Xiaomi’s decision to use a properly developed, large camera sensor for their upcoming flagship is a huge moment for smartphone photography, provided they calibrate the sensor properly. Here’s why.

More data to play with
Most smartphone camera sensors are barely half the size of a 1-inch sensor. It does not matter how many pixels a manufacturer shoves inside a sensor. Samsung’s 200MP camera sensor may sound impressive on paper, but had it not used some sort of pixel binning to group the individual pixels and make a larger pixel, images taken on the ISOCELL HP1 or HP3 sensors would have a lot of artefacts and noise, thus making the image grainy and ultimately unusable.

More than the number of pixels, it is the size of pixels that matter. A larger pixel will be able to capture more light and therefore more data. This means that a camera’s processor has more data to work with and will eventually be able to put out a better image.

This is one of the reasons why, for a long time, smartphone cameras have been almost as good as proper full frame cameras, but also lacked some basic functionalities that professional photographers rely heavily on. If Xiaomi calibrates the sensor properly and uses quality glass elements for lenses, photos and videos taken in the dark should be phenomenal. This is where Xiaomi messed up with their Mi 11 ultra, which had a 1/1.2-inch camera sensor.

A better dynamic range
Another advantage of having a bigger sensor is that the camera has a naturally larger or better dynamic range. 

Dynamic range basically refers to the ratio between the maximum and minimum signal that is acquired by the sensor. At the upper limit, pixels appear to be white for every higher value of intensity (saturation), while pixels appear black at the lower limit and below. 

What this means is that in the same photo or video, the sensor is able to handle a varied level of brightness and darkness in such a manner that there is very little or preferably no distortion of the colours.