help in bringing out more details from the darker or shadowed areas, while also preserving the details from the brighter areas.
So I would suggest you leave the HDR mode on auto, all the time. In some of the images like this, the difference that the HDR mode makes is just amazing. As I said before, these have all been 16-megapixel images. If you want to take higher resolution images, you can switch to the 64 megapixel mode. These images capture a lot of information, so they are 3-4 times larger in terms of file size. If you want E-commerce app development.
This means, if you leave this mode on all the time, your phone's internal storage fills up pretty fast. Let us compare these 64 megapixel images with the 16-megapixel ones. Looking at them from this distance, you can barely differentiate between the two. You will have to zoom way in to see the difference. And only then can you notice that the 64-megapixel images have a slight edge in terms of the detail level. I am sure, most of you don’t zoom in so deep or even compare images side by side like this in real life.
So I would suggest you stick with the default 16-megapixel mode for all of your shots. It also gives you a much better dynamic range, as the HDR mode cannot be used while taking64 megapixel images. This is an image shot with the primary camera, and here is the same image shot with the 8megapixel ultra-wide camera. Look at how much more of the scene, this 13mm ultra-wide lens lets you get in your shot.
This lens is especially useful when you want to show the scale of things, or when you want to get more of the scene in the shot, but you don’t have enough space to physically move away from your subject. There is also a 2x mode in the camera app, but we don’t have a 2x telephoto lens on this phone. So what this mode does is, just crop in on the image captured with the primary camera. Now the 8-megapixel sensor is not as good as the primary one, so these wide images are not as sharp or detailed as the images from the main camera.
But nevertheless, it is always nice to have multiple focal lengths on your phone. It helps you tell stories in different ways. If we look back at these images side by side, you can see a clear difference in the white balance and color temperature between the 2 lenses. You can easily fix this if you know how to edit these images later on. But for most people who don’t edit their images, I think POCO should try to fix this thing in the camera software itself. Hopefully, they acknowledge and fix it in one of the future software updates. If you want Recover files from formatted Compact Flash card.
Before we move on to the close-up shots, here is a quick focusing speed test. POCO X2 is quick at switching the focus from a near to a far object, but the shift in focus is a bit abrupt, and not very smooth. This is not an issue while clicking images, but if we are shooting articles, this is clearly visible. This quick and accurate focusing is very important when we are trying to take close-up shots.
Since the POCO X2 is quick at focusing on a nearby object, these close-up shots turned out to be amazing. You can see that the subject is in perfectly sharp focus, and since we have got a very wide F/1.9 aperture on the main camera, you can see that the background gets a very nice and natural optical blur.If you want to get even closer to your subject, the POCO X2 comes with a dedicated Macro lens.
It lets you get much closer to the subject, and still allows you to set the focus, so you can get amazing macro shots like this. It is so much fun to take these shots. Since it’s just a 2-megapixel sensor with an F/2.4 aperture, we see a lot of noise in some of these shots. To avoid this noise, make sure you are taking these macro shots in areas where there is plenty of light. Best results can be found while shooting outside on a bright sunny day.
Coming to my favorite kind of shots, the Portraits. Portrait mode on smartphones is the easiest way to give your images a professional look. As it mimics the kind of images you might get when you are using an interchangeable lens camera and an expensive prime lens.I have always felt that Xiaomi, Redmi, and now POCO have got very good at isolating the subject from its background for these portrait shots. If you want Microsoft Teams: With this new capability, your video meetings will be even more expansive.
The edge detection is near perfect, and the background is blurred out very nicely and evenly. You can even change the amount of blur to the background or add various studio lighting effects to your portrait shots, before or even you have clicked them. There is this new Movie mode within the Portrait mode, which lets you take 21:9 images, with black bars at the top and bottom, giving your portrait shots a very lice cinematic look.
I like this mode very much. For the top and bottom black bars, you can either let them be as they are or just crop them out in editing. You can take portrait mode images of objects as well. When the object is too complex, it just keeps the part that you tapped on, in focus, and then gradually blurts out the rest of the image, like we see in this example. When it detects the edges, like in this shot, you can see how well it separates the subject from the rest of the background.
I feel this and some other phones from Redmi, handle these portrait shots of objects in a much better way, compared to most of the other smartphones. And ya, you can use the movie mode while taking portraits of objects as well, to add in a bit more drama to these portrait shots. Let us now get to the images shot in indoors, artificial, and lower lighting situations. When you are shooting in these kinds of lighting situations, make sure that you are not in the 64-megapixel mode.
Since that mode does not use pixel binning, there is a lot of noise in those images compared to the 16 megapixel ones. With that said, I think the low-light performance on this phone is pretty good. There is enough sharpness, so you can make out the edges of everything, and even if you zoom in, you can still read the small text on the wall menu. The low light performance is not groundbreakingly great for the price.
But if you know how to use the camera, and have realistic expectations, you can get some good-looking images. Since this sensor is not optically stabilized, you will start seeing some noise, as we start shooting in even darker situations. To make up for this, you can switch to night mode. Right from the 1st image, you can see that the image with the night mode has better details and colors in it. I like that the night mode images don’t take too long to capture, that way, you do have to hold the phone steady for 4-5 seconds, to get a good shot.
Night mode images handle the exposure from light in a much better way, making the overall shot look very pleasing. It not only adds more light to the shot, but also elevates the colors making the night mode images look much richer.Whenever you find yourself in less than ideal lighting conditions, make sure to switch to the night mode, so you get the best possible results from your POCO X2.That brings us to the front-facing cameras.
With the 20-megapixel selfie, the camera can take some good-looking selfies. But I think, even with the beauty mode turned off, this phone is applying some amount of smoothing to my skin in all of these shots. And one big thing to note is, whenever you switch to the selfie camera, by default the beauty mode is turned on. If you don’t wish to use it, you will have to turn it off manually every time you switch to this camera. Thanks to the secondary depth sensor, edge detection is fairly accurate in these portrait selfies. Since the background is blurred out, these portrait selfies appear to be sharper than normal ones. The dynamic range takes a big hit while taking these portrait selfies. As you can see, the bright background is completely blown out in all of these portrait selfies. If you want End-to-end encryption is now available in Android's Messages app. Make sure it's turned on.
Now these selfie cameras are not the best when the light gets low. There is a lot of noise in the selfies when the light goes down. Here is an article from the front-facing camera of the POCO X2.You can see how it is handling the overall colors of the scene, exposure, and from the looks of it, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of stabilization for this article. With high noise levels in lower light, a bit of over softening of the images, and no electronic stabilization while shooting articles. I am not too impressed with the selfie camera on this phone.
Coming to the article performance of the rear camera. You can shoot electronically stabilized 4K articles at up to 30fps, and these articles look really good. Here is a short montage of 4K footage shot with this POCO X2, that I put together. You also get to shoot 1080p 60fps articles, but at this frame rate, you don’t get any kind of stabilization. You can shoot 120fps slow-motion articles at up to 1080p resolution, and if you want to go crazy with the frame rate, There is also an option to shoot 960fps super slow motion particles at 720p resolution.
I am just not a big fan of these low bitrate, lower resolution high frame rate articles, soI stick to shooting slow-motion articles in 1080p resolution.After looking at over 80 images and article samples, I am really impressed with the rear cameras on this POCO X2.
It can capture very detailed images with accurate colors, when there is ample light around. And even as the light goes down, the night mode helps it take good-looking usable images. I am personally a big fan of portrait mode photography, and Recently I have found a liking for macro photography as well.
So I am glad to have this phone perform amazingly well in both these modes. At a starting price of Rs.15,999 I think POCO X2 is the new camera champion in the under20,000Rs. smartphone world. These have been my thoughts about the cameras on this phone. What do you guys think about the cameras on this phone? Do let me know in the comments.
That is it for this article guys. You can also check out some of the other articles on this blog. If you want How to become a computer genius/hacker in 2021.
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