Realme 11 Pro Plus hands-on: 200MP camera with in-sensor crop

Chinese value brand Realme doesn’t officially sell in the US, but that didn’t stop it from holding a media pre-launch event in New York City last week to let US media test out its latest high-value mid-range phone .

Named Realme 11 Pro Plus, the phone will launch in India next month with a retail price of around $300 equivalent. It will go on sale in India first, with a rollout planned across Southeast Asia and Europe. As always, the phone offers specifications and design that exceed its $300 price range.

The 11 Pro Plus has a faux-vegan leather back with a circular camera module that’s very reminiscent of Chinese flagships like the Xiaomi 13 Ultra or the Oppo Find X6 Pro, and the inclusion of stitching in the leather gives it a very nice texture. Gives a feel Flip the phone around, and you have a great (for its price) 120Hz OLED panel, wrapped by thin bezels and relatively bright enough.

But the star of the show is its main camera: a 200MP shooter that uses Samsung’s ISOCELL HP3 sensor. Despite Realme technically being a direct competitor to Samsung’s mid-range phones, the two companies worked together to optimize the camera for the Realme phone, at least in terms of marketing. In fact, a Samsung imaging engineer flew to the event from Seoul to speak on behalf of the collaboration.

The 200MP camera allows the Realme 11 Pro Plus to do some tricks. The first uses 16-in-1 pixel binning to produce a 12.5MP image that packs 16 times more information than a traditional 12MP photo. This allows the camera to produce brighter images than its otherwise small sensor size would allow.

The other trick is that Realme can take advantage of all 200 million pixels, and use in-sensor cropping to create “zoomed” photos that don’t lose too much detail in sharpness. Realme is keen to point out that its phone is the only phone in this price range to feature true in-sensor cropping (a trick that expensive phones like the iPhone 14 Pro and Xiaomi flagships are doing).

Considering that the phone only costs $300 and doesn’t have a dedicated zoom lens, the 4x zoom photos above are pretty impressive, especially since they were taken in low light conditions. In better lighting conditions, 4x zoom shots look virtually flawless.

Since the phone is yet to be launched, I cannot reveal information about other components of the phone like processor or battery size. I can say that they are punching well above the $300 price range of the phone.

Based on the main camera, leather-backed design and 120Hz OLED panel alone, I can say that the Realme 11 Pro Plus is another (in a long line) of Realme devices that offer great value at a low price. As it stands now, Realme and Xiaomi’s Redmi are essentially trading it off to see which phone can give users the best bang-for-dollar, and it’s a battle that we consumers win. Are.