You can imagine what might have happened at Xiaomi headquarters in Beijing as a tense meeting was being held to discuss the telephoto camera for the Xiaomi 13 Ultra. Looking to make photography on the device worthy of the Ultra name, the team leader might have stood up and said, “Up periscope,” while the second-in-command replied, “Aye, aye.” And it was decided. The Xiaomi 13 Ultra would feature a new periscope lens that is expected to go beyond anything that Samsung has shipped in the past.
According to a tweet from tipster Kartikey Singh (@That_Kartikey, via NotebookCheck.net), the periscope camera on the Xiaomi 13 Ultra “will shock everyone.” Unless the tipster means that everyone handling the device will suffer an electrical shock, this is actually a good thing for Xiaomi. For those whose minds go right to submarines, or The Beatles, a periscope camera is a sideways-mounted tube that is folded up inside a smartphone and uses prisms to bounce light coming in from the lens to the image sensor.
The periscope camera helps to extend the focal length of the camera for optical zoom images since such a feat is usually limited by the size of a smartphone. Oppo introduced the technology at Mobile World Congress back in 2017 and it debuted on the Huawei P30 Pro in 2019. The advantage is that users can use optical zoom when taking a photo or filming a subject.
Singh continued in a follow-up tweet, “Since last 2 years no-one was able to challenge Samsung in long magnification Zoom which made Samsung lazy and they are using same hardware for 3 generations now but next year things will Start turning around and this monopoly will come to (an) end.”
The Huawei P30 Pro from 2019 was the first smartphone to include a periscope camera
Where optical zoom provides a clear, sharp image, there are two alternatives. Digital zoom uses AI or other trickery to allow users to zoom in on a subject although there is often plenty of noise and the image or video is far from the quality achieved via optical zoom. The third option is a combination of optical and digital called hybrid which still is not up to the level of optical zoom.
A reliable tipster by the name of Digital Chat Station also posted about the Xiaomi 13 Ultra on Chinese social media site Weibo. He expects the device to be equipped with up to 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and include as much as 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. We could see Xiaomi take the wraps off the device codenamed “M1” early in 2023.
