The Xiaomi Mi 12 is seemingly in development, and now, a new report based off posts from noted Chinese tipster Digital Chat Station on Weibo claims that the smartphone may feature a 200MP main camera at its rear. The 200MP camera sensor has been doing the rounds for a while in the rumour mill, with multiple reasonably well trusted tipsters already suggesting that Samsung is indeed manufacturing a 200MP ISOCELL camera sensor for smartphones. Now, the new report suggests that the Xiaomi Mi 12 may feature this sensor, and may also even borrow into a potential Samsung and Olympus partnership for its rear camera unit.
Alongside the camera spec, the report further claims that the Xiaomi Mi 12 will run on the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8450 SoC, which has so far been tipped to be the next generation flagship from Qualcomm, the purported Snapdragon 895. The latter is likely to be in its final engineering stages, if Qualcomm manages to keep up with its usual launch cycle of introducing its new flagship chips at the end of each year. Xiaomi, the report claims, will join Lenovo and Motorola in being among the very first companies to feature the next generation flagship SoC in their phones, and the Mi 12 will be their vessel for it.
If the 200MP camera rumours turn out to be true, then the Xiaomi Mi 12 may get a rear camera module with the Olympus branding on it. The 200MP camera project has so far been rumoured to feature a 192MP ISOCELL camera sensor, which measures 1/1.37 inches in size – therefore still falling short of the 1-inch sensor size that a limited set of smartphones have already featured. However, the said sensor is reportedly going to feature 0.64um pixel size, which in turn will feature 16-to-1 pixel binning technology to produce effective 12MP photos, and effective pixel size that’s larger than 2.5um. Olympus is believed to be co-developing the camera technology, and may also lend its expertise in an area that it is considered to be a legend in – camera optics.
Reports of the Xiaomi Mi 12 featuring the upcoming Snapdragon SM8450 aren’t new, so this appears to be in line with previous rumours as well. However, given that it is rumoured to get the Samsung camera tech as part of its big appeal, it will be interesting to see if Samsung sources the tech to a third party OEM, before featuring it in one of their own future smartphones – perhaps the Galaxy S22 portfolio. Given that both the Mi 12 and the Galaxy S22 are expected to have similar launch schedules, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
