Develop Bugs

Xiaomi mi6 optical zoom is actually digital?

Hello guys,
Ive been playing with my mi6 for a while and noticed a strange thing. Photos captured at 2x look actually more like a digital zoom than an optical, even though the resolution is the same as 1x. When you actually cover the left camera lens, the picture is still normal. No matter if you choose 1x or 2x.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

You can explicitly set the lens on manual mode.

marinespl said:
You can explicitly set the lens on manual mode.
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Thanks, you da real MVP!

Where can you change that? Still on MIUI8.

it does that in low light shots, cause the tele lens is so bad at low light that it prefers to shot in main camera and zoom it in.
sources : miui forum? red it when i bought it

ZackoFF96 said:
it does that in low light shots, cause the tele lens is so bad at low light that it prefers to shot in main camera and zoom it in.
sources : miui forum? red it when i bought it
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That's right, the telephoto sensor has 1.00µm pixel size at f/2.6 aperture, while the main sensor has 1.25µm pixel size at f/1.8 aperture.

Fake rear second camera?

Daisy should have second rear 5MPx camera but I dont think that is even used, it feels like just a hole. Doesnt help for bokeh, in low ligh, for zooming. If I covered it image was the same. Anyone knows when this camera take any effect?

same problem, bad front camera experience

itsaazim said:
same problem, bad front camera experience
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next time please read post before you write some unrelated text

I think so too

It is definitely not fake.
You can test by going to dialer and typing *#*#64663#*#*
In that test mode you can test each camera lens ( finger over lens) and that will verify both cams do in fact "work"
Not saying the software actually uses both, but the cams are in fact real

hossman said:
It is definitely not fake.
You can test by going to dialer and typing *#*#64663#*#*
In that test mode you can test each camera lens ( finger over lens) and that will verify both cams do in fact "work"
Not saying the software actually uses both, but the cams are in fact real
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Click to collapse
Im not so sure in my case:laugh::laugh::laugh:
edit:same for dual back camera

With the stock camera app, it does work correctly. Perhaps you should contact warranty...

The portrait mode that focus only on what is close must be a proof that the second camera works, right?

If you cover the second camera in potrait mode in stock cam app, you will see that it is not working properly anymore

the 2nd camera only there to enhance DOF information
not to actually take a picture.
front camera is also able to fake the DOF but its slower and not so accurate when compared to the rear camera

hossman said:
It is definitely not fake.
You can test by going to dialer and typing *#*#64663#*#*
In that test mode you can test each camera lens ( finger over lens) and that will verify both cams do in fact "work"
Not saying the software actually uses both, but the cams are in fact real
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Click to collapse
This works for me! Thanks. I don't know why others doubt their smartphones

i also use this model and i think that secondary dual cam is just for show off it does not do any thing. its a mimic only for branding purpose.

So many people have no idea what they bought.
The first sensor is a 12MPx Sony sensor (bottom one) that captures standard photos, in focus.
The second sensor is a 5MPx Samsung sensor (top one) that analyzes the whole frame and returns RAW depth data for the camera app to process, to bring a better blur effect for the portrait mode.
This is a bonus to the classic software portrait mode, it helps. It's not useless, and it's not for show off.
The fact that it doesn't work as good in dark environment is because the Samsung sensor is cheap and can't give enough data in darkness.
Now, let's see when both cameras work at the same time (not applicable on this device):
- when the secondary sensor is black and white, this helps the pictures get more dynamic range
- when the secondary sensor is the same as the other sensor, this is used for 3D imaging (chech HTC 3D)
Now when 2 modules work independently and can be switched via software:
- when the main lens are normal and the other lens are wide lens
- when the main lens are normal and the other lens are zoom lens
Now, our device doesn't fit in either of the above categories and the best way to use the Portrait mode is to use a ToF sensor, but baring in mind the price of our device the ToF sensor was replaced with a standard, low quality camera sensor from Samsung.

Macro lens

So, the macro mode apparently uses a motor to move the ultrawide lens slightly to change the focus. If you cover up the main camera or the telephoto, macro still works. However, when turning on and off macro, if you look at the main camera, it moves slightly, while the ultrawide doesn't appear to move. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

tzzeri said:
So, the macro mode apparently uses a motor to move the ultrawide lens slightly to change the focus. If you cover up the main camera or the telephoto, macro still works. However, when turning on and off macro, if you look at the main camera, it moves slightly, while the ultrawide doesn't appear to move. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
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The main lens moves because it turns off the stabilizer at the time of switching modes. The ultra-wide lens also moves slightly when you turn on the macro mode.

Sam998 said:
The main lens moves because it turns off the stabilizer at the time of switching modes. The ultra-wide lens also moves slightly when you turn on the macro mode.
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Thanks. This is the first time I've had a phone with OIS, so I never realised it actually moves the lens. Just realised now that the lens also moves every time the camera is opened.

Question No zoom lens until 5x

So I noticed that the zoom lens only activates at 5x zoom. You can see this by covering the lens with your finger and zooming in.
I gather this must mean that the optical 4x lens is fixed at 4x, but as it only kicks in at 5x zoom you can never get 4x optical zoom shots as it is cropped to 5x ?
This would also mean that up to 5x zoom you are just getting a digital crop of the main lens?
Am I missing something here? Seems a little weird that you cant get a 4x optical shot with a 4x optical lens fitted.

rosso22 said:
So I noticed that the zoom lens only activates at 5x zoom. You can see this by covering the lens with your finger and zooming in.
I gather this must mean that the optical 4x lens is fixed at 4x, but as it only kicks in at 5x zoom you can never get 4x optical zoom shots as it is cropped to 5x ?
This would also mean that up to 5x zoom you are just getting a digital crop of the main lens?
Am I missing something here? Seems a little weird that you cant get a 4x optical shot with a 4x optical lens fitted.
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Googles periscope lens doesn't kick in a "fixed" manner, it uses an algorithm (ambient light, shaking, distance to object etc) to decide "on its own" when to kick in the dedicated zoom lens. You can easily test this out/replicate this by lowering the light in your room/and or change your distance to your desired object and see that the point where periscope lens kicks in, changes.
Best just try to focus on the amount of details you can see, if you play around with it, you can quickly see through the Preview when periscope kicks in, since that will improve the amount of details in your preview window significantly.
Many people here want "fixed" values, but as of now, Google doesn't offer that.
This is also a big problem in reviews, since those people don't know about this limitation and you can often see a "here, 4x shot, not looking good" and my eyes tell me "jea, that's a digital crop, you m*ron" and none are the wiser.

So your saying you never know whether you will get a crop or an optical zoom shot at 4x, this makes the 4x lens pointless imho.
Google are basically stopping you using a feature of the phone whenever you want. If every zoom shot is a gamble on cropped or optical, decided by the phone, surely they are stopping you from getting the best performance from the camera every shot/zoom length.
If I choose a 4x shot I want optical every time or I may as well have bought the 6 instead of the pro and saved some money.

The deciding factor on whether it's digital zoom or the telephoto lens is the distance of the object. I estimate the telephoto lens minimum focus distance is around 4 feet. As you go between close and far objects, you can see the stutter between the digital 4x and telephoto 4x. You could always cover the either the main lens or telephoto and figure it out too. What they really need to do is add an icon in the camera app that lets you know it's 4x digital zoom or 4x telephoto.
This isn't something that's only unique to the 6 Pro.

EeZeEpEe said:
What they really need to do is add an icon in the camera app that lets you know it's 4x digital zoom or 4x telephoto.
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This. I think that's the best solution for now, let people know what they have at the moment.

rosso22 said:
So your saying you never know whether you will get a crop or an optical zoom shot at 4x, this makes the 4x lens pointless imho.
Google are basically stopping you using a feature of the phone whenever you want. If every zoom shot is a gamble on cropped or optical, decided by the phone, surely they are stopping you from getting the best performance from the camera every shot/zoom length.
If I choose a 4x shot I want optical every time or I may as well have bought the 6 instead of the pro and saved some money.
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The threshold in the HAL is at about 4.3x provided that all the other requirements for the switch are met. You can see the image "jump" slightly when it crosses the threshold because the image characteristics do not match perfectly. So yes, you can definitely tell which sensor it is using.
The reason why they don't alert you to which sensor it is using is because they (gooble) think they're smarter than you and better able to pick the right sensor.

Another thing to keep in mind is if the 4x telephoto was the default, anything too close would be immediately blurry. Then how do you switch to a digital zoom?

They could just give us a way of selecting the lens in use manually. Instead of treating us all like idiots.

rosso22 said:
They could just give us a way of selecting the lens in use manually. Instead of treating us all like idiots.
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Good luck with that. Truly given the way the entire world is being run right now, its pretty clear that the vast majority of people *ARE* idiots. And that is putting it mildly. So best way to make money is to sell to the majority, who are stupid enough to trust government -- those people clearly can't think for themselves.

rosso22 said:
So your saying you never know whether you will get a crop or an optical zoom shot at 4x, this makes the 4x lens pointless imho.
Google are basically stopping you using a feature of the phone whenever you want. If every zoom shot is a gamble on cropped or optical, decided by the phone, surely they are stopping you from getting the best performance from the camera every shot/zoom length.
If I choose a 4x shot I want optical every time or I may as well have bought the 6 instead of the pro and saved some money.
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yes, return your pro and get the 6. be happier.

It's worse on video. I took a supposedly 4x video of my dog and it looks terrible. Pixelated, oversharpened and unusable.

MacGuy2006 said:
It's worse on video. I took a supposedly 4x video of my dog and it looks terrible. Pixelated, oversharpened and unusable.
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Do you have 4k60fps enabled?
For some odd reason, Google only allows the dedicated sensors to kick in if you use 30fps, since both the ultrawide and Tele module do not support 4k60fps.
So if you zoom in whilst having 4k60fps enabled, it will always be a digital zoom.

This is one of the most annoying features. The 4x lense can focus as reasonably close range but the "ai" deciding to either crop and main lense or switch to the periscope is crap.
You can trick it by switching to 4x and focusing on a distant object and back again and hope it's just within range.
People ask why use it so close, but the 4x can really aid in composing a shot without the wide distortions.
Another issue is if you adjust anything like HDR or temperature on the main lense and switch focal length to other options it doesn't switch to the actual lense you want anymore!!

MacGuy2006 said:
It's worse on video. I took a supposedly 4x video of my dog and it looks terrible. Pixelated, oversharpened and unusable.
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You can't use the telephoto sensor for video. Only the other two.

86rickard said:
This is one of the most annoying features. The 4x lense can focus as reasonably close range but the "ai" deciding to either crop and main lense or switch to the periscope is crap.
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In my book, that's an idiotic "feature" and is in fact a bug.
It makes zooming in day-to-day use unusable in most common cases.
When I zoomed to 4x and took a video, the result (1080) was not usable. It's a joke.

I think the conclusion here is the entire camera system really needs work. The hardware is better but the software is letting it down. Jerky transitions, bugs and a processing algorithm left over from the lower quality sensor days that actually over works the 50mp images.

96carboard said:
You can't use the telephoto sensor for video. Only the other two.
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No, you can. I just tested it by setting it to 4x, making sure I'm focused on something far enough, and blocking the telephoto lens does block the picture.

Just discussing this elsewhere, with regard to the MWP GCam mod. This is a *serious* improvement over the stock app; the one thing they could do to make it perfect is give you control over when the periscope kicks in. If anyone here knows the people working on this, please mention this. The mod is here, btw — you really should try it! The version you want is 8.3.252-V1c_MWP:
MWP GCam APKs - Google Camera Port
Modified Google Camera app by MWP.
www.celsoazevedo.com

Gnaius said:
Just discussing this elsewhere, with regard to the MWP GCam mod. This is a *serious* improvement over the stock app; the one thing they could do to make it perfect is give you control over when the periscope kicks in. If anyone here knows the people working on this, please mention this. The mod is here, btw — you really should try it! The version you want is 8.3.252-V1c_MWP:
MWP GCam APKs - Google Camera Port
Modified Google Camera app by MWP.
www.celsoazevedo.com
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That may not actually be an option. The hal only presents one logical camera on that side of the phone and transparently switches between the sensors based on the level of zoom requested, and an assortment of other data.
I haven't looked into what the hal looks like, is it open source? If it is, presumably it could be modified to present 3 or 4 logical cameras (I.e. 3 individual + 1 combined).

Gnaius said:
Just discussing this elsewhere, with regard to the MWP GCam mod. This is a *serious* improvement over the stock app;
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How is it an improvement?
Testing zoom, it still uses the main lens on 1x, 2x ad 4x. Just like the stock camera does.
This is another reason to dislike this phone and to recommend against buying it.

Question What is the zoom lens for?

Hi all. I am debating the switch from the regular 6 to the pro.
Looks I will be getting bigger higher refresh screen (pro) which is curved (con) and with worse battery life.
One thing that is not clear to me - is the zoom lens used in any other situations than when actively selecting it? For example - which of the lenses is being used when you select the portrait mode in the camera app? Is it using the telephoto lens to battle the fish eye effect?

monocay said:
Hi all. I am debating the switch from the regular 6 to the pro.
Looks I will be getting bigger higher refresh screen (pro) which is curved (con) and with worse battery life.
One thing that is not clear to me - is the zoom lens used in any other situations than when actively selecting it? For example - which of the lenses is being used when you select the portrait mode in the camera app? Is it using the telephoto lens to battle the fish eye effect?
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I have never gotten the telephoto lens to show up in gcam. Only the 50MP wide cam and the 12MP ultra wide cam. The 50 gives you zoom options but the 48MP telephoto never shows up

monocay said:
Hi all. I am debating the switch from the regular 6 to the pro.
Looks I will be getting bigger higher refresh screen (pro) which is curved (con) and with worse battery life.
One thing that is not clear to me - is the zoom lens used in any other situations than when actively selecting it? For example - which of the lenses is being used when you select the portrait mode in the camera app? Is it using the telephoto lens to battle the fish eye effect?
Click to expand...
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It's a 4x telephoto, which is a lot for portraits (so portraits are taken using main camera at 2x magnification).
No, it's not being used for enhancing ultrawide. I suppose it's also because if the same reason mentioned above (OnePlus uses it's 2x tele for this as well).
Telephoto is really only useful for zooming 4x and up all the way to 20x, when photos are still kinda useful (depending on a scenario), thanks to being a 50 MP sensor and some Google's AI magic.
I take a lot of zoomed pictures and I don't mind curved display. Battery is okay, 6 hours of SOT are real for me, usually on social networks and news scrolling. Sometimes I play a League of Legends, than it will drop to 4-5 hours.

Zoom lens is for... zooming in. I would think that would be self-explanatory?
It kicks in when the magnification reaches about 4.5x. Switching between sensors is exclusively a matter of changing the magnification level, not by "selecting" a particular camera. There are other details considered before switching sensors, such as exposure requirements.
You can tell which sensor is in use by briefly blocking sensors with your finger. When you see your finger on the screen, you found the sensor that is in use.

Yeah, thanks
What was not clear to me was if it is being used when shooting portrait photos, as some phones (e.g. Oneplus) do.
Looks like this is not the case.
I will stick with my vanilla 6 then, not missing out on much, subjectively.

monocay said:
Yeah, thanks
What was not clear to me was if it is being used when shooting portrait photos, as some phones (e.g. Oneplus) do.
Looks like this is not the case.
I will stick with my vanilla 6 then, not missing out on much, subjectively.
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Portrait photos can be made with ANY lens, depending on the distance and direction to the subject(s).

96carboard said:
Portrait photos can be made with ANY lens, depending on the distance and direction to the subject(s).
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Is it so? How does the portrait UI looks on Pixel 6 Pro? On the vanilla pixel I have the options to shoot it in 1x and 2x only. Does the pro version offer a higher magnification, using the zoom lens instead of main one?

monocay said:
Is it so? How does the portrait UI looks on Pixel 6 Pro? On the vanilla pixel I have the options to shoot it in 1x and 2x only. Does the pro version offer a higher magnification, using the zoom lens instead of main one?
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No. 1x and 2x are the only options available. The telephoto lens isn't used in portrait mode.